Scorched 'Car-nasty' fairways to cause nightmare for caddies

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 US golfer Tiger Woods plays his approach shot on the 9th fairway during a practice round at The 147th Open golf Championship at Carnoustie
 Caddies have a tough job on their hands predicting how the course 
will behave at Carnoustie




Cross your fingers, hope it dies. It is hardly the most scientific approach to winning the Open, but this is the sort of blind hope which the frazzled caddies of Carnoustie may just be relying on as their player’s ball streaks toward the baked-out fairways.

Such is the speed of the course, browned and parched by the relentless Scottish sun, that the yardage book has been rendered almost meaningless for the tournament’s opening rounds.

 “There is no grass for the ball,” said Brooks Koepka, the US Open champion. “If it hits a down-slope, it is just going to keep running.”

Unreadable, unpredictable and unforgiving. No wonder David Duval, the 2001 Open champion, said the conditions here will “drive some people batty” over the next few days.

“Car-nasty” is living up to its name, it seems, and this will be a rare challenge for the caddies as well as for the players, especially those who have grown used to the lush greenery of the United States.

“In the States, we have two numbers,” says Duane Bock, the caddie for American Kevin Kisner. “We know the number to where certain hazards are, and the number where we want to finish.

That is all we think about. Here, we have to think about where it is going to land, how far it is going to roll, where the trouble is. It is the luck of the bounce out there.”

For now, it is all part of the fun, Bock says. “It’s a major championship, it should be that way. You should have to play for it. If you hit it off line then you are going to get penalised, which you should be.”

 Tiger Woods of the U.S. during the practice round 
 __Carnoustie's grass has been damaged by the recent heat wave__


Whether he feels the same way by Friday night, however, is another matter. “It all depends where it lands on a certain slope, and if it hits the back side of a slope,” he says. “We hit a five-iron and it went 275 yards when we were just trying to hit it 220.”

On Sunday, Rickie Fowler made the most of the conditions by smashing a 458-yard drive during the Scottish Open at Gullane.

The same day, Brandt Snedeker hit a 427-yard drive during a practice round at Carnoustie, shortly before Padraig Harrington ate up 457 yards on the same hole. “The fairways are a tad fast,” Harrington said on Twitter, with some understatement.

All this is made treacherous by the generous spattering of bunkers which litter the Carnoustie course, lurking and waiting to gobble up any over-running shots which have slipped down the fairways like a toddler on a water slide.

“You can get anywhere between 30 and 80 yards of run out there,” says Martyn Thompson, the caddie for Welsh player Rhys Enoch. “That brings all the bunkers into play.

Normally on a course like this you are looking at avoiding certain bunkers and you might be running 20 yards through the ground. Here, it is anything up to 80 yards of roll.”

Thompson played here in the 1999 Open but says the conditions have made this a “totally different golf course”.

He believes this will be a week where the strategists will thrive, yet there is an acceptance that even the most carefully-constructed plans are likely to be decimated by an unfortunate bounce or untimely gust of wind.









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