nicklaus and palmer critical of the masters

He says some changes, which were supervised by consulting golf architect Tom Fazio and his team, looked as if they were done "by somebody who doesn't know how to play golf."

But sheer yardage is not what has gotten Jack, Arnie and others of the Old Guard riled up. They're mostly upset about the tightening of many holes, through the use of expanded bunkering, transplanted trees and the introduction of rough, what Augusta National calls, in delusional parlance, "a second cut of fairway." This is where Jack and Arnie are absolutely right. Far from maintaining the integrity of the design that Jones and Mackenzie envisioned, the changes undertaken since 1998 have abandoned their philosophy of multiple options and different lines of attack. "They've totally eliminated what Bobby Jones tried to do in the game of golf," Nicklaus says. "Bobby Jones believed golf was primarily a second-shot game. He believed that you should have enough room to drive the ball onto the fairway, but if you put it on the correct side of the fairway, you had an advantage to put the ball toward the hole. He wanted to give you a chance to do that shot." Gone are Augusta's wide corridors that allowed every competitor to play his own game off the tee, to pick the spot he thought provided the best angle of approach for his trajectory and shot shape. Squeezed-in fairways now dictate the manner of play on every hole. It's as if the Masters Committee thinks it's now running the U.S. Open. Which makes one wonder just how much research Augusta National has really done regarding the original Mackenzie-Jones design. Mackenzie believed that if a good player hitting good shots couldn't post a good score on one of his courses, then there was something wrong with his design. Jones once wrote that he never intended Augusta National to be a punishing golf course. Jones and Mackenzie believed in rewarding risk on the golf course. Most of that is gone now. Consider the par-4 first. The optimum angle, particularly when the flag was on the left, had long been from the far right of the wide fairway. Today, that area is rough--not particularly nasty stuff, but enough to affect the spin of the ball.