PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Given that its playing field is measured in acres, not feet, and is so much more of an uncontrolled environment than those that are used for our popular team sports, golf is subject to a variety of situations that are a matter of personal taste.

Grasses cannot only be different heights, but varying types, too. Trees are most usually present in some fashion, but what flavor and just how many of them has never been something mandated. As for those other features that are so prevalent at golf courses, water and sand, well, again there are no rules, but that doesn’t prevent one from having preferences.

So far as water goes, there’s way too much of it worked into the design of too many golf courses in our country. Florida in particular presents an endless stretch of golf courses that are so mundane, because they are a repetition of the same theme — dogleg left, water right; dogleg right, water right; par-3 over water.
    
Given that the stage was the annual Players Championship at the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course, it was unavoidable to get in a discussion about the island-green 17th. Not to rehash a personal taste about that hole — I have little use for it — but during a conversation about the merits of it, Adam Scott succinctly noted that “the easiest way to make a hole harder is to add water.”

Ah, the young Aussie possesses a keen perspective that matches his polished golf skills.

His comment hit at my disdain for water — so often it is worked into the design of a golf hole just to add difficulty when it doesn’t fit the landscape or it subtracts from the aesthetics or, worst of all, precludes you from playing a variety of golf shots.

Of course, I accept that it’s a matter of taste and that golf courses will continue to be built with holes that force you to go around and over water, just as we’ll forever have those other necessary obstacles, bunkers. But as with water, I hold dear to beliefs — two, in this case — that can be filed under “pet peeves,” if you like, since I accept the notion that others will see differently.

First and foremost, they are bunkers and while I know what they are filled with, please refrain from calling them sand traps. Just writing the words gives me the shivers and if that’s a snobbery in me floating to the surface, then so be it.

They are bunkers and there is a committed mission on my part to spread this throughout my travels.

With bunkers you get rakes, which hits upon another sticking point. They belong inside the bunker and not tossed haphazardly to the side.

During a walk around TPC Sawgrass the other day, I raised this issue yet again to a colleague and sure enough, there was a situation in Round 2 that demonstrated why I feel the way I do.

Anthony Kim was playing his third shot into the green at the par-5 11th when his pitch hit hard and the ball took off. With severely raised greens at this Pete Dye design there was little doubt that the ball would go through the green and sure enough it started to roll down the embankment and toward a bunker when it came to rest against a rake.

OK, so I had reason to rant once again about a topic few others care about — hence why it’s a “pet peeve” — but it gave me the opportunity to explain my point of view. Rakes left outside the bunker are in position to keep balls from going in.

It’s quite common to play courses in the United Kingdom that request you to place rakes inside the bunker, but here in the U.S. it is more likely that you and your colleagues take the rake and place it outside. That’s how they do it on the PGA Tour, as we saw with Kim’s shot, and longtime tournament director Mark Russell explained that it’s for practical reasons. Were rakes placed in the bunkers, he said, balls that came to rest against them would create rules headaches (you’re dealing with hazards) and since the Tour is always trying to move a lot of players around in a small time frame, it helps their cause to keep rakes outside the bunkers.

No such worry in instances like Kim’s, when a ball comes to rest against a rake in grass. In that case, he cannot pick up the ball, but he marks it, said Russell, in case the ball rolls when he moves the rake. If it were to move, he’d simply return it.

But the rake may have stopped his ball from going in the bunker?

Russell agreed, but indicated it was one of those “rub of the green” instances, and there would always be the possibility that a ball could bounce off a rake in the bunker and carom into a more advantageous position. The fact is, to Russell rakes “are necessary evils,” which is where he added something that made me smile. If it were up to him, there would be no rakes and bunkers wouldn’t be the manicured areas that they now are.

“Maybe then you’d really try not to hit it in there,” he said.

Given our obsession with pristine conditions, don’t expect that to happen, but Russell suggested that so long as rakes are part of the golf course landscape, he agreed that “for the general public” they belong inside the bunkers.

“Just from a maintenance point of view it makes sense,” said Russell. “How long does it take a guy to hop down from his mower, move the rake, get back in his mower, and continue on? Imagine the gas and effort that is wasted.”

Frankly, I hadn’t thought about it from that point of view, but Russell is right, and it only reinforces my belief that rakes belong in the bunkers.