3.28.2011

bay;hill’s;rocky;finish

Arnold Palmer hasn’t been shy through the years about making alterations to his Bay Hill Club & Lodge, which has been home to a PGA Tour event since 1979. Palmer, for whom the Orlando club has been a winter base for four decades, has tinkered with the greens and changed the par (it has been 71, 72, 70 and is now back at 72 for the second year). If Palmer is of a mind to make more changes to Bay Hill, here’s something he ought to consider: The rocky borders that Palmer established some years ago in the greenside water hazard on the classic par- 4 finishing hole (and at hazards elsewhere) seem out of character

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for the layout Dick Wilson and Joe Lee originally built in 1961, something more suited to a desert design, not one in central Florida. Sure, the rocks catch the eye and can cause an approach shot to carom to lucky (dry) or unlucky (wet) territory. That doesn’t mean the boulders look right. There was, in the way the pond at the 18th used to be, a neat, low-key appearance—not unlike the water hazards for the last several decades at another of Palmer’s favorite spots, Augusta National. Boulder-edged water hazards make sense some places, less in others, and No. 18 at Bay Hill is one of the latter. —Bill Fields