"We don't doctor rough."

Lawrence Donegan reports on Tiger's first practice round at Turnberry and files this observation about the setup:

That is exactly how it should be at the Open, and exactly what many expected of Turnberry, a terrific golf course whose absence from the championship rota for 15 years seems bizarre. The weather off the Irish Sea has the potential to wreak havoc but on the evidence of a blustery, occasionally sunny Sunday afternoon, the R&A appears to have produced to stern but sensible test. The fairways are broad, the greens fast (ish) and the rough – which has been talked up by many, Colin Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington among them, as the closest thing to penury this side of San Quentin– is not as ridiculous as had perhaps been feared.

Make no mistake, it is wrist-breaking in places, but those places are a distance from the centre of the fairway – in part because the organisers took the decision three weeks ago to widen the semi-rough. If conditions are hard and bouncy, as they almost certainly will be, that will stop some balls disappearing off into the jungle.
"We have widened the cut sections of rough a little bit on each side. Six yards rather than the usual four and a half yards, which is what we had a little while ago," said Dawson. "It is very nasty off the fairway and off the shorter rough but the fairway and shorter rough is, I think, fairly generous. We don't want to get the reputation that the Open is about hacking out of rough because it isn't about that.

"We don't doctor rough. We take what we get naturally and leave the playing arena at a sensible level. If you spray it outside the playing arena here, it is lost ball; hack-out territory."