Caddie's Role: The Memorial Tournament falls on the week after the Memorial Day Weekend. This is a national holiday in America that honours those citizens who died in battle for their country.

The tournament was started 31 years ago with the intention of bringing a top-quality event to Jack Nicklaus's home town. The other motivation was to honour those Jack believes have played an important role in the greatest game, golf. This year's inductees were Michael Bonallack, Charlie Coe, Lawson Little, Henry Picard, Paul Runyan and Denny Shute. There was a ceremony on the Tuesday afternoon to induct the chosen golfers into their immortal place in the Memorial Garden below the clubhouse in Muirfield Village.

The official tournament magazine introduced this year's inductees and explained about the changes made to improve and toughen the course. Teeing areas were upgraded and bunkers deepened. What was not mentioned was the rakes they chose to rake these cavernous sand traps.

There are many ways to toughen a course. The obvious ones are, well, pretty obvious. Move the tees back 50 yards, grow jungle thick rough closer to the fairways, add more slope to faster greens and deepen strategic sand traps.

Last week at the Memorial Championship at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, the rules for toughening up a course all changed. What a surprise it was such a bizarre method reared its ugly head at the Golden Bear's event. Nicklaus is a living legend and has earned the respect of his peers and the golfing world by his golfing exploits over four decades and more recently his ambassadorial role.

I am not too sure if that respect made it through last week's event. An experienced course designer, his obvious changes to his own course were well received, lengthened tees and more, ever deeper traps are a fair addition. The surprise was the rakes used to smooth the sand in the deepened traps. The "new" rakes were the talk of the tour last week.

This is the first time I have heard such concern over something that is usually so mundane. In preparation for this year's event the greenkeepers bought a bundle of old-fashioned wooden rakes and removed each alternate tooth. The effect was it left furrows in the sand and on the players' brows as they were presented with the daunting task of getting their ball out of the creased sand pits and then trying to keep it on the green. The chances increased greatly of the ball lying low in a hollowed out crevice, which meant there was little hope of getting spin on the ball.

Professionals with their 60-degree lob wedges have become very skilled at plopping their trap shots in a boringly repetitive fashion close to the pin and spinning it towards the hole. Bunker play is a finely tuned art. Naturally there are those players who are particularly adept at the trap shot.

One of the more menial tasks of a golf caddie is to smooth over our masters' scrapings in the bunker. How our masters rummage around in the trap is a way of figuring out just how considerate he actually is. Those who traipse about like it's a beach make a lot more work for us. The more steps the more raking, it puts us under more pressure to keep up. It's an unwritten rule that you help your colleagues out if their player hits it in a trap.

It was impossible to smooth out the traps at Muirfield Village due to the nature of the rakes, no matter how long you spent manicuring. If you left the traps in the condition we were obliged to at Jack's course any other week we would probably incur a fine. We are meant to leave minimal trace of anyone having been in the sand; it is a major part of basic etiquette. Which makes the whole rake issue of last week so confusing. There is a strong consensus that there is some trickery going on up in the "War Room". It's almost like an advanced method of very bad etiquette. The club had their own bunker rakers assigned to each fairway in order to ensure the traps were raked exactly how they desired.

The average sand players were really excited about the new concept because basically it reduces the whole field to the same level. It is like a form of handicapping for pros. I always thought golf was a test of skill combined with mental fortitude on a level playing field. This furrowed trap defies this concept.

The theory of the deep-channelled sand apparently came from when Jack won the US Open at Cherry Hills - the sand was exactly like it was at Muirfield Village last week. Courses, and particularly bunkers, were never as well maintained back in the 1970s as they are now. It is due to better equipment and an overall push to create a level playing field.

Saying "that's how it was in my day" is not a good enough reason to resort to underhand methods to try to make a course more difficult. If we go along with this policy why not take it a step further and forget about replacing divots, repairing pitch marks and being respectfully quiet while your playing partners are hitting? The Memorial event has spent three decades building up hard-earned respect.

Continuing with the regressive tactics of tricking up the traps is not in the honourable tradition of the greatest game the greatest living player of all time is responsible for creating last week. He has the chance to redeem himself by admitting it wasn't the right thing to do and return to leaving traps as smooth as possible.