A rare Wednesday morning at the keyboard, so what would you kids like to discuss? OK, I didn't see that coming, but there is that little gettogether in Upstate New York.
The Course - Nothing but raves so far, along with obligatory tips of the hat to the course's difficulty, though that typically precedes a -22 winning score. Don't really expect that this week, but you never know with these lads.
But the East Course, Donald Ross and Andrew Green are all ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille. As is my wont, shall we begin with the origin story?
In 1941, Frank E. Gannett, founder of the media company that still bears his name, made headlines of his own when he put forth a prize through one of his newspapers, the Times-Union, in upstate New York. Gannett was a proud member of Oak Hill Country Club, on the leafy outskirts of Rochester, and he hoped to draw top talent for a tournament there.Dangling a $5,000 purse did the trick.That August, a luminous field, highlighted by Ben Hogan, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Sam Snead, competed in the Rochester Times-Union Open, on Oak Hill’s Donald Ross–designed East Course, with Snead breezing to a seven-shot win. Photographs from the event show a smiling Snead accepting his winner’s check, while news accounts convey what he thought of the venue.“This course is certainly one of the finest I have ever seen,” he said. “Fit for either an Open or a PGA.”
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| The 6th green. |
The Oak Hill where Snead cashed in big in 1941 was not the same Oak Hill of 1968, where Lee Trevino claimed the U.S. Open, which was not the same Oak Hill of 1980, where Jack Nicklaus ran away with the PGA.And those courses were different from what Oak Hill has become. In the latest phase of its evolution, the East Course has been restored, its Ross imprint revived with its championship teeth retained. When play gets underway at the 2023 PGA Championship, the world’s best will get their first crack — and fans will get their first glimpse — of a Golden Age great with a grand legacy, where everything old is new again.
It is a course with an interesting major championship history, seemingly the only club able to remain in the good graces of both families:
Does that help you pick a horse this week? I guess you'll want that guy who most reminds you of Jack and Shaun Micheel, so good luck with that.
Andrew Green hasn't risen to name-brand status, but he's quietly built a reputation of note, though this is a tad hyperbolic:
This underrated architect could be golf's next "Open Doctor"But the majors will also reflect the work and ideas of designer Andrew Green. Green’s profile as one of the leading renovation and restoration specialists in the profession has risen incredibly fast—incredibly fast, that is, after working quietly for McDonald & Sons, a golf course construction firm based in the mid-Atlantic, for 14 years. After going out on his own about five years ago, Green grabbed one of the game’s most prominent commissions when he was hired to revamp Oak Hill’s venerable East Course, one of Donald Ross’s most industrious designs that had morphed into a vague reflection of its original brilliance. Green’s restoration of the Ross character and resurrection of other deleted architectural elements will be on display during the 2023 PGA Championship.Green also conducted one of golf’s most unexpected transformations in 2021 at Congressional Country Club’s Blue Course, site of the 1964, 1997 and 2011 U.S. Opens, where he erased the property’s treelined fairways and greens and built new holes that flow broadly through fescue meadows into varied and imaginatively shaped greens. Congressional will exchange one type of major championship pedigree for another when it hosts the 2031 PGA Championship and the 2037 Ryder Cup.Several other club’s he’s recently worked to revive, including Inverness Club (2020) and Scioto (2022), both past U.S. Open venues, could be on the short list for future majors, and his clients range from public courses like The Preserve at Eisenhower, a bunkerless redesign in Maryland, to the U.S. Naval Academy course, to America’s Second 100 Greatest regulars like Donald Ross’ Wannamoisett in Rhode Island and the Tour Championship’s East Lake in Atlanta.
Scioto, where Jack learned the game, would be a welcome addition back into the major rota, though there's precious few open slots during the remainder of your humble blogger's natural life expectancy.
One feature of Green's restoration is the restoration of those closely-mown runoff areas, and Jack Hirsh takes a deep dive on the restored fifth hole:
The shortest hole at Oak Hill might feature the most intriguing shot-making on the entire course.When the quartet of Bryson DeChambeau, Abe Ancer, Dustin Johnson and Padraig Harrington reached the 15th green for the first time on Monday, each one dropped a couple balls to the right of the par-3. It wasn’t coincidence. This was purposeful, because there’s nothing simple about pitch shots from this part of Oak Hill.The last time Oak Hill hosted a PGA Championship, in 2013, the 15th was guarded by water on the right side. But now, that pond has been filled in, restoring Donald Ross’ original design of a postage stamp green — narrow, but deep — flanked by bunkers on the front and left sides. It was also shortened from more than 180 yards to just 155.
Shack had this photo of the hole avec and sans the dreadful Fazio pond:
But while the header promises a "pick your poison situation, it doesn't seem there's any real choice:
That was the first spot Bryson DeChambeau visited. First, he tried driving shots into the bank but each of them died on the slope, which is just one cut longer than fairway height. DeChambeau’s new caddie Greg Bodine concluded the wall of turf was too soft to offer any chance of a bump-and-run shot, or even a putt. Everyone is trying to figure this place out.“So they’ve taken the putter and the bump shot out of your hands for some reason,” Jon Rahm noted.“That was the architect’s design,” PGA of America Chief Championships Officer Kerry Haigh said. “It’s fun. It adds a different dimension to how you play your approach there.”
For Beltz, who has been picking at the club’s history for two decades, this offers a watershed moment in 2023 with the return of the PGA Championship. He’s hoping this year’s event ushers in a modern era of major tournaments at a place that has seen its fair share of changes.“This is a pivotal year, for sure,” Beltz said. “If the players like the renovations and the weather treats us right, this could be a place where major championships are held for a long, long time.”
I think we'll find it worthy this week, though I'm not sure it has a future that incorporates majors. That bit about the weather is key, it's just one heck of a risk to be in Rochester in May, as even Mr. Beltz acknowledges. Oak Hill does have the 2027 U.S. Amateur on its calendar, and Father's Day seems a better fit than mid-May, but there's precious few open years available. Stay tuned, as the kids are won't to say....
The rough is another area of interest, with early reports indicating that, while not especially deep, it is sufficiently lush to ensure that hitting fairways will be rewarded. One of the guys had these thoughts:
Finau on the dense rough. “The rough is long enough to where you're not going to be able to advance the ball to the greens. The reason I say long is if I remember right, there's four par-4s over 500 yards. Yesterday after hitting some really nice drives up the fairway, even with some roll, I was hitting 5-, 6-iron into these par-4s, which I'm really not used to doing unless it's a par-5.”
OK, but we always hear that on Monday through Wednesday, then they get to the green from everywhere when it counts.
Rory 2.0 - That was quite the oddball presser yesterday, no? A few takes, starting with this:
Triggering reporters to ask, "Who are you and what have you done with Rory"?
Q. We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the first LIV Golf tournament. If you could look into your crystal ball three years from now, where do you think the professional
game will be?RORY McILROY: I don't have a crystal ball.Q. You don't want to speculate?RORY McILROY: No.
The first observation to make is that he looked angry when taking the podium, quite unexpected with Rory. This guy isn't wrong:
The transcript doesn’t look all that different, but that was an entirely different Rory McIlroy at the podium today. Gone was the jovial spokesman. This was…somber. Tired. “Just here so I don’t get fined” energy.
— Dan Rapaport (@Daniel_Rapaport) May 16, 2023
That, and much more from Oak Hill:https://t.co/9Iyig4UXth
He didn't even warm up appreciably in talking about his ties to the local community, from which his wife Erica hails. But, while everyone seems eager to attribute his Masters disaster to his anti-LIV activism, this seems more the issue:
Away from his press-conference scrum on Tuesday, with two reporters he was familiar with, McIlroy revealed that week was, in a word, shocking.“I was never so sure that I was going to have a great week at Augusta,” he said.He said it again.“Never so sure.”He continued.“Then that happened and it was a great lesson. It was a great lesson for me to not put too much into feelings or vibes or — shot five-under on the back nine on the Wednesday afternoon and felt great and everything was in a great spot. But that’s golf. And golf can be an imposter at times, as you said, and yeah, I think that’s when — that’s the chat I had with [sports psychologist Bob] Rotella the night before. It’s like, I feel so good. How can I not get ahead of myself? How — the game can bring you back down to earth quickly.“But I think the best way to deal with that is not let yourself get to that level of expectation so early, right? And that’s sort of what I’m trying to do. Just sort of take what the golf course gives me and hit good golf shots and, you know, just try to have a little bit more acceptance. Now that I think back to Augusta and maybe the last few months as well, the level of acceptance hasn’t been where it needs to be. And if I work on that and I do the right things, I know I’ll start to play some really good golf again.”
Acceptance? The issue with Rory is that the more he wants it, the worse he plays.....
Color me skeptical that this is the solution to what ails him:
McIlroy's coach, Michael Bannon, has spent the past week in Florida, and Golf Channel's Eamon Lynch revealed an even more interesting nugget: that Tiger Woods texted Rory saying he spotted an issue in his swing, and McIlroy went over to his house to work it out.What did Tiger tell him? We don’t know for sure. Rumor has it was something to do with his setup and alignment, which itself was perhaps a compensation based on some golf swing stuff Rory has been working through. He went pretty deep on it during his press conference on Tuesday ahead of the 2023 PGA Championship, and for the golf nerd, it made for some fascinating reading.
Mebbe. There's a deeper dive into his mechanics at the link, but Rory's failures have always seemed to me to be related to wedge distance control and the putter, as I always expect him to drive it great.
I also don't mind the one-word answers, as his message discipline has been dreadful. As for the direction Tiger and he are driving the Tour? I already don't watch LIV, so easy enough to add the PGA Tour to that list.
Phil 12.0, Still A Dick - Or maybe it should be Phil 1.0, because it's the same tired crap. Joel Beall sort of hits on some of the duplicity with this offering:
PGA Championship 2023: The very thing that made Phil Mickelson loved is what makes him so polarizing now
Was it actually love? That's a tough one, but let's see what Joel's got:
Mickelson is playing his first PGA since that Kiawah triumph, having skipped last year's true titledefense at Southern Hills following the firestorm he created early in 2022 on his way to moving to LIV Golf, and he enters this major on the offensive against the very organization running the tournament. In a series of recent tweets, the six-time major champion accused the PGA of America, along with the USGA and Augusta National Golf Club, of colluding with the PGA Tour. This is the same tour on which Mickelson played for three decades, only to join other players in an antitrust suit against that circuit in the name of LIV Golf, the Saudi Arabian-backed league that Mickelson helped spearhead because he thought he and others deserved better.In a vacuum, that makes sense, fitting for his maverick persona. It takes a rebel to take on the establishment, to fight for what you believe is a greater good, while taking the heat that comes with dancing in the fire. Only the very characteristics that made Mickelson so beloved then have made him so polarizing now.
Oh, this is all about the greater good? Joel, have you considered that this is all about Phil's greater good? Did anyone tell you that there are checks with many zeros involved?
How do we know Phil is lying? No, can't reprise the lips moving bit, because so much of it is on social media these days:
Thing is, this time last year, Mickelson seemed OK to let that spotlight go. When he ultimately returned to golf in 2022 from his sabbatical, first at LIV’s launch in London and then the following week at the U.S. Open, Phil did not seem like Phil. He was muted, reserved, conservative. The golfer who had famously embraced the brazen promised to lower the temperature.“I have had strong opinions and ideas regarding most of the governing bodies, and I've done a poor job of conveying that. I've made it public, and that's been a mistake,” Mickelson said. Going forward, he added, he would be "a lot more thoughtful with my words and actions and try to keep a lot of those things behind closed doors.”
Yeah, Joel seems so credulous that I wonder if he'd be interested in some swampland....
He seems to have taken Phil's fauxpology at face value, not realizing that the only actual apology was to the Saudis. he pledged to work on being the man he wants be, and apparently the man he wants to be is that guy that accusers everyone else of dick moves..... And that from the man that inspired this very truncated Greatest Hits album:
Mickelson is not foreign to sideshows. Should there be any doubt, one only needs to remember him feuding with Detroit media and threatening never to return to the city following the revelation of Mickelson’s ties to a mobster. Or the Saturday at Shinnecock in 2018, when he hit a moving ball in an act of petulance and defeat. Or the defiance after an insider-trading scandal. Or throwing two Ryder Cup captains under the bus. And any number of other gaffes, including a prescient 2019 moment when he told fans “You do you, I’m gonna do me” regarding his first dalliance with the Saudis. It’s a thin line between self-assured and self-absorbed.
No Billy Walters? No discussion of his frequent unpaid gambling debts? He's doing his "me", but it's a repellent caricature. And we exit with the light bulb over Joel's head:
It is why Mickelson’s latest rants against the PGA of America don’t hold up. Mickelson has argued he is standing up for players’ rights, that he’s fighting for a greater good against an establishment unwilling to change. Except, on closer inspection, there’s little evidence in the three decades he was on tour that he worked and collaborated with his colleagues to improve the tour. The only situation he ever worked to improve was his own.
Ya think?
Exit Note - I'll leave you with this bit from Geoff that bodes well for the week ahead:
But the bigger news in major land and for your viewing pleasure starting Thursday came from the golf course. The firming status of splendid Oak Hill meant a noticeably crispier course to start the day, drying out even more after a windy day of practice rounds. Late in the afternoon the greens looked like they were still rolling over 13 feet on the Stimpmeter based on my deeply refined scientific method of throwing a few balls around on the revitalized Ross greens. (The PGA does not share Stimpmeter readings).During Tuesday’s press conferences players mentioned the ball running in what a few deemed to be super-tight fairways. (The landing areas are a comfortable-by-modern-standards 26-28 yards.) Throw in that all-inportant first bounce onto the bentgrass greens growing higher and crisp temperatures due to arrive Wednesday, and the 2023 PGA venue could not be more ready to go. Even better, I don’t see the course conditions putting this PGA in the same uber-defensive mode that made the last two editions here a total, unequivocal drag.
Be still my foolish heart.
See you down the road.
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