With a whopping $25 million on the line for first place in the FedEx Cup, PGA Tour and NBC executives would like nothing more than the Tour Championship coming down to the 18th hole on Sunday. However, that might involve golfers playing down a different hole altogether.
East Lake Golf Club’s extensive restoration under architect Andrew Green has this year’s crop of 30 players feeling like they’re playing it for the first time.
“It’s not really at all the same,” Scottie Scheffler said. “The greens, since they’re new, are extremely firm, which I think makes it more challenging. It’ll be tough to access some of the hole locations. I think we’ll have a bit to learn in terms of golf course setup.”
“It’s just new,” Xander Schauffele added. “It’s firm. It’s fast. Needs to settle in. It’s very brand new—I’m not huge in agronomy, but I’ve played some new courses before, and they’re a little bouncy. However it was designed to be played, it’s going to be a little bit different for the first two years just because it hasn’t settled in.”
And that might cause the top two players in the Official World Golf Ranking to play the par-5 finisher in a, well, new way. During their Tuesday practice rounds, both fired tee shots down the par-4 10th hole.
“The way they reshaped the fairway there, the fairway crowns like this and it’s a very difficult fairway to hit, and if your ball goes into the right rough and you don’t get a good lie, you have to chip it 10 yards down the fairway because there’s nowhere really to lay up,” Scheffler said. “Before there used to be some opportunity there, where now there’s not. You’re now hitting it across the Lake. If you hit it into the left rough basically like—I’ll describe it this way: If you hit it into the right rough, you’re now hitting it over a pond to a fairway that’s pretty narrow. If you hit it in the left rough you probably can’t hold the green from there, and if you don’t get it to the fairway, you’re going to be in the water.”
“It seems like a safer play to take all that out of play, hit it down 10,” Scheffler said. “The green is going to be pretty extraordinarily hard to hold anyways with it being a downslope and having a long club in there. It’s more you’re playing for birdies. There is less opportunity I think for eagle than there was before.”
Here’s what playing down/up No. 10 instead looks like on the course map:
Sam Burns, playing with the World No. 1, hit a drive down No. 10 as well. Scheffler also practised laying up with his second shot on No. 10 before hitting a wedge over some trees and onto the 18th green for his third.
“Overall we’ll see how it plays,” Scheffler said of the course changes that also include the possibility of No. 8 playing as a drivable par 4 for the first time. “It’s so new right now that it’s really hard to tell exactly how—all I know is it’s way different.
There’s also a possibility this could cause a backup in play. Although, the small field size will help prevent that.
Schauffele, playing in the group in front of Scheffler and Burns, hit two drives down No. 10 but wound up having someone go pick them up since he didn’t find the fairway. He then spent a lot of time practising different shots from the 18th fairway and rough.
“Yeah, I spent time trying to hit balls out of the rough into that little sliver of a fairway for the lay-up area,” Schauffele said. “I tried to hit some drives over the tree over on the 18th tee, that tree right there. It’s a really small fairway. It’s just plain and simple. It kind of cambers right down the middle too, so if your ball is turning too much one way or the other it might roll into the rough; and if you’re going into the rough, I don’t think anyone on this property can hold a green hitting a lob wedge or sand wedge out of the rough into the green unless it’s a really long one that I haven’t seen or with a backstop. But you need to be in the fairway to do some damage out here.”
And NBC might need to move a few cameras around if players wind up going this route.
Main Image: Mike Ehrmann
