Major Courses Get High Marks From Players

Everybody knows it’s not easy to win a major. Just ask Phil Mickelson or Colin Montgomerie. But should it be so difficult to simply play in one?

Last week at the PGA Championship, leafy Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y., couldn’t have been any tougher unless they put planks over the holes or hid alligators in the rough. At the end of four days and 72 holes of grinding, only winner Shaun Micheel and two others were under par.

We should have seen this coming. When you study all four majors, it hasn’t been a great year for scoring. Masters champion Mike Weir and six others shot under par at Augusta National, where rain softened the course for the second year in a row.

Four players, led by Jim Furyk, were under par at the U.S. Open at nice-turned-naughty Olympia Fields, and Ben Curtis was the only player under par at the British Open at Royal St. George’s, with its imitation cement fairways.

Here are the facts:

Four players won their first major this year, Tiger Woods got shut out, Nielsen ratings were lower than the year before in all four majors and major championships are played under much tougher conditions than other events.

It’s great spectacle, no matter what the ratings say. Just don’t expect to see it spread.

Let’s look at the majors. The primary defenses of the major courses, as set up by the organizations that run them, are not exactly secret.

At Augusta, it’s the greens. Course officials made the course longer, but that’s not much of a deterrent. They grew some rough, but it’s not so difficult that you can’t play out of it and advance the ball.

For the U.S. Open, the U.S. Golf Assn. dictates that the fairways be narrow, the rough tall and the greens firm. That’s exactly the way Olympia Fields near Chicago was set up, and even though it played easier early in the week when it was softened by rain, the scores soared as it dried out on the weekend.

The Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews feels no need to trick up the British Open courses ... except for 1999 at Carnoustie, which was outrageous. The R&A; lets the weather do its thing on the links courses and that’s what makes them difficult.

As for the PGA of America, the course setups for the PGA Championships have depended on the course itself. For example, Valhalla was room service for the pros, while Oak Hill hung a big “Do Not Disturb” sign and slammed the door.

The people who watch the pros and the pros themselves accept the fact that the majors are supposed to be unmatched in degree of difficulty. But if the pros tolerate the setups and golf fans enjoy the spectacle of par being a good score in a major, don’t expect to see it coming to your PGA Tour event any time soon.

If anyone is wondering why the course conditions at regular tour events aren’t as severe as the majors, or who exactly decided what those course conditions might be, remember what group of people makes up the PGA Tour.

The players.

There is no written rule in the PGA Tour handbook about course conditions for regular tour events, although there is a basic mandate for the setup that has evolved over the years, taking into account factors that the majors don’t really have to consider.

The PGA Tour sends its agronomists to host courses months in advance to work with the superintendent on the condition of the course.

Riviera Country Club, which has been host to the Nissan Open and its predecessors 42 times since 1929, received about $300,000 this year to host the tournament, which probably makes its members a little less grumpy about losing their course for a week or more.

What if the PGA Tour decided that to toughen Riviera, the fairways would be 20 yards wide and the rough grown to five inches? That doesn’t sound like too much fun for the members, who would play under those conditions leading up to the tournament.

The basic mandate for course setup is that there should be a mixture of difficult and not-so-difficult setups. The Players Championship and the Memorial are tougher than, say, the Bob Hope or Tucson. The anticipated result is a mixture of winning scores, from 30 under at the Hope to three under somewhere else.

Weather is supposed to make conditions more difficult, but that doesn’t always work out, which is what happened at Kapalua. You can’t have fairways pinched to 15 yards when the wind is blowing 35 mph. But this year, the wind didn’t blow and Ernie Els shot a record 31 under.

Plus, these guys are good, as they say. If the courses weren’t as difficult, the players would shoot 40 under.

However, the majors are different, and rightly so. They’re the most important, so they should be the toughest. After watching the players come off the course at Oak Hill and take their beating, the toll such difficult conditions took on them, there would be zero player sentiment to take the same conditions on the road to regular tour events.

Of course, in theory, the policy board could recommend it. The policy board could also recommend tournaments provide spaceships instead of courtesy cars, but that’s not going to happen either.