I walked Plainfield, outside the ropes, during the final round of the Barclays on Sunday and I was blown away. I'd glanced at Mark's photos in this thread and watched about an hour of TV coverage of the event, but was unprepared for the dramatic slopes and contours of the property. Photos and video simply cannot do justice to elevation. As mentioned, 15 of the holes play across a slope that tumbles down from the clubhouse, but the roly-poly nature of the landscape means that a player might face an uphill or downhill or fade or hook lie on any of these holes--as far as I could tell from my vantage. Besides this, a long hitter might face 11 or 12 holes with blind shots, and some of the green contours are as severe as I've seen.
As a spectator, my introduction to the course was as follows: (1) the blind tenth tee shot, with no distinguishing feature or aiming point except for a grandstand; (2) watching four twosomes play the ninth hole, hitting wedges or perhaps 9-irons in but facing a blind approach, and only one player making a birdie despite a bunch of good opportunities on what appeared to be the flattest portion of the green. It was pretty clear to me from these few acres of the property that the course had something different to offer.
We then walked the course, and the following design elements stood out to me as particular highlights:
- The first green, with its severe slope to the front left;
- The two lines of bunkering angled into the second green from the right, with the right side of the green just tucked behind a corner of one;
- The front edge of the sixth green, like a pie crust against the front bunkers, sure to propel balls all the way to the back;
- The angle at which the eighth green is laid into the hillside (now covered with fescue), suggesting a draw from what's likely to be a fade lie;
- False fronts deep into the greens at nine and 11 and probably other holes;
- The bunkered hillside over which the second shot on 16 must be played blindly, and the green on that hole sloped so severely that Jason Day attempted to play a bunker shot about 90 degrees away from the hole.
Bunker placements and the artistry of them (with quite varied styles) are superb, and the course really does make excellent use of the whole property. One minor negative note about the routing would be that three of the four par fives play the same direction, parallel. I'm not even sure that the "tunnel" holes detract too much--they probably allow players a nice breather (of sorts) before the final stretch uphill toward the clubhouse again.
The course's setting on a hillside, parkland style but with a lot of recent tree clearing, reminded me of Olympic Club. When I walked Olympic during the US Open in 2012, it seemed to me that the pros struggled to get their shots close to the hole because the USGA had maintained the ground to be so firm that balls needed to land right at the front edge of a green to settle down on the green, with little margin of error. In contrast, Plainfield seemed just about right in terms of firmness, but the best players still struggled to keep their shots close because of the design of the greens. Of course, the winning score at Olympic was quite a bit higher than it was this week...
On a slightly different note, the last time I walked a course during a tournament was at TPC "Boston" outside Providence last year. This was a wholly better spectator experience despite that Ross presumably gave no thought to spectators. At TPC Boston, accessing the first eight holes requires a traverse of several hundred yards through a swamp, and we didn't even try. Most of the rest of the course is laid out through the woods in a way that doesn't allow cutting across fairways to a different hole or any viewing play on other holes. The final few greens at the Deutsche Bank were all but inaccessible to commoners, hemmed in by corporate tents. As mentioned in this thread, Plainfield by contrast lends itself to watching play unfold on multiple holes at once, and we had direct, open views of every green. Congratulations to the PGA Tour for bringing the Barclays to Plainfield this year.
JB