An observation about PGA West

[Matt_Cohn]

I like the look of overseeded fairways and dormant rough. However, I think it's causing the course to play too easily: balls that miss fairways carrom off the hard dormant bermuda on the mounds, then keep rolling across the tight surface until they find flat areas, generally the overseeded grass close to (or on) the fairway.


It seems like the course would play better either with a lot more overseeded rough, which would stop errant drives on sidehill lies; or with dormant rough that's left 2-3 inches long so the ball can actually stop there instead of just rolling down into easier spots.


(Not that they're going for difficulty; they're only playing 11 of 18 holes from the back tees today. But it does seem to compromise the design of the course.)

[Joel_Stewart]

It's expensive to overseed so you're talking about an additional expense.


Also, do they really care?  The end goal is to try and attract tourists to come play and maybe sell a few homes.

[Jeff Schley]

Are they still using PGA West as a final stage for Q school?

[Peter Ferlicca]

Two things,


To overseed that rough would be a nightmare, it would take a lot of push spreaders and guys to make sure everything got seeded at the proper rate with all the humps and hills.  Also to mow that all season long as overseeded rough would also be very difficult.  They made the decision since day one that they were not going to overseed that rough and that was the right call.  As you said they could maybe go up another 2-3 fairways passes with overseeded rough.  That is definitely possible to try and stop balls from coming down into the fairway all the time.


Second, when you don't overseed rough and then it goes fully dormant from frost, the capability to maintain its proper height from cart traffic immediately goes away.  It is a very tough scenario.  Most guys keep their 419 Bermuda rough in the desert at around 1-2'', if you go any higher with how thick and dense it gets people start to complain.  Say you have it at 2'' before it gets cold and goes into dormancy.  Once you lets the carts out to drive wherever they want that rough gets so compacted down, now it is tighter than some of the fairways and FIRM.  I have worked at courses and a lot still do it where you tell the members to stay in the fairways with their carts so that the rough doesn't get so tight by February.   It makes golf courses that don't have containment mounding play a lot tighter since the rough doesn't stop the golf ball at all from going into the desert. 

[astavrides]

Are they still using PGA West as a final stage for Q school?

only korn-ferry q school exists now, so no.

[Adam Clayman]

Matt, It sounds to me that the course is playing perfectly, if you're getting bounces and rolls off the mounds. Why else did Pete build them so randomly, and artistically? If not to get the random bounce, that results in whatever physical factors went into its result. Whether the golfer views it as favorable or not. Whether he planned for it, or not. He still has to hit again and, in this case, he likely has to hit it to a tiny section of a green within a green.


 

[Tom_Doak]

I drew the original plan of the Stadium course for Mr. Dye, after he spent two days explaining to me what he wanted to do there, and then I spent a couple of weeks in Palm Desert grinding on the details of it with Mr. and Mrs. Dye stopping in every day.  So, I know a fair bit about what he was looking for.


The clients, Joe Walser and Ernie Vossler who had started Landmark Land Company, told us after the first iteration that "We don't want the ideal golf course.  We want the hardest course in the world.  We want a course that's so hard that people in Japan, who will never come here, will complain about how hard it is."      Mr. Vossler suggested we only build the back tees -- "we're building four other courses for players who want to play from the white tees" -- but Mrs. Dye quickly ruled that out.


I think it's fair to assume none of them wanted to see the entire field under par, and several players flirting with 61 or 62.  But Landmark folded, and the new proprietors are more interested in getting green-fee-paying customers around the course than keeping scores high, so the maintenance has changed.


Golf equipment has also changed!  Part of my responsibility was to try and make the course as efficient as possible in terms of acreage, so there would be plenty of real estate around it to sell.  But that means there isn't room in many spots to add tees further back.  The Stadium course was 350 yards longer than the TPC at Sawgrass when it opened, but it's too short to test the best players now.

[Kalen Braley]

I think Matt makes a valid point here.  Because most of the dormant rough was on slopes feeding back to the fairway, from what i noticed over the weekend in most cases it put these guys back in the fairway instead of having more difficult side hill lies from the longer stuff.

[Anthony_Nysse]

It's expensive to overseed so you're talking about an additional expense.


Also, do they really care?  The end goal is to try and attract tourists to come play and maybe sell a few homes.

Not to mention having to flymow & trim those mounds 12 months out of the year. I cant imagine getting overseed to hand on some of those slopes.

[Matt Kardash]

The Stadium course was 350 yards longer than the TPC at Sawgrass when it opened, but it's too short to test the best players now.

Yeah, I am pretty sure the 18th wasn't meant to be a driver and a sand-wedge when the course first opened! Back in the day I would bet it was a driver and a 6 or 7 iron.

[Matt_Cohn]

Thanks Tom for your reply. I was thinking about exactly what you'd referenced, that Pete Dye set out to build the hardest course in the world and at the time he may have succeeded. Now the Stadium is number 30-something in difficulty on the PGA Tour. The course is not consistent with his vision for a few reasons—with technology, maintenance choices, and green shrinkage being the main three.


Incidentally, although there was always some dormant bermuda, there used to be much more overseeded rough. These are screen captures from the 1985 Skins Game:






and one from the 1991 Skins Game:



On 16 above, you can imagine a ball stopping on a sidehill lie in the right rough, with that huge bunker on the left on the second shot). Today, the ball would bounce off the slope into a flat spot on or near the right edge of the fairway. When I played the course around 2000, all of the bunkers were encircled by dormant bermuda and then by rye rough, implying maybe 10 yards of green grass. Now there's almost none off of the fairways.


So, I get it. I just think a course that was once wildly distinctive is now much less so.

[Tom_Doak]

Seeing all of those bushes in this picture reminded me of a Pete Dye story.


When we were doing the planning for the course, Pete didn't want it to just be grass off the fairway . . . he wanted to landscape it, ideally with a desert plant that looked something like gorse bushes.  So, we went to the Museum of the Desert - which is also kind of a desert arboretum - to look for native plants that might work.


We found four or five, and went back to the office, and Pete told Lee Schmidt to call the biggest landscape nursery around.  Lee got them on the phone, and went down the list of plant names asking if they carried those.  Only a couple of them, but they did have the one Pete liked best.  So, Pete tells Lee, "Ask him if they've got 5,000 of them."  Lee asks.  There is a long pause.  And Lee reports back, "No, but they said they will be happy to find us that many."