Frankly, not only is it a poor idea to analyze a course or architecture by the leaderboard alone, it's also a poor idea to analyze professional golfers and certainly even champions and superstars on the strength of various performances at various courses which logically will reflect on the leaderboard for them.
We seem to think that since these players are good, champions, superstars, whatever, that we should be able to expect a relatively consistent performance from them anytime! Wrong!
That may be true in some other sports but that's not the way it really is in golf, never was and probably never will be. There's so much more to high level tournament golf than getting consistently into positon and up the leaderboard because you have golfing talent--schedules, overall management of one's life, any kind of ailment, physical, mental, whatever.
There are and have been some awesome golfers that we see do some amazing things and because we don't know them as well as others we discount what they do--and sometimes that even appears to reflect on the courses they do it on! We shouldn't do that! What we should do is just look at what they did, period!
Because what we never see is the rest of it--the rest of their lives and how important that all is particularly over the long haul and when success of any kind comes anywhere near consistency in the overall make up of tournament golf.
We see Woods hit those amazing shots and seize the moment a mindbending amount of the time and we think that's just the expectable golf of a great golfer when he tees it up and plays the game--end of story.
But what we should realize better is that he does it because he is without question the strongest, most solid psychological and mental competitor, I, for one, have ever seen, and frankly by a long way, in my opinion.
Nicklaus was unquestionably immensely talented, beautifully prepared, a great course manager which he could vary so well given particular situations (like final rounds) and he was obviously one of those rare competitors who almost naturally believed (without a scintilla of doubt) that he was better than those he played against--always.
But I think Woods goes beyond even that--he's almost so accomplished at that to appear sometimes to be a competitive killer or even some kind of evidence of odd fate!
We think many of these guys out there are wimps because they're scared of Woods because he's so good on the course. I don't think they're exactly scared of him, they just recognize an overall totally functioning product when they see one.
Woods is a phenonenal physical talent, sure, but he's outworked every other one of those pros in every other aspect of his life by a mile--and I think they, certainly more than us, truly understand that! And in those other areas he also may be about the best we've ever seen either completely naturally or because he's figured it all out and made himself that way in all those other areas!
If any of us think there are a bunch of young guns in junior high of high school or college that are going to come out and give Woods a serious run for his money because they might be able to hit the ball as pure or purer than he does and even farther, they better think again!
I think Woods was probably playing at about a B or B+ for him at the PGA and he came within a shot of Beem. But that fact takes nothing away from Rich Beem at all!
So Hazeltine may be good architeturally or it may not be but that won't show up in the leaderboard at that course necessarily!
The more I think about this subject on here the more I think that degrees of risk and risk/reward on any golf course that require high degrees of course management and the management of the degrees of temptation and how to filter that through 72 holes and also overall competitive zeal at any time are what begin to define and hone leaderboards which can probably help use analyze golf courses anywhere, anytime with any setup!
But when we do that we should keep in mind that what we're seeing is a game, a sport but very much an entire life encompassing business which is incredibly comprehensive and probably quite elusive and so much more involved than the tournaments, the rounds and the shots we're watching!