If the PGA of America was going to put another PGA Championship at Quail Hollow – a course golf fans see every year on the regular Tour – we should at least be able to expect a leaderboard equal to the Truist Championship.
Instead, we got a Puerto Rico Open – only without the bathing suits and piña coladas.
Are we really supposed to believe this is a major?
No offense to Cam Davis, Ryan Gerard, Ryan Fox, Alex Smalley and Stephan Jaeger – golfers who have four PGA Tour wins among them – but the first day of the PGA Championship did not exactly draft off the excitement of last month’s Masters.
OK, OK, it’s early. And it’s kind of fun to see 47-year-old former world No. 1 Luke Donald pop up to randomly shoot 4-under 67 after doing nothing of note the last few years.
But really, folks. The only word that can describe the first day of golf’s red-headed stepmajor is … bleak.
And it’s bleak for a few reasons.
The Scottie Scheffler-Rory McIlroy-Xander Schauffele supergroup was a bust. Scheffler fought to finish at 2-under, but McIlroy was all over the place and shot 74, and last year’s champion, Schauffele, needed 31 putts to shoot 1-over. But none of the other stars really got much cooking either, while Justin Thomas, Brooks Koepka and last week’s winner, Sepp Straka, will have a lot of work to do to jump back into contention.
It was also bleak because the PGA of America, in a complete setup whiff, decided against playing lift, clean and place despite rain pounding the Charlotte area for much of the week. That left the course soaking wet and balls caked with mud, even while the greens were firm and dry thanks to the SubAir System underneath. That combination was not, shall we say, the most pleasing style of golf to watch or play.
“I understand how a golf purist would (say), ‘Oh, play it as it lies,’ ‘ Scheffler told reporters. “But I don’t think they understand what it’s like literally working your entire life to learn how to hit a golf ball and control it and hit shots and control distance, and all of the sudden due to a rules decision, that (ability) is completely taken away from us by chance.”
That may sound to some of you like a spoiled millionaire athlete whining about Mother Nature, but Scheffler was not wrong.
As he pointed out in a far more expansive answer on the issue, American golf courses are not built like the Open Championship courses in England and Scotland, where there’s a layer of sand between the soil and the turf to help drain moisture and make the fairways more playable in wet conditions, which of course happens all the time. That’s not a practical solution in America because the grass would dry out in the summer heat.
So the middle ground for most tournaments is allowing players to clean their ball from the fairway and then place it back where it was before hitting the next shot. The PGA chose not to go that route, which meant that players faced a lot of approach shots with muddy balls that reacted far differently than they normally would.
Don’t think about whether that’s fair. We know golf isn’t necessarily fair to begin with. Think about it more in terms of whether allowing that kind of preventable randomness is good for generating interest in the tournament and the sport. This leaderboard would suggest it is not.
This particular PGA Championship was always going to struggle from a narrative standpoint because of Quail Hollow. Nothing against the course, which is a fine piece of property where a lot of great players have won – including McIlroy four times.
But the entire idea behind major championships is to identify the best players by asking questions that they don’t encounter regularly at your run-of-the-mill PGA Tour stop. That’s hard to do on a course they see every year – the exception, of course, being Augusta National.
The only way to really combat that is to have a tournament where the biggest stars are duking it out on Sunday, which has kind of been the PGA Championship’s brand to the extent it has one.
Maybe things will normalize by Sunday and we’ll eventually get there as the Ryan Gerards and Ryan Foxes of the world fade away. But that’s definitely not how the tournament looks after Round 1.
The PGA, through no fault of its own, has long had the misfortune of being No. 4 among golf’s four majors. It doesn’t have the tradition or allure of the Masters, the torturous identity of the U.S. Open or the links golf novelty of the Open Championship.
All it can do is put on the most exciting tournament possible. But after a round like Thursday, it’ll never beat the allegations.