Baltusrol a classic made for the ‘long hitters’

SPRINGFIELD, N.J. What Baltusrol may lack in charm, it tends to make up for with great champions.

This week’s PGA Championship will be played on Baltusrol’s Lower Course, about 40 minutes outside Manhattan, where Jack Nicklaus won the 1967 and 1980 U.S. Opens and Phil Mickelson won this championship in 2005. The classic course was designed in 1922 by A. W. Tillinghast, architect of many major championship courses, including Winged Foot and Bethpage Black.

Rich Beem, who won the 2002 PGA Championship at Hazeltine, summed up what players will face this week.

“It’s kind of just a big boy golf course,” Beem said beside the 18th green after his practice round on Tuesday.

At 7,450 yards and par 70, he wasn’t kidding. The opening hole is a 478-yard par 4 that normally plays as a par 5 for Baltusrol members. It was the third-most difficult hole when the PGA Championship was played here in 2005.

The short 377-yard par 4 second hole offers players a chance to steady themselves. During practice rounds on Tuesday, most players were laying up with an iron rather than take on the cross bunkers 275 yards from the tee. This leaves a blind approach shot to a fairly difficult green. Even though it was the third-easiest hole in 2005, the second hole still played a shade over par for the week.

The third hole is a 503-yard brute of a par 4 that was the second-most difficult hole last time around. Every player wants to get off to a good start but it won’t be easy this week at Baltusrol where the winning score was just fourunder par in 2005. “It definitely favours the long hitters if they can hit the fairways,” Beem said.

Even if the bombers are missing fairways, they still should have an advantage because the rough, although long, is graduated and players should be able to advance the ball without too much difficulty even out of the deep stuff.

Beem sees another advantage for the longer players, even if their tee shots are off-line.

“They can hit it in spots the shorter players can’t hit it and they can see the green complexes,” he said. “There is probably half the greens out there where, if you don’t hit it 300 or 320, you can’t see the green. And as a short hitter, you kind of get discouraged by that because you want to see the green as much as possible but you just can’t.”

Baltusrol hosted a major in all but one decade of the 20th century, so golf fans will see a style of golf course they are quite familiar with. This isn’t Whistling Straits or Chambers Bay — there will be no question what a bunker is or whether the greens will disintegrate before our eyes.

This is a classic tree-lined North American parkland course built over rather flat terrain. It doesn’t offer the eye candy of some of the more breathtaking major championship venues, but it tends to have a knack for sorting out the biggest, baddest golfers on the planet.

Torrential rain forced players off the course on Monday afternoon, but 24 hours later, the two inches of rain was a distant memory as the course dried out well under withering temperatures in the mid-30s C. The frequently changing forecast is calling for rain on Thursday and Friday. If the course significantly softens up, the long bombers will be licking their chops even more.