Forget the leader board: On day one of tourney, the course won
Welcome to my newly renamed column, “Almost Inside the Ropes.”
Because in the f irst round of the FedEx St. Jude Classic on Thursday at TPC Southwind, that’s where a lot of supposedly perfect shots landed, many of them approach lasers failing to stick on postagestamp greens and skittering under the lawn chairs of spectators.
“There are some pin placements that are really tough to get close to,” said Nicholas Thompson, who shot a 3-under 67 to position himself a stroke off the lead with 10 other golfers.
“Nobody’s going low here,” said Phil Mickelson, winner of 41 tour events who felt fortunate to finish with a 1-over 71.
“It’s a course that you think you can get (birdies) a little bit,” said Scott Stallings of Knoxville, tied in the group for second with, among others, Thompson, two-time FESJC winner David Toms, 2012 champ Dustin Johnson, Jason Bohn and Tim Petrovic. “But if you don’t have the perfect club, you can make some big numbers pretty quick.”
“I thought I was struggling,” said Padraig Harrington, who shot a 1-under 69 as did 29 other golfers, “until I looked at the scoreboard.”
The absence of a bunch of low scores — 65 and below — was a bit of a stunner because there was little or no wind all day.
Yet TPC Southwind was no pushover, thanks to PGA Tour director Steve Carman and a staff of six rules officials who set up and check the course. Their charge this week is that TPC Southwind doesn’t play as easy as miniature golf, which is the way the course was the first 14 years it hosted this event until the course was re-designed after the 2004 tourney.
Since then, TPC Southwind has turned into a monster. More balls have landed in the water (3,284) in the FedEx St. Jude Classic from 2003 through last year’s tourney than at any other stop on the PGA Tour in that time.
Carman’s name may have been on Stallings’ lips when he settled in to tee off on the par-3, 239-yard 14th hole.
“Having the hole in the back right corner (short- ening the hole to 202 yards and placing the pin just a few feet from the edge of the green where a water hazard awaits) is something you don’t expect on a Thursday,” said Stallings, who escaped with a par when he hit almost a 60-foot putt one foot short to tap in for the 3.
Carman doesn’t mind admitting there might have been a few ultratough day-one pin placements, ones that should have been saved for a final round.
“You’d like every golfer in the field to have a chance to play the hole with that challenge, rather than wait to the final two rounds after the field has been cut,” said Carman, who rides the course each day to assure holes don’t present too many similar views to the golfer.
The basic principle of setting up a course from round to round isn’t complicated.
“You don’t want to trick the golf course up,” Carman said. “You want a guy rewarded for hitting a reasonably good shot to have a reasonable chance to make a birdie. You don’t want to put the cup somewhere where he’s got to make some Goofy Golf putt.”
Carman said pin placements for all four rounds are decided just before the tournament, and adjusted along the way. Several elements come into play, including weather forecasts, balancing pin placements as lefts and rights and fronts and backs and giving new looks from year to year.
He also understands there’s nothing worse than an unfair pin placement.
“I play golf with my friends when I’m home,” Carman said. “Sometimes, we’ll get to a green and they’ll start shaking their heads at a tough pin placement. I’ll say, ‘I’d probably get fired for that one.’ ”