NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — If one were to rank the seven days of a major championship week, the competition days on the weekend obviously come first. That’s when the golf matters. But when it comes to the non-competition days — Tuesday is filled by press conferences and Wednesday is the last hurdle to golf that matters — Monday is a surprising favorite. It is marked by the arrivals, newness and anticipatory energy. All of which makes a Monday evening walk around the property some of the most delightful time of the week, particularly if Mother Nature plays along.
This week, we got our first look at Aronimink during a sunny back-nine stroll with Dustin Johnson and Thomas Detry. Below are some early observations from that trek, and the 24 hours that followed.
If you want a compelling championship golf test, everything starts with the greens.
Andy Johnson of the Fried Egg told me that once, and it has crystallized pro golf tournaments ever since. It’s not the tee shots, the width of fairways, the thickness of the rough or even the firmness of the fairways and how they send balls into bunkers. All those things are just window dressing to the core of what matters: the greens. If the putting surfaces are firm and challenging, they determine so much about every other decision between players and their caddies. Bunker shots, fairway shots, approaches from the rough, from behind a tree, from a tee box, etc. Good greens impact everything, and every Aronimink conversation seems to come back to its greens.
Donald Ross designed this golf course long before Gil Hanse and Co. recently renovated it, but he seemed to understand the importance of green complexes as the central challenge of a golf hole. At Pinehurst No. 2, his most famous design, the greens are turtle-backed in shape, where players fear falling off the edge. At Aronimink, there’s some of that, but more of an understanding of complexes as full structures — the way a company’s headquarters is also a complex, all connected but with different subsections.
Take the 14th, for example, a long par 3 with a back-right hole location that is difficult to access. Players will be thrilled to reach the center of this green off the tee. But from that center-green spot, Detry raced one putt past the hole and off the green. Clearly flummoxed, he dropped another ball and hit a softer putt. It also rolled off the green.
There’s an equally difficult-to-access part of the 11th green, too, on its left side. From the center of the green, Johnson and Detry angled themselves away from the hypothetical flag, right up to the curtain of the green. Anything less than that was rolling off the green, too. There is just a lot of clear thought required to find the right spots of greens on different days, and while we won’t see pins like the above early in the championship, they’re out there and at the PGA of America’s disposal, likely over the weekend after they’ve trimmed the field.
A dark, temporary fence has been erected around the property, closing off the golf course to Aronimink’s (presumably wealthy) neighbors who normally get to watch the course from their backyard. One such neighbor — who lives along the short, par-4 13th — is ahead of the game, building a platform of their own above the fence, just tall enough to see most of the entire property. It will offer the best, widest view of the PGA Championship, and I’m not sure it’s close.
From the platform, where a trio of high schoolers hung out Monday evening, you can see the entirety of the drivable 13th and a view from above the 14th tee. You can peer through the trees and see players make putts on the 11th, 12th and 15th greens, and with a pair of binoculars, you can watch the same on the 8th and 10th greens. This private view will cost its viewers nothing, of course … besides the millions invested into acquiring the property in the first place.
On paper, Aronimink could appear a bit cookie-cutter. Its first four holes are all par 4s between 413 and 457 yards. But as the photos above can hopefully suggest, working your way through those holes means sliding along the edge (and eventually dropping into) a central valley. And with a routing that is as scattered as can be — it goes out, back, out some more, across, across some more, backward, then inward — the natural contours of that valley mean successive approach shots from the same distance are nothing alike.
It may seem oversimplified, but Aronimink creates differences in successive holes to the extent that players will never be on autopilot. They may hit driver just about everywhere, as Rory McIlroy suggested Tuesday morning, but if the greens are as difficult as they portend to be, solving the problem from where those drivers end up will be a helluva battle in itself.
Among the topics that “Live From the PGA Championship” delved into enthusiastically Monday evening was the hypothetical boost Bryson DeChambeau would offer the PGA Tour in a world where he returned. One of the panelists suggested that since he didn’t bring significant ratings juice to LIV Golf, most of what he can offer is via YouTube views.
We’ll never know for sure until he makes that hypothetical a reality, but you can really see his power in person, and I was reminded of it Monday evening. Frankly, the “Live From” panelists could have seen it themselves — Paul McGinley and Brandel Chamblee sat in their Golf Channel tower while DeChambeau played the 17th and 18th holes right beneath them.
DeChambeau enjoys a Monday afternoon walk around majors, and he was out playing the back nine, flying his driver 30 yards past Scioto club pro Jared Jones. There couldn’t have been many more than 1,000 spectators still on property, and half of them had to be following DeChambeau. Maybe that’s not surprising, but it’s through this horde that you can see his value personified. None of the shots matter, there’s no one else of substance in the group, it’s Monday evening at suppertime and the fans on site want to see him. I don’t care if that hasn’t worked out in LIV’s favor or on FOX — it would work out on the PGA Tour in a demonstrable way. Major weeks — like the 2024 U.S. Open, or even the 2024 PGA Championship — have proven that.
I find it extremely pleasing when spectators can stand in one spot and see a lot more than one shot, which is what makes properties like Aronimink delightful. You don’t need to build your own platform (like the one mentioned above); you just have to be choosy about where you stand.
The only issue is that, at these century-old courses, the modern pro game has started to force courses to eat themselves, needing to lengthen holes but having no land to move back on. Look no further than the 10th tee, which has been backed up so much that it has to use the furthest extent of the 1st tee box. In the image below, the first hole moves forward, up and to the right, while the 10th hole crosses the photo (and the 1st tee) directly to the right.
This will almost surely cause pace-of-play issues on Thursday and Friday, particularly with some rain in the forecast. But it’s not entirely new. At the 2022 PGA Championship at Southern Hills, the rigid borders of the property meant that any lengthening would require tee boxes situated just off greens and criss-crossing holes as well. The 18th green at Aronimink is just a few steps off the 17th green, a par-3, which means approach shots and putts from the 17th will impact when players feel comfortable teeing off on the 18th, adding seconds and minutes to the pace of rounds. Getting through that 17 into 18 pace-of-play trap, for players who start on the 10th, will only push them toward that awkward 1st tee for their second nine. In other words, I’ll be shocked if Thursday and Friday don’t feel very slow at some point.
My, what a year can bring. Twelve months ago, Rory McIlroy was fresh off a Masters win and uninterested in chatting about much at all with the golf media. It was truly puzzling, it lasted longer than a month and I’m not sure we ever really earned an explanation for it. But today? McIlroy sat for a 19-minute press conference, meandered out for a sit-down with ESPN, then some time with other TV rights holders, some formal chats with Irish media, then some informal chats with Irish media, then some friendly chats about who knows what with even more media types, just outside the press conference tent.
In total, McIlroy spent 90 minutes chatting with media members, producers and communications staffers before moving on with his Tuesday, and at one point was so jovial that his laughter was distracting from the Jon Rahm press conference that followed him. This is a small, esoteric and navel-gazing kind of information, but goodness, it’s a much different mood he is bringing to this championship than he did a year ago.
It was 10 years ago that, on the Wednesday afternoon before the PGA Championship, I watched Daniel Summerhays hit hook after hook on the Baltusrol driving range. It was about as late as it gets in the run-up to that week’s major, and it was so clear that Summerhays, then the 89th-ranked player in the world, was searching. If anyone was a surefire bet to miss the cut — I thought to myself — it was him.
Of course, Summerhays shot 70-67-67-66 to finish solo third that week, the best performance of his life and the best reminder to me that 1.) These guys are good, and 2.) What you see is not always what you get. And with that, I’d like to talk briefly about Dustin Johnson.
Johnson is by no means a betting favorite this week, but he is a two-time major-winner. He’s playing on a special invite and is, according to DataGolf, the 117th-ranked performer in the world. He’s past his prime, but he’s still a popular name and will no doubt fill the daily fantasy lineups for plenty of DraftKings sickos …
… but he could not hit his driver on Monday. Johnson hit numerous tee shots on each hole, repeatedly blocking his drives out to the right. He even swapped out his TaylorMade driver for a different offering at times, tinkering with the club that was his greatest asset at the peak of his powers. Over and over again, the same blocky miss returned. When a shadow disturbed him, that same miss even showed up with his 3-wood.
All of which has me wondering … will Johnson do as he did Monday, which was the kind of golf that would have equated to something worse than 75? Or will the Daniel Summerhays Rule apply and serve as another reminder that practice is just practice, and observers know so little about what is really going on for these guys.
We’ll find out in a few days.
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