PGA Championship
All Grown Up
Hazeltine National has got the hang of hosting majors
No. 16 The 402-yard par 4 is the rare championship hole that needs no bunkers to make it challenging.
It's time to focus on the future of Hazeltine National Golf Club, time to forget about its imperfect, impetuous early days.
Sure, Hazeltine, which hosts its fourth men's major with the PGA Championship Aug. 13-16, was not ready for its first major. Club founder Totton Heffelfinger (a former United States Golf Association president) strong-armed the USGA into holding the 1970 U.S. Open at Hazeltine when it was just eight years old, a curious Robert Trent Jones design with a bunch of blind tee shots, 90-degree doglegs and saplings still wet beneath their boughs.
The present Hazeltine National no longer resembles the course that prompted diatribes from runner-up Dave Hill and others (see "Growing pains"). Every hole has been rebuilt at least once, and a handful were replaced entirely by Trent Jones in 1979. Heck, for this year's field, even Payne Stewart's victory at the remodeled-but-still-maturing Hazeltine in the 1991 U.S. Open, in a rather putrid playoff over Scott Simpson (75-77), is just a vague memory, something that happened when some of today's players were in grade school.
‘There's talk of Hazeltine installing a plaque to commemorate Tiger's shot in 2002, even though he didn't win.’Today's players know Hazeltine National only as a mature, fair-in-fair-weather, fickle-in-foul-weather championship test. A couple in the field might have played it as recently as the 2006 U.S. Amateur, when the wind blew from every direction. A few more remember it as a brute from the 1999 NCAA championship, particularly Luke Donald, who took medalist honors, and Ryuji Imada, whose final-round 67 led his Georgia team to the title over the likes of Oklahoma State (Charles Howell III), Arizona State (Paul Casey) and UNLV (Adam Scott).
Most will know Hazeltine from the 2002 PGA Championship, won by Rich Beem over Tiger Woods, who birdied the final four holes but fell one stroke short. Beem won at 10 under par, but only eight others broke par 288 that week, including third-round leader Justin Leonard, sixth-place finisher Rocco Mediate and former PGA champ Vijay Singh.
"You can't be that aggressive on this golf course," Tiger said. "You still have to play conservative and play smart."
"A ball-striker's dream," said Ernie Els.
"Really a wonderful setup, testing all the elements of a player's game," said Phil Mickelson, who, like Els, finished six over.
The Hazeltine National of today is even better than it was in 2002. Ranked No. 91 on Golf Digest's list of America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses, it has been refined in recent years by architect Rees Jones, younger son of Trent Jones. It's now a heavyweight golf course, says Hazeltine's club professional, Mike Schultz. "It's brawny and keeps coming at you," he says. "That's not to say that to beat it you don't need some finesse."
It's brawny mainly because of additional length. New back tees stretch Hazeltine to a boggling 7,674 yards, par 72, but it will probably play at about 7,400 yards during the PGA. Jones added sufficient flexibility to the tee boxes so that officials will have the ability to adjust markers to prevailing wind conditions -- something we're seeing more and more in major championships -- moving the markers up a bit on the 475-yard 18th, for instance, if it's into a stiff breeze.
Jones says several new tees are intended to bring ground features back into play. "Sideslopes," he calls the natural folds in the land utilized by his father in the original design. Those slopes were easily carried back in 2002, but they won't be this year. One example: The crest in the landing area on the 18th conceals a sideslope that will slide booming tee shots down into the right-hand rough.
