There's quite a contrast in yardage between the courses used for this week's U.S. Amateur and The Barclays. Erin Hills in Erin, Wis., site of the Amateur, is 7,760 yards. The Plainfield Country Club in Plainfield, N.J., site of The Barclays, the first of the four FedEx Cup playoff tournaments, is 6,964 yards.
Erin Hills isn't even playing at its full length. The scorecard shows that its front nine can be as long as 3,901 yards, and the back as long as 3,919 yards, for a total of 7,820 yards. Mike Hurdzan, Dana Fry and Golf Digest's lead architectural critic Ron Whitten designed the course, which, although only five years old, had a major makeover during 2009 and 2010.
The U.S. Amateur at Erin Hills is effectively a test run for the 2017 U.S. Open, which will be held there. Meanwhile, Ross designed Plainfield in 1916. Gil Hanse has done extensive work on the classy old course over the last 10 years. Some 1,200 trees have been removed to open up the property—as was once the case—while tees have been added on 12 holes to lengthen the course. Still, it's under 7,000 yards and is being used for one of the PGA Tour's most significant tournaments.
Erin Hills, for its part, has been getting mostly positive reviews. Maybe it plays shorter than its length, because the terrain allows for golfers to use the ground and find speed slots that will carry the ball great distances. At the same time, young golfers hit the ball so far these days that it's difficult to make a course too long.
"I feel like there's no such thing as a long course anymore," Justin Thomas, a U.S. Amateur competitor from Goshen, Ky., said of Erin Hills. "Until they get to 8,000 or 8,100 yards, I don't think there's going to be a course that's too long."
The USGA's executive director Mike Davis, who bears the ultimate responsibility for setting up courses for its championships, is all too aware of this. Here's what he told Gary D'Amato of the Journal-Sentinel in Milwaukee about the 493-yard, par-four fifth hole.
"This was the one that surprised me. Here's a hole that's 500 yards where I do think we need to do something with the drive zone because I think that that one, the kids were just bombing it down the left side and you were watching them hit at most a mid-iron into the green. So I think shifting (the tee) slightly to the player's right is going to make them think a little bit more off the tee and bring that bowl that's kind of short-right much more into play."
The hole is 493 yards and it's playing too short. Of course it is. Say a player hits his drive 325 yards, not at all unusual these days. Now he has about 170 yards in. That's an 8-iron, maybe a nine. Enough said.
As for Plainfield, it hosted the 1978 U.S. Amateur and the 1987 U.S. Women's Open. Now it's hosting The Barclays, and it's less than 7,000 yards.
Obviously, a golf course is about much more than length. One course that's approaching 8,000 yards doesn't play long, but is being used to test the game's top amateurs. Another course that's under 7,000 yards is being used to examine the top tour pros in the game.
Is the golf landscape confusing? Draw your own conclusions.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein