To ‘deter’ pros from hitting this shot? PGA Tour installed electronic defense

They ‘broke’ a hole at historic Riviera Country Club. And their reward?

An electronic leaderboard this year. And trees potentially in 2024. 

You can maybe call it the Viktor Videoboard. And the Hovland Hardwoods. It was Viktor Hovland, after all, who somewhat popularized a wild move on the 15th at Riv. Last year, over all four rounds at the Genesis Invitational, Hovland played the dogleg right very right — after setting up at about a 1 o’clock angle on the tee box, he drove down the adjacent 17th fairway and away he went, as did a few others.  

But where once sat an opening now sits the leaderboard, about 30 yards ahead of the tee. According to the chief referee for this year’s Genesis, the trees are coming. The reasoning?

“Integrity of the hole.”

“Every effort was made to retain the integrity of the hole by working with the Riviera CC on a tree re-planting to fill the void,” Steve Rintoul said in a statement. “While this did not happen for the 2023 tournament, and rather than installing an internal out of bounds at such an iconic venue, the decision was made to move a scoreboard into place to simply deter players from taking that route. That decision was made solely with the safety of other players, volunteers and spectators on the 17th hole in mind. 

“Given that, we still have had a couple of players taking that route, and their caddies have been informed to fore-caddie on the 17th hole without any issues.”

Unsurprisingly, Hovland has been steadfast, scoreboard be damned. He’s hit twice down 17 (and Collin Morikawa once). It’s been some sight.  

On Thursday and Friday, Hovland moved to the left side of the tee box, then moved two club lengths back of the markers. (That’s OK, according to the rules definition of “teeing area.”) And he hit, his ball clearing the top of the 10-foot-high board by about 10 or so feet, before landing on the 17th hole; on Thursday, he was in the fairway and parred, and on Friday, he was, stunningly, right of the fairway and bogeyed. 

“I was out there yesterday when I was walking around, and I was thinking to myself: Is this the play?” analyst Colin Swatton said Thursday on the PGA Tour Live broadcast. “Does this really make the hole that much easier? I wasn’t convinced, but obviously Viktor has done the math on it, and he figures it is.”

“I never thought of it, but he did, way back when he played amateur competitions here,” analyst Mark Wilson added. “And he went down there every single round last year. I still don’t get it because it makes that second shot over that bunker that guards the right side of the green pretty difficult, in my opinion, and then you got to go over and see the other group on 17. It’s just awkward.” 

Swatton and Wilson are right — the play doesn’t make 15 all that much easier. The landing area on 17 isn’t that wide, and the shot into the green is still guarded by a front bunker. And that, of course, raises a question:

Why do it all?

The answer, Hovland, says, is just fit. Or, maybe more accurately, a lack of it. The move avoids the hole’s dogleg and fairway bunker — though, as he learned Friday, when he bogeyed the hole, the play is not without its own problems. 

News

“I played down 17 last year,” Hovland said on a video released by the PGA Tour, “and this year they put a screen up in the way, but it wasn’t high enough, so with the tee box all the way back, I could just kind of tee the ball up, take two club lengths, go back, and yeah, hit a nice drive in the middle of the fairway on 17 and had a pretty straightforward 9-iron in there and hit the green so it was a very stress-free hole.”

For possibly this year.   

Of course, the unconventional is nothing new in golf, and it also brought to mind a similar play from Lon Hinkle, who, on the 8th hole at Inverness at the 1979 U.S. Open, hit his tee shot left and onto the nearby 17th fairway, on his way to making birdie. Memorably, the USGA planted a tree on 8 to try to block the shot, though Hinkle tried it again. 

And the tree was named the “Hinkle Tree” going forward. (In 2020, it was unfortunately uprooted by a storm.)