After pro’s brilliant 59, questions swirl about unusually easy PGA Tour conditions

Daniel Berger played the round of his year on Thursday morning at the Cognizant Classic.

In nine go-rounds at the PGA Tour’s annual event in Palm Beach, Berger has never shot better than his opening-round 63 at the “Bear Trap,” and for good reason. This week on Tour typically brings one of the nastiest setups of the year. At a course like this, Berger’s 63 qualifies as one of the best rounds of the year.

So you can imagine his surprise on Thursday afternoon when he learned his 63 didn’t even qualify as the round of the day.

“I thought I played well … but then someone shot 59,” Berger said with a chuckle. “Clearly the course was not the old Bear Trap we’re used to.”

The 59 belonged to Jake Knapp, and its impressiveness needs no explanation. Knapp made birdies on two-thirds of the golf holes he played on Thursday morning, 12 of 18, and his remaining six holes featured no bogeys. His round ranks as just the 15th sub-60 score in PGA Tour history.

But Berger’s sentiment — that the course seemed different — was shared by much of the field on Thursday. Fellow competitor Michael Kim stated it bluntly: The Bear Trap was playing more like, well, a Bear Hug.

“Big rye overseed and no wind make this course much easier,” posted Kim on Thursday morning. “But did not think I’d be 6 shots back after a 65.”

One factor aiding Thursday’s low scores was the weather, which was completely breeze-free and comfortably warm — ideal for firing at pins. But another factor, several players said, was a dramatic rye overseed that helped tame the course’s typically gnarly conditions.

“The fairways being overseeded changes [the golf course] a lot because it’ll make the fairways softer which makes them wider, and then around the greens it’s significantly easier than the dormant Bermuda,” Jordan Spieth said. “You’re looking at easily a stroke a round on just the change in the grass types in the fairway.”

By mid-Thursday afternoon, Spieth was proven wrong. The scoring average at the Cognizant was 67.85, almost two shots lower than the scoring average in the opening round of the event a year earlier (69.55).

Why the overseed? It’s hard to say. In places where winter golf is common, many courses overseed their native grasses with rye to help maintain appearance and playability during the cold weather months. Appearances are important to a course like PGA National, which will be broadcast to the world during the Cognizant. Still, the course has survived many years on television without an overseed dramatic enough to affect playing conditions the way it has this week, which raises an important question: Why?

Defenders of the course setup will point out that the overseed has little effect on the competitive integrity of the tournament. Every golfer in the field will play the same golf course in roughly the same conditions, and every player will have the same opportunity to shoot a score as good as Knapp’s 59. This is true, and it underscores the impressiveness of Knapp’s round, but it does not cut to the root of the problem. This tournament, which has roots dating back five decades on the PGA Tour, has earned a hard-fought reputation as one of the toughest tournaments on the golf calender. This week’s changes have undermined that tradition with little ostensible gain.

“It’s a little disappointing,” Billy Horschel said of the conditions at the Cognizant. “The rough is not long enough. It’s not penal enough when you miss. This will be the lowest scoring average in the history of the tournament.”

The 2020s will be remembered as the era of low scoring in professional golf, and particularly so on the PGA Tour, which briefly adopted the tagline “Live Under Par.” That slogan assumed fans would be drawn to the excitement of players challenging records with ever-lower scores, much like how fans enjoyed the boon of NFL offenses in the early 2020s. But this campaign failed to recognize an essential truth of tournament golf: Course setup and technology are not barriers to interest, but incentives. In other words, our sense of what matters is tied to history. If we honor our history by replicating the competitive challenge, then low scores are a reason to tune in. But if we ignore our history by altering the competitive challenge, ever-lower scores don’t create entertainment, they merely move the goalposts.

A low score, the golf world has learned, is only that. It is impressive and exciting in the context of the course, the difficulty level, and the competition. If everyone is shooting 30 under, then nobody is.

The scores were low on Thursday at the Cognizant Classic, and in an unusual twist, nobody seemed happy about it — not even the guy who broke 60.

“Yeah, you think about 59, but I’ll still think tonight about how it should have been 58 or 57 or 56,” Knapp said with a grin. “You always could technically do better.”

This week, that might not be an exaggeration.