FLOURTOWN, Pa. — When Lucas Glover saw the Truist Championship was being played on a par-70, 7,100-yard course, the Wissahickon Course of the Philadelphia Cricket Club, he knew something on instinct alone: the course was likely to have a little bit of everything. Long holes, short holes and everything in between. Par-3s representing all the major food groups, wedge-shot par-3s and 5-wood par-3s. Then he played the Cricket Club’s A.W. Tillinghast course and knew his instinct was correct.
Next week, the PGA Championship will be played at Quail Hollow, a par-71 measuring 7,600 yards. It has been a bear for years. When Glover won a Tour event there in 2011, it was 7,500 yards long. The Ryder Cup will be at Bethpage Black in September. It will be 7,400 yards for the match-play event. When Glover won the U.S. Open there in 2009, it was about the same length. Over the 23-year period that Glover has played in the Masters, the par-72 course has gone from 7,200 yards in 2002 to 7,500 yards.
So he was asked the other day: Is golf — men’s elite professional golf — better on courses that measure 7,100 yards or 7,600 yards?
“Seventy-one hundred,” Glover said. “No question about it.
“Look at this Cricket Club course,” Glover said. “You have a pitch-shot par-3 where the cover is a 100 yards, you have a 250-yard uphill par-3 where one side is death and you have two par-3s that are in between. Four different clubs. Look at the second hole [the ninth for member play, a short, right-curving par-4]. I played it was a 5-wood and a sand wedge. Wyndham Clark, longer than I am, hit driver right up to the green. We both made 3s. The architect gives you so many choices. At Quail Hollow, we’ll all be hitting it to pretty much the same place.”
Glover was describing his Saturday play with Clark, when the two U.S. Open winners went around in three hours as a twosome. On Sunday, they did it again. Needless to say, a 7,100-yard course plays faster than a 7,600-yard course.
“Golf’s a walking sport,” Glover said. “When Tillinghast designed this course, the greens and the tees were close together. Land was not an issue back then [in the early 1920s]. But golf was meant for walking, so of course you had the greens and tees close together.”
Glover noted how the players came off the green of the par-3 eighth hole and were immediately on the tee of the par-4 ninth. [Holes 15 and 16 for member play.] Once there, they made a short walk back to the back of the tee. Across the road, was a farm, just as there was in Tillinghast’s day. Behind the tee was a sprawling townhouse development. Exurbia meets suburbia.
Glover played some of the course on Monday, more of it on Tuesday and a nine-hole pro-am on Wednesday (that unfolded at an almost-reasonable pace, 2 hours and 20 minutes). Then the four tournament rounds. He was not thrilled with his play — rounds of 72, 70, 70 and 72 had him near the bottom of the 72-player field — but he was charmed by the course.
“You’ve got two greens that are practically at the door to the men’s locker room,” Glover noted. Those greens are the 3rd and the 10th, under the everyday routing. “Then you have the 18th green and the first tee right up against the clubhouse, where the all the action is.” Glover was talking about a club’s lifeblood. The course, of course, but also the people upon it, its members and guests and caddies and staff members.
So with all this love for 7,100 yards, for a true walking course, the variety of holes and all the rest, you might guess that Glover is in favor of the USGA’s plan for a modest rollback of the golf ball, by which the ball will carry maybe 10 percent less for the longest hitters with driver in hand, starting in 2028. Glover is, after all, steeped in USGA culture. In 1997, he played in the USGA Junior Championship at Aronimink near Philadelphia. (Jason Allred defeated Trevor Immelman.) He played in two U.S. Amateurs and has played in 16 U.S. Opens.
He is not.
“I’ve been against rolling back the ball,” Glover said. “Our job is entertaining fans.”
Prodigious drives are entertaining. It’s a generous thing for him to say. Per the PGA Tour statistics, his average length with driver this year is 290 yards, good for (this is almost shocking) 170th place. Glover thinks the 350-yard drive, which Wyndham Clark and Rory McIlroy and various others unleash, is the product of superior technique, training, course conditions, a hot golf ball — and the huge, 460 cc driver heads the USGA permits. Glover emphasizes that last part, the size of the modern driver head.
He doesn’t think a course like Quail Hollow, at 7,600 yards, or Augusta National, at 7,400 yards, will produce better tournaments when the Rory McIlroys and the Wyndham Clarks are bombing drives 340 yards instead of 375.
But what about Glover’s professed love for the 7,100-yard course, that golf, for elite professional men, is better when courses are shorter?
He holds to that, with a simple, logical caveat:
Roll back the ball, Glover said, and shorten courses as you do.
“A long par-4 at 470 instead of 505?” Glover said. He likes.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
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Michael Bamberger
Golf.com Contributor
Michael Bamberger writes for GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. Before that, he spent nearly 23 years as senior writer for Sports Illustrated. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has written a variety of books about golf and other subjects, the most recent of which is The Second Life of Tiger Woods. His magazine work has been featured in multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing. He holds a U.S. patent on The E-Club, a utility golf club. In 2016, he was given the Donald Ross Award by the American Society of Golf Course Architects, the organization’s highest honor.
