Scottie Scheffler, should he ever design a golf course, warns you.
It might be boring.
“I’m not super creative in that sense,” he said earlier this year.
Still, the world No. 1 and last week’s PGA Championship winner knows what he likes from a track, and what he dislikes, and he shared his thoughts on the subject on a recently released video on the channel of YouTube golf sensation Grant Horvat. Let’s start with his preferences. On the video, Horvat asked him to name a course he liked from a strategic point of view.
Scheffler named three — Augusta National, TPC Sawgrass and Harbour Town.
Why Augusta?
“Strategically, Augusta is really good,” he said on the video. “You still have to hit it far. Like hitting it far is an advantage at Augusta, but the areas where you need to hit the ball are so small.
“And the big runoff areas, fairway, around the green I think is better in terms of shotmaking and creativity and there’s more stuff to it than if you just put heavy rough right off the side of every green, because then it becomes a competition of who gets a decent lie.”
What about Sawgrass and Harbour Town?
Variety, he said. You have to hit different shots. He gave examples.
“If you look at Sawgrass,” Scheffler said, “first hole, cut off a tee, draw into the green. Second hole, draw off a tee, cut into the green. Then it’s a cut and a draw, a cut on five, draw on six, draw on seven — you have to hit shots.”
A bit unsurprisingly, he’s won at all of those courses, which he admitted — ”I feel silly,” he said. Then there’s what’s unappealing to him in course design.
Scheffler said he’s annoyed by the disappearance of trees.
“One of the reasons I would like to eventually get into some golf course design,” Scheffler said, “is because what they’re doing to golf courses now I don’t like.”
“They take out all the trees,” he continued, “and they make the greens bigger and they typically make the fairways a little bigger as well. And so like the only real barrier to guys just trying to hit it as far as they basically want to or need to is trees.
“Like when you host a championship tournament, if there’s no trees, you just hit it wherever you want because if I miss a fairway by 10 yards, I’m in the thick rough [but] if I miss by 20, I’m in the crowd.”
Of course, there are also arguments for tree removal. In 2020, GOLF.com published an article entitled “Why golf courses remove trees (and why you might want to do so in your own yard),” and you can read that story by clicking here.
