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PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLORIDA | Daniel Berger referred to it as a major championship-like venue. Lee Westwood called it a risk-reward course on steroids. Harris English likened it to a bloody boxing match in which the winner, dazed and stumbling, plops himself directly into an ice bath when it ends.
“You've got to have your mouthpiece in out there,” English said, the wind swirling around the clubhouse behind him.
No matter how players described the Champion Course at PGA National, they all came away battered and bruised in a Honda Classic that was one of the most trying regular PGA Tour events in recent memory. Sungjae Im’s winning score of 6-under par was the highest in relation to par for a winner of a non-major since the 2016 Farmers Insurance Open, a tournament Brandt Snedeker won after a freak storm produced bizarre weather conditions in the final round.
There was nothing tremendously out of the ordinary about last week’s tournament and the many black eyes it left. Sunny skies and a steady wind all four days made for firm, dried-out greens. A greater factor than any may have been the mental burden of attempting to manage an ultra-penal golf course that utterly dominated the field in every way.
“This course is hard regardless of which direction the wind is. But it's not unfair, it's just hard.”
Zach Johnson
The gory details come with images of golf balls splashing into one of the course’s ubiquitous penalty areas and stats that will make every player wince. The par-3 15th hole lured 72 balls into water, the most at the tournament since 2010. Matt Every dumped four balls into the water on the par-3 fifth on his way to recording an octuple bogey. And the damage wasn’t limited to par-3s. Matthew Wolff put three balls into the water on the par-4 11th and slammed his club into the turf just as many times.
But nothing compares to this, the king of the wreckage for the week: Not a single player in the field registered a 5-under-par round throughout the entire event. The last time that happened was 24 years ago at the 1996 NEC World Series of Golf.
Lest we forget to mention that tournament organizers cut down the rough compared to previous years. At no point were bad lies prompting players to wedge out into the fairway.
“It can be as mentally demanding of a golf course as we see all year,” said Gary Woodland, the reigning U.S. Open champion, who shot himself out of the tournament with a 4-over 74 on Saturday. “(Nos.) 15, 17, the tee shot on 6 … there's just not a lot of bail-out out there, and when the wind gets blowing and gets swirling, you just have to execute, and it really puts a lot of pressure on your short game, as well.”
This is nothing new for the Honda Classic since it moved to PGA National in 2007. The lowest winning score came in 2010 when Camilo Villegas shot 13 under to win by five strokes, but typically it has been a war staged on a tight leaderboard. In the past 14 years, 11 of the winners failed to reach double digits under par and 10 of them won either by a single stroke or in a playoff.
Despite the possibility for carnage at every turn, it’s never been a course for comebacks. Im overcame a three-stroke deficit in the final round to win this year’s tournament, and that ties the largest comeback at PGA National. He’s only the second player to win the tournament here when starting the final round in third place or worse.
Beyond being incredibly hard and producing dramatic finishes, PGA National cannot be identified with a specific type of player who does well on the track. Eight winners have been from outside the United States and six have been American. Some of the shortest hitters in the game have won, including Russell Henley, Mark Wilson and Michael Thompson. Bombers like Justin Thomas and Rory McIlroy have won, too. The leaderboard comes with all ages mixed together – last year, 57-year-old Vijay Singh nearly became the oldest winner of a PGA Tour event in history, and 46-year-old Lee Westwood had a great shot in this year’s edition.
Unable to be overpowered, the Champion Course usually exposes poor ballstriking and impatience. It doesn’t discriminate, allowing any player of any background to find his way through the fog.
“This course is hard regardless of which direction the wind is,” said two-time major champion Zach Johnson, one of the shorter hitters in the field. “But it's not unfair, it's just hard.”
The PGA Tour’s slogan may be “Live Under Par,” and that is an accurate moniker for most of the year, but it’s refreshing to see an event like the Honda Classic push players to the brink of their comfort zones. The course architecture geeks will cry foul about the heroic and oh-so-not-playable-for-the-public design of PGA National, but it has carved out an entertaining identity.
No, the “width and angles” school of design is not in play here. It often lacks imagination, consistently telling players that they must hit it to a certain area or they definitely will fail. Even within a five-mile radius of the property, there are significantly better and more well-rounded golf courses.
But for this tournament against these world-class players, it works beautifully.
Top: The 15th green, which is the start of the Bear Trap on the Champion Course at PGA National.
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