World number one Scottie Scheffler hasn’t always had the best of fortunes when playing East Lake, the venue for the season-ending Tour Championship. In each of the last two seasons, Scheffler has started at -10, two shots clear of his nearest challenger, and in each of the last two seasons, he’s been overtaken. In 2022, Rory McIlroy started six shots behind and went on to win his third FedEx Cup, while Viktor Hovland overturned a two-stroke deficit for glory last year.
East Lake has since been revamped, and all of the putting surfaces and several of the holes have been redesigned. One hole that’s been re-imagined is the par-5 18th, and if Scheffler’s intentions are anything to go by, the redesign leaves a lot to be desired.
What way does the world number one intend to play the hole? By hitting it down the 10th fairway instead.
“Yeah,” he replied when asked if that was a strategy he was intending to take. “The way they reshaped the fairway there, the fairway crowns like this and it’s a very difficult fairway to hit, and if your ball goes into the right rough and you don’t get a good lie, you have to chip it 10 yards down the fairway because there’s nowhere really to lay up.
“Before there used to be some opportunity there, where now there’s not. You’re now hitting it across the Lake. If you hit it into the left rough basically like — I’ll describe it this way: If you hit it into the right rough, you’re now hitting it over a pond to a fairway that’s pretty narrow. If you hit it in the left rough you probably can’t hold the green from there, and if you don’t get it to the fairway, you’re going to be in the water.
“It seems like a safer play to take all that out of play, hit it down 10. The green is going to be pretty extraordinarily hard to hold anyways with it being a downslope and having a long club in there. It’s more you’re playing for birdies. There is less opportunity I think for eagle than there was before.
“You’ve got three bunkers in front of the green now, and with how firm the greens are — I saw Rory hold 18 green today, but he landed in the fringe over the bunker. The fringe is soft; the greens are firm. It’s very challenging to hold the green in two.
“If you don’t hit the 18th fairway you’re in a heap of trouble. That’s something I’m still going to toy around with tomorrow, but I think it’s likely you’ll see some guys hitting it down the 10th because it’s a safer play.”
Would it make a mockery of the redesign if the solution to playing the closing hole – the hole where the drama is supposed to unfold – if players just bomb it down the adjacent fairway?
We’ll let you be the judge of that.
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