NiceBallz - Play Ballzy

Professional golf is like NASCAR, the pro stock car racing circuit. No, not the PGA Tour’s silly FedEx Cup points-based playoffs, which is modeled after NASCAR’s Chase for the Cup.

What I mean is this: The 180-horsepower Ford Taurus you can buy from the car dealer, no matter how much you trick it out, is nothing like the 750-horsepower machine hurtling down the track at 200 miles per hour. Sure, they have the same shape, but that’s where the similarities end.

Likewise, a championship golf course set up for a professional tournament bears little resemblence to the same course you played a few months ago.

It’s easy to sit on your sofa and criticize pro golfers on TV when they fail to make a par or miss an easy birdie putt. It’s even easier when you’ve played the course and you’ve made a par on the hole. But until you’ve played a course under tournament conditions you don’t appreciate how a course can be set up to play significantly more difficult than for regular play.

You know those media junkets where the press play the course a few days before or after a big event? We recently had the opportunity to play the Pumpkin Ridge Ghost Creek course the day after a playoff finish at the LPGA’s Safeway Classic. Whether we’re media or not is debatable, but whether we were up to the challenge is not. I wasn’t.

The day was a fun opportunity to test my game against the world’s best women (interestingly, only men played on media day), with leaderboards and corporate hospitality tents as a backdrop. But, I was humbled and learned a lot about championship course set up.

At 6,542 yards, somewhere between the Blue and Black tees, the course didn’t seem overpoweringly long. But it would probably have about a 73.0 rating and a 140 slope, which is pretty stout for us amateur desk jockeys. Still, I thought I could put together a decent round on a course that I’ve played dozens of times. I’ve shot as low as 77 here from the White tees in the past. Way to go, big shot!

What you don’t realize, though, is just how much the hole locations and thick rough affect scoring. You hear about it on TV. Johnny Miller and Nick Faldo pontificate about the speed of the greens, but it’s difficult to understand until you’ve tried it.

On a few holes at Pumpkin Ridge, particularly several of the five par 3s, the Sunday final round flags were hidden behind a bunker. Sure, you can hit it on the green, if you can get it to stop, which is tough especially when the greens are firm, double cut and rolled so they’re super fast. But now you’ve got 30 feet for birdie and you’re not going to make many of those putts.

Also, even as a spectator who saw the thick rough with my own eyes, I didn’t appreciate how penal it can be. It doesn’t look that bad, but try getting a 4-iron through it like I did at the long par-4 No. 18. The thick rough grabbed the toe of the club and my ball shot 40 yards right, landing in the middle of the lake. I wasn’t even close to the green. I made Scott Norwood look accurate.

In the end I only made par on three holes and shot a humbling 93. The best round of the tournament was a final-round 65 by the winner, M.J. Hur. That’s 28 shots better than me. Even the worst score of the week was only 83. My game was not sharp and I struggled with my swing. I would not have scored well on any course that day. However, I learned a lot about course setup and gained even more respect for the skill and focus of professional golfers.

In playing a golf course that was familiar and yet completely different, I was reminded that driving a Ford and winning the race — or hitting a Titleist and winning the tournament — are a world apart.