The 93rd annual Professional Golfers Association Championship tees it up Thursday at the Atlanta Athletic Club Highlands Course. The PGA Championship is the fourth and final major of the men”s golf season. Martin Kaymer of Germany is the defending champion, Tiger Woods will be in the field, and the August heat of Georgia will be much of an issue as are the rains and winds at the British Open.
The site of this year”s PGA, the Atlanta Athletic Club, is steeped in turn-of-the-century tradition as well as modern era golf history. Similar to San Francisco”s Olympic Club, Atlanta Athletic is not only a golfing club, but also an establishment that features tennis, badminton, swimming and basketball.
The original AAC had a 10-story athletic facility in metro Atlanta as well as a championship golf course at its East Lake property. Opened in 1904, its first director was Georgia Tech football coach John Heisman, the very same Heisman who is the namesake for the prestigious college football award to the game”s top player. The original golf club, East Lake, was the home course of amateur golfing great Bobby Jones.
In the 1960s, the Atlanta Athletic Club divested itself of the downtown facility as well as the golf course and moved to a new site some 25 miles north of Atlanta in the small community of Johns Creek. Two 18-hole golf courses were built, a nine-hole practice course was added, and facilities for indoor and outdoor tennis, an Olympic-sized pool, a massive health club as well as a ballroom-styled dining room were included. Robert Trent Jones Sr. designed both courses with Joe Lee, and the course used for next week”s PGA Championship, the Highlands Course, was typical Jones with length, water and toughness. It was designed to play to a par of 72 and could be stretched out to 7,613 yards from the back tees.
First opened in 1967, the Atlanta Athletic Club secured the 1976 United States Open as its initial introduction to championship-caliber golf. Jerry Pate won that week in dramatic style, stiffing a 175-yard 5-iron to mere inches on the final hole on Sunday to beat out Tom Weiskopf and Al Geiberger. Five years later, the 1981 PGA was contested at Atlanta Athletic as Larry Nelson won his first of three major titles, romping to a four-stroke margin of victory over Fuzzy Zoeller. In 1990, Betsy King caught a slipping Patty Sheehan to win her second consecutive U.S. Women”s Open title at the Riverside Course at Atlanta Athletic. King shot a final-round 70, Sheehan carded a 76, and the weather was muggy, rainy, stifling and very hot.
In 2001, the PGA returned to AAC. The heat was excessive and the greens had to be water constantly during play to keep them alive. One shot ahead of playing partner Phil Mickelson going to the final hole, David Toms laid up short of the water on the par-4, 500-yard 18th hole, then hit a 90-yard wedge to 10 feet, and drained the par putt to win the PGA by one stroke. It would mark the highlight of his golfing career.
Ten years later, the PGA Championship has returned to the Highlands Course at Atlanta Athletic. The course has been tweaked for the PGA, with the yardage set at 7,463 yards and the par lowered to 70. However, the major changes to the course from a decade ago have nothing to do with yardages and par, and have everything to do with science and agronomy.
The recent course re-do by Rees Jones, the son of the original architect, included the introduction of completely new grass strains that not only grow at a slower pace, cutting down on overall maintenance, but also are found to be much hardier with regard to the searing August sun in the southern United States. This time around, they won”t be stopping play to water the greens nor will those enormous electric fans be located greenside. The bent grass greens have been replaced by a newly developed ultra-dwarf Bermuda, and the Bermuda tees and fairways are now comprised of diamond zoysia. The gnarly and punitive Bermuda rough from 2001 has been changed to a different Bermuda strain called Tifton 10, making it more playable. If the science holds up next week, Atlanta Athletic should play firm and fast, similar to the way Augusta National runs every April fro the Masters.
In the end though, it will be all about the golf. In what will be golf”s strongest field for a major championship this year, there are many questions that will only be answered with the conclusion of play on Sunday evening.
The world”s No. 1 and No. 2 golfers are entered, namely Luke Donald and Lee Westwood. How much longer can they remain atop golf”s ranking s with exactly zero major titles to their names? Is this the breakthrough moment for either linkster? What about U.S. Open champ Rory McIlroy? Is he the dominant golfer of the future or was his week at Congressional simply an Oosthuizen experience for the Irish golfer? Will a member of the youth brigade such as Dustin Johnson or Nick Watney finally have their moment in the sun or are they this era”s version of Frank Beard and Bert Yancey? Is this the week Kaymer, Graeme McDowell or Charl Schwartzel cement their place among golf”s top players or will another journeyman of sorts come through at AAC? Finally, can Steve Stricker pull out a win and join Darren Clarke in the 40-something club of new major champions?
Finally, how will Tiger play? Can he compete like he did at this year”s Masters or has he become a golfing afterthought? How will the change of caddies affect him? And most intriguing of all, is it possible that Tiger fired his caddie of 12 years and 13 majors because he was caught cheating on him when he caddied at the U.S. Open for Adam Scott? Seems a bit inconsistent on Tiger”s part should that turn out to be the case. Of course, all the answers to these questions and more won”t be readily available until a week from Sunday when the 93rd annual PGA Championship concludes at the Atlanta Athletic Club in Georgia.
