The final major of the season, the PGA Championship, is at the halfway point at the Whistling Straits Golf Course. This is the third time the PGA has been contested at Whistling Straits, a Pete Dye design that first opened just 17 years ago in 1998. It has been the site of the 2004 and 2010 PGA as well as the 2007 United States Senior Open. Vijay Singh won in 2004 in a playoff, Martin Kaymer also had to work overtime to attain his first major title in 2010, and Brad Bryant won the Senior Open by three strokes over Ben Crenshaw in ’07.
It took a full three years for the diabolical Dye and company to build the Straits Course and two years later its inland neighbor, the Irish Course, opened for play. Dye kick-started the whole process in 1988 by designing and building two great courses just down the road at the Blackwolf Run complex. Blackwolf Run’s courses are the River Course and the Meadows/Valley Course. A composite of the two courses at Blackwolf has hosted a pair of U.S. Women’s Opens, the first won by Se Ri Pak in an 18-hole playoff in 1998 while the 2012 Women’s Open was captured by N.Y. Choi. While the Blackwolf Run courses meander through typical Midwest topography alongside the Sheboygan River, the pair of Whistling Straits courses have the looks of Irish and Scottish links courses. Some 20 years ago the Whistling Straits complex was nothing more than an abandoned airfield and grazing land, but after Dye’s array of bulldozers moved massive amounts of land, the place took on the look of the great links courses. Like Bandon, if you build it golfers will come to play it. Kohler is a great golf destination.
The centerpiece of the four courses is the American Club, a five-star resort in the company town of Kohler. An old-time factory town, the original American Club Hotel was built in 1918 and housed the German immigrants who came from Europe to work in the extensive factory that still makes bathroom and toilet products. Blackwolf Run is located at the south end of Kohler, just west of Sheboygan, while Whistling Straits is a couple of exits up the freeway to the north and east in the town of Haven. I’ve played both courses at Blackwolf Run but I got rained out of a round at Whistling Straits. I will be sure to play there sometime in the near future. It’s a great place to visit as long as you visit Wisconsin between May and September.
While the first two rounds of the PGA Championship have featured beautiful Wisconsin weather with increased winds each afternoon, professional golf storms have been brewing throughout the earlier portions of the week. The first volley occurred when the American PGA Tour released its 2015-2016 wraparound schedule that begins in October of 2015 with the playing of the Frys.com Tournament at Silverado in Napa.
The only real changes to the consistency of the tour schedule had been the introduction of the Fed Ex Cup series in 2007. However, the Olympic Games are scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 2016 and for the first time since the games were played in St. Louis in 1904, golf will be a part of it. While an Olympic gold medal in men’s and women’s golf seems to be far less prestigious than a major championship win, or for that matter a victory in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the show will go on and the PGA Tour has adapted its schedule accordingly.
The PGA Tour schedule for the winter, spring and early summer of 2016 is very similar. After that, chaos is the norm. After the U.S. Open is played over Father’s Day weekend in June, the Quicken Loans Tourney in Washington D.C. hosted by Tiger Woods comes next, only to be followed by the WGC event in Akron. That’s three big-boy tourneys in a row. After that it’s off to the Greenbrier, then the British Open, then the Canadian Open, and most shockingly, the PGA Championship jumps to the end of July. A lot of top-notch professionals will skip the Greenbrier and will do the same to the Canadian, an event that has been a tour staple since 1904. The three August tournaments will be the Hartford event that is usually scheduled for June, the Quad Cities that has historically been contested the week before the British Open in July, and, finally, the Wyndham tourney in Greensboro.
Here are some of the issues. As earlier mentioned, a number of top-notch golfers will skip the B-level events. Will Jason Day be exhausted from all this and skip the Canadian Open, a tournament he won this year? Will Jordan Spieth go to the Olympics as one of the four American contestants and blow off the Quad Cities, an event that gave him an exemption as a teenager, was the site of his first PGA Tour victory, and a tournament he has showed loyalty toward even though it has historically fallen just prior to the British Open? How will all this affect the caliber of the fields in these events? How difficult will it be to prepare for the Open Championship and the PGA Championship when they are contested 11 days apart and an ocean away? And if you think all these issues are individualized, consider the issue from the perspective of the European Tour. That includes Rory, Sergio, Graeme, Padraig and the rest.
Moving the World Golf Championship from August to July will result in the European Tour deciding to remove that event from its calendar. Irishman Shane Lowry, the dramatic winner of last week’s WGC at Firestone, is just one of many Euros in a predicament. The movement of the WGC conflicts with the French Open. The French Open is the longest-running professional tourney in continental Europe. How long? Well, next year is its 100th anniversary. On top of that, 2016 is a Ryder Cup year and the French Open will count for those trying to make the European squad while they will receive zero consideration for a high finish at Akron. Even further, the 2018 Ryder Cup will be played at Le Golf National, the site of the French Open since 1991.
I blame the No. 2 man in PGA Tour headquarters, Ty Votaw, for all this chaos. He has been the cheerleader for Olympic golf when he should have been advising against it. Why is professional golf legitimizing the cesspool that is the Olympic movement? Olympic golf has next to no history, it will limit quality participation as evidenced by recent statements made by the No. 1 female golfer in the world, Inbee Park, and it will be another snub to the tournament organizers of lesser tour events, even if it does come around every four years.
However, in the meantime, we’ve got a PGA Championship to watch. The leader board is full of quality, this is the latest opportunity for Dustin Johnson to get that major monkey off his back, and my weather app tells me that it will be a beautiful Wisconsin weekend at Whistling Straits for the playing of the year’s final grand slam event. Sure beats Olympic golf.
