ATLANTA — There was much discussion at this week's Tour Championship about East Lake Golf Club itself, a course that recently underwent a restoration overseen by renowned architect Andrew Green, who also worked on the renovation of Oak Hill Country Club, site of the 2023 PGA Championship.
Viktor Hovland called East Lake a “major championship golf course,” and Scottie Scheffler went on to talk about the greens, which many describe as “difficult” and “hard,” scoring about 13 on the Stimpmeter and likely U.S. Open-like conditions.
New golf courses, and courses with new green complexes, take time to soften and adapt to the terrain, so as we saw at Quail Hollow and Colonial earlier this year, the new greens can be hard and make it difficult for pros to keep them on the green anywhere, let alone in the Bermuda rough.
“I've played the new course before and it's a little bouncy,” said Xander Schauffele, who has an impressive record at East Lake.
“However it's designed to be played, it's going to be a little bit different the first two years because it's not settling in yet.”
Schauffele added that he was surprised the Tour Championship was returning to the course so soon.
“I wouldn't have been surprised if I had to play somewhere else for a year or two to let this course settle in. It's that new,” Schauffele said.
“It's just so new. The course is really, really new.”
East Lake Golf Club has hosted the Tour Championship every year since 2004. It also hosted the PGA Tour's final round in 1998, 2000 and 2002.
Plus, the Tour gets huge financial backing from the three Tour Championship sponsors — Coca-Cola, Southern Company and Accenture — all of which have a big presence in Atlanta. It would have been tough for the Tour to give up East Lake, given that the 30 players competing this week will receive $100 million in FedEx Cup bonus prize money. But then again, the Atlanta Athletic Club could have hosted the Tour Championship for a year, as could TPC Sugarloaf in Duluth. Both have hosted Tour events before. The Atlanta Athletic Club also hosted the 2011 PGA Championship, where Keegan Bradley won in a playoff against Jason Dufner.
However, the Tour, its sponsors, East Lake management and its members decided to host the Tour Championship at the same venue in 2024, leaving little time to complete repairs to the green.
“We had a limited amount of time. The East Lake team has to sit on a really big pedestal because they were here last year. The maintenance team was preparing the golf course for this championship last year and the day after this event was over they were killing the sod and starting construction,” Green said.
“But every step of the way, we knew we had to be ready by Thursday.”
Yes, the course is finished, but it's hard and fast, and because it's new there's the possibility of some unfortunate bounces and breaks, but that probably won't happen for another year or two.
It's literally brand new.
Green and his team laid the last sod just over two months ago, on June 15th (the third round of this year's U.S. Open was on that day). The next day, Bryson DeChambeau beat Rory McIlroy in a win that's still fresh in everyone's minds, and no doubt still fresh in McIlroy's mind.
Nonetheless, this golf course is fresh.
That will be entertaining for golf fans and viewers, but it could also pose problems for the 30 players in the field, as Schauffele described what he saw on the par-5 18th hole on Tuesday.
“Someone hit a long iron from the fairway. [in a small part of] fringe, [which is pretty narrow]”The ball hit it really soft and it got jammed,” Schauffele explained.
“And then the ball landed [on the front of the green, inches beyond the fringe] “Just went over the green. It's just hard to tell because it's new.”
Maybe these bounces could lead to the kind of chaotic entertainment PGA Tour fans crave.
But having received critical acclaim for his work at Oak Hill, Green has crafted another true masterpiece that will surely receive greater praise as time goes on.
Jack Mirko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation Playing Through. Follow For more golf articles, follow us on Twitter Jack Mirko In the same way.
