The PGA's Long-Distance Dedication

Course Length Is a Record; Will It Matter?

CHASKA, Minn., Aug. 12 -- The numbers, by now, almost roll off the backs of the best golfers in the world, but they must be discussed anyway. Hazeltine National Golf Club is listed at 7,674 yards for the PGA Championship, which begins here Thursday morning. That's more than 4.3 miles. There have been 410 major championships in golf history. None has been held on a course this long.

How, then, can Corey Pavin -- a little bitty 49-year-old man who ranks 201st on the PGA Tour in driving distance, hitting the ball nearly 30 yards shorter than the average player -- arrive here and say the following?

"Length is not a serious factor," he said.

Hazeltine is, no doubt, a muscular layout, bristling with an opening par 4 that is 490 yards, anchored by three par 5s of more than 600 yards -- a major championship first -- and featuring the diabolical par-4 12th, which lists on the scorecard at 518 yards and can play even longer. Rich Beem, the surprising champion of this event when it was held here in 2002, assessed the overhaul of his beloved layout thusly: "It's just excessively long."

"It's nowhere near the same golf course that it was," Beem said. "But it's the state of the modern game, I guess. In order to make it harder, just make it longer."

That would be the simple explanation, that "longer" equals "more difficult," and that longer courses eliminate perhaps half the field. But the explanation about what that number on the scorecard means isn't that simple. "Sometimes length doesn't add a lot to certain holes," said Padraig Harrington, the defending PGA champion.

To be sure, no one is arguing that this version of Hazeltine will be easier than the 7,355-yard course on which Beem beat Tiger Woods by a stroke seven years ago, finishing at 10-under-par 278. Since then, it is nothing to note that a course is the longest in PGA, U.S. Open or British Open history. Advances in technology have dictated as much. Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, expanded to 7,445 yards. Bethpage Black hosted the U.S. Open in 2002 at 7,214 yards. This year, when the players returned for the same tournament, it was listed at 231 yards longer. The sheer numbers get to be jarring.

"That's just kind of the fad of today," said Jim Furyk, who won the 2003 U.S. Open on a seemingly dainty Olympia Fields course of 7,188 yards. "Longer, longer, longer is better."

But put those stats to the side for a minute, and that might get to what Pavin is talking about, why he can sit here knowing he drives the ball an average of 260 yards but still say Hazeltine "will be the same boat for everybody."

"That's because," said Rees Jones, the architect who directed the redesign here, "total yardage is meaningless."

Jones, son of Hazeltine architect Robert Trent Jones, was entrusted with bulking up the course to its current format, and he has in fact worked on it for some two decades. Likewise, he brought Bethpage Black up to the standards of the U.S. Golf Association, and is working with Congressional Country Club in Bethesda as it pushes tees back and redoes its greens in preparation for the 2011 U.S. Open. No one in golf is more familiar with updating older courses for the modern game.

So when Jones set out to lengthen Hazeltine in preparation for this event, he did not do so with a specific total length in mind. He did so, he said, judiciously.