Difficult Courses Make Golf Better to Watch on TV

View From The Fairway by Derek Clements

Here's a thing - I enjoyed the recent Genesis Invitational. I really enjoyed it - and I am willing to wager that those of you who also tuned in will feel precisely the same way.

I haven’t been able to say that about many tournaments on the PGA Tour thus far in 2025. They have been cursed with slow play and sublimely easy tracks.

However, this was different. Torrey Pines was different - a proper golf course, a proper test. A genuine challenge. And the players knew it. And, unbelievably, the final groups took just four hours to play 18 holes. No, you did not misread that. Four hours!

I have become utterly fed up with marathon rounds of golf, and I have not been overly impressed with the quality of the courses.

And they have been at it again in the Mexico Open with rounds in the mid-sixties being reeled off for fun by players most of us have never heard of.

You get the picture.

Ludvig Aberg, surely destined for a long and stellar career, won the Genesis with a four-round total of 276 and finished the week just 12 under par. 

And the reason was that Torrey Pines was set up to be a real test. The Genesis is one of the PGA Tour’s signature events, with huge prize money and extra FedEx Cup points on offer. It should be a showpiece event and, for once, it truly was.

Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy were vying for the lead after 36 holes. Most of us expected two of the world’s leading golfers to disappear over the horizon. But it didn’t happen. 

In the third round - moving day - Scheffler required 76 blows to negotiate the course, while McIlroy was just two shots better. They tried to overpower the layout but were unable to do so because Torrey Pines had been set up properly. Poor driving meant that McIlroy was unable to find the right places on the greens and, as a result, putted horribly. 

For starters, there was actual rough. Scheffler and McIlroy found out the hard way that if they missed the fairway they were going to be punished - severely. The same thing could not be said of either The Sentry (another of the tour’s signature events, by the way) or the Phoenix Open.

I totally get why TPC Scottsdale is set up for low scoring. 

Over the course of four days, around 700,000 people pour through the gates at the Phoenix Open. It is well known that vast amounts of alcohol is consumed. And those fans do not pay their money to see players struggling to make pars. They go along to see birdies - lots of them. And the course is duly set up to deliver precisely that.

But my view is that all courses chosen to host signature events should properly test players. 

These elite fields are the best our sport can offer and they should be good enough to come up with a strategy to cope - something McIlroy failed to do at Torrey Pines. 

And that should mean that there is a premium put on finding fairways and avoiding fairway bunkers. I have long held the belief that too many of the courses that host PGA Tour events are too easy and the general scoring bears that out.

I have played Torrey Pines - and it is a brute. My guess is that the players would agree. Earlier in the year Harris English won the Farmers Insurance Open there - he finished the week on 280, just eight under par.

Do not get me wrong. I am not advocating impossibly difficult golf courses. I am not even suggesting that every course should have thick rough and deep fairway bunkers. 

But I am saying that if somebody is going to pick up $4m for winning a golf tournament then he should do so in the knowledge that every facet of his game has been properly tested. 

If they are consistently faced with courses such as TPC Scottsdale week in, week out they simply won’t be able to cope when it comes to the majors, still played, mercifully, on the most difficult courses our sport has to offer.