Southern Hills, 2007 PGA Championship Preview piece

See you in Tulsa.  This piece and my coverage of the event will be on Cybergolf and linked to by Golf Observer.

SOUTHERN HILLS – THE MOST UNSUNG COURSE OF THE MAJORS

 

 

            Ask any golfer to list the private masterpieces he or she would love to play before dying and you’ll get many similar answers.  Augusta National, Shinnecock Hills, Winged Foot, Oakmont, Cypress Point, Pine Valley and Merion top most people’s lists.  Golf Course architecture fans will add such gems as Sand Hills, Friar’s Head, Monterey Peninsula Country Club (Shore Course) and Crystal Downs.  Yet casual fans and architecture experts alike almost uniformly overlook Southern Hills in Tulsa.

 

            Perhaps it’s because Southern Hills is in Tulsa and is more known for blistering heat and a seemingly repetitive narrow, tree-lined parkland layout.  Maybe it’s because – despite having hosted three U.S. Opens and three PGA Championships – the course’s strength is in its design strategy and cleverly sloping greens which don’t translate on TV like Pebble Beach or Whistling Straits which have arresting natural settings.  Maybe it’s because we’ve devolved into a “flyover state” mentality in golf and believe that if it doesn’t border water, it’s second-class.  Well, whatever the reason, get ready to be pleasantly surprised by Perry Maxwell’s Midwest masterpiece when it hosts this year’s PGA Championship.

 

            Perry Maxwell was to Alister Mackenzie what Seth Raynor was to Charles Blair Macdonald; not just a devoted, dynamic and diligent protégé, but one who grew into a wildly successful architect on his own with a formidable portfolio of work.  Maxwell worked with Mackenzie on Crystal Downs among others, but he cemented his own place in golf design history with Prairie Dunes, Southern Hills, Dornock hills and Old Town.  He also renovated Augusta National, Pine Valley and Colonial Country Club.  Ask any architect alive if they would love to have that resume and they would likely assent.

 

            The secret of Maxwell’s success lies in his laying out the holes – called the “routing” in industry terms – and in his devilishly contoured greens.  Like Mackenzie, Maxwell believed the adventure on a given hole merely began upon reaching the putting surface.  Like another great Golden Age architect, A.W. Tillinghast, Maxwell’s greens are like faces, each is unique and detailed and is the identifying feature of the hole.  In an age where greens have been neglected by designers and rejected by touring pros if they have too much character, the genius of Maxwell’s greens practically screams out to be replicated.

 

            Maxwell, formerly a banker who used his rich contacts to help finance design efforts, was best known for “Maxwell rolls,” severe contours in the interior of greens that resulted in fascinating exterior and interior hole locations at the same time.  For those of you who watched this year’s U.S. Open closely, the ninth green at Oakmont offers a good comparison.

 

While Tiger Woods may lament “I don’t like greens that have elephants buried under them (he said that before the 2006 Open Championship at Royal Liverpool) and while Tour players may echo the sentiment, they only do so because character filled greens may interrupt their runs of birdies and make them grind harder.  Despite their bleating, severe green contours are an excellent defense to technology – take for example a Biarritz green with its deep swale.  The green is so difficult it often doesn’t even need bunkering to defend par.

 

            Combined with the design features of the rest of the course, the greens cement what will prove to be the fairest and most complete test of golf skill of this year’s majors and will insure that grinders and shot-shapers will have an equal chance with long bombers.  The tree-lined corridors will test accuracy.  The sharp dog-legs will test distance control and limit the long bombers advantage.  Severe fairway undulations will require shot-shaping skills and thoughtful approaches.  Since there are open front to many greens, the short game will test bump and run as well as the sixty degree lob wedge.  Finally, the greens will test the mental toughness of the competitors.  In short, Southern Hills requires as superlative effort in all facets of the game.

 

            The first four holes run counterclockwise and employ both a severe hill and a natural creek as design features and hazards.  The rest of the front side runs clockwise around the first four holes and finishes on the main hill.  Noted golf designer Ian Andrew outlines the benefits of such a routing in his short biography of Maxwell, “no two holes run in the same direction and because of the winds, no two holes play anything alike.”  Another expert on Maxwell, Chris Clouser, author of the superb book “The Midwest Associate” says the routing soars because Maxwell and his design associates lived on site and walked the property endlessly in an effort to maximize use of the site’s natural features.

 

            Andrew raises an interesting and controversial point when he discusses the wind.  Southern Hills was not built as a tree-lined layout, but like Oakmont, became one over time.  The severe Midwest winds would be much more severe if the course were “Oakmonted” and the offending trees removed.  Not only do they sap nutrients and limit recovery shot options, they cancel out design strategies the architect originally intended, most notably at the par-4 12th where they block the side of the fairway Maxwell intended for drives to land.  Further, wind was intended to be a defense and the fickle Midwest gusts can be a gentle zephyr merely prodding a ball or they can blow errant shots to Arkansas.  After all, the howl of the wind is the clarion call to golf.

 

            Nevertheless, the course’s strategic requirements shine through.  Take for example the par-4, 471 yard second hole.  Clouser believes the hole could be a template hole of C.B. Macdonald’s called a “Bottle” hole because the fairway bottlenecks at the green and the player must carry a hazard to reach the putting surface.  Tee shots finishing on the right side of the fairway will play the shot with the ball above their feet, yet the left is pinched by the ubiquitous trees.

 

            The same hillside that makes for a hook lie on the second hole makes for a fade lie on the par-4 372 yard 4th hole.  Playing to a green benched into the hillside, the landing zone for the drive rolls dramatically into a valley and leaves a short-iron approach with the ball below the player’s feet.

 

            Clouser has an interesting story about the 655 yard par-5 fifth hole.  “When Robert Trent Jones visited the course before the 1958 U.S. Open [Author’s Note:  won by Tommy Bolt] he said ‘You’ve got one of the best courses in the world here.  You’d b a fool to let anyone touch it.’…The fifth is perhaps the one hole he touched more than any others.”  While Jones showed remarkable restraint when compared to other renovations (for example, Oakland Hills), you can see how some of his changes did not work and were, at times, eliminated.  Most notably, he placed a bunker on the outside of the dogleg on the tee shot.

 

This is a microcosm of Jones’ design theories.  Jones loved to spoon-feed the player and as a result, decades later, his “aiming” bunkers have become a crutch for players who need to be led around a course by the nose.  To the contrary, Maxwell and Mackenzie prefer the “doctrine of deception,” where the player picks his own line rather than the “doctrine of framing” where the course is spelled out for the golfer.  At Southern Hills’ fifth, while the bunker is not really and aiming bunker, it still serves no purpose other than to be penal and restrict options.  The proper play is actually over the bunker guarding the inside of the dog-leg.  The hole opens up considerably on the left and the approach to the green comes from the optimum angle.

 

The two par-3s on the front are particularly clever.  All four par-3s on the course run to the four different point of the compass and in the case of the sixth, the direction of the hole and the prevailing wind significantly impact strategy.  The 178 yard hole runs north, playing into a left to right cross wind.  The prevailing wind will push balls away from the water hazard, but also tests accuracy.  The green also features a severe false front.

 

The 228-yard eighth also features intricate architecture; it replicates the famous redan hole made famous at North Berwick and National Golf Links of America.  The green is protected by a diagonal set of bunkers and a knoll on the right ensures that the ball runs right to left and front to back.  Maxwell also built redans at Dornick Hills and Old Town.

 

The back nine plays over even more severe terrain and features several wildly undulating fairways.  Once again, Clouser has excellent analysis.  “The fairway at ten is perhaps the narrowest on the course as the slope runs dramatically from right to left off of the hill that the clubhouse sits in [sic].  Then Maxwell cleverly forces the player to go back against the grain of the slopeand play to a green cut magnificent into the hillside.  The two-tiered green is one of the best on the course.  The large knoll short of the green is also a major impediment.”  Clouser also criticizes the tree encroachment as restricting recovery shots on this hole.

 

Similarly, although most tout the 458 yard par-4 12th as one of the best holes on the course (Including Arnold Palmer who believes he left the 1970 PGA Championship on this hole to the benefit of eventual winner Dave Stockton) once again the trees on the left side block the entrance to the green and prevent the player from approaching on what Maxwell deigned to be the best side of the hole.

 

The thirteenth is a fabulously tempting par-5.  At a mere 537 yards it is easily reachable in two, but two ponds and several bunkers surround the catcher’s mitt shaped green.  The large Maxwell roll in the middle of the green effectively segments the putting surface in two and makes a two-putt form the wrong tier highly unlikely.

 

The rest of the back nine is tight, tree-lined and features every different kind of uneven lie a player could fear.  The finish has seen one of the strangest ends to a major championship when Stewart Cink, Mark Brooks and Retief Goosen all missed putts that would have won the U.S. Open in 2001.  Indeed, Cink three-putted his way from eight feet right out of the Monday playoff won by Goosen.

 

Hubert Green won the only other U.S. Open played at Southern Hills in 1977.  Ray Floyd (1982) and Nick Price (1994) won PGA Championships in the August Tulsa heat.  Clearly, well-rounded shot makers thrive here rather than rash long bombers.  Look for Jim Furyk, Vijay Singh, Steve Stricker and other solid ball strikers and grinders to play well.  Woods will of course be a factor, but he my have trouble with the difficult greens if he does not putt better then he did at Augusta and Oakmont this year.

 

Southern Hills has crowned excellent, worthy champions, has seen remarkable historic championships and has fascinating golf course architecture.  The time has come for the course to stop being overshadowed by August heat and more photogenic courses on the coasts.  Nothing would cement Southern Hill’s place in history with the media than a Tiger Woods victory, but the course and Maxwell deserve much better treatment as the course and it’s champions are worthy than more than just a cursory glance as a flyover state course.  Take a close look next week.  You’ll be in for quite a surprise.  But then again, that’s always the way it is at Southern hills.