Two days of rain may have dulled the teeth of Ridgewood Country Club, but as the 62nd PGA Senior Championship begins today, the storied course has plenty of sharp claws left to challenge a field of 144 golfers.
“It may not play as difficult as they had hoped it would, but it’s still going to be plenty for us,” said Tom Kite. “There’s no question about it. Some of these greens are very, very treacherous, and it’s going to prove to be very exciting, very interesting.”
The month-long drought that made the tree-lined fairways hard and fast and the greens slick as marble are a distant memory. Rain Tuesday and yesterday has turned the course into sponge, minimizing any roll in the fairway and making the greens receptive to approach shots. But while a wet course normally equates to lower scoring, few golfers expect to have an easy time of it during today’s first round of the 72-hole major tournament.
The rain will make the championship layout play longer than its measured 6,904 yards, and the rough, which was cut to 2½ inches on Saturday could be up to six or seven inches by the weekend. “I need more length,” moaned Doug Tewell, who is the tournament’s defending champion and also won the Countrywide Tradition last April, the first Senior major of the season. “The last two days, the golf course has gotten about 30 yards a hole longer.”
But even long hitters like Kite and Dana Quigley can take little for granted. The rough or a greedy tree limb will swallow any errant drive, and the greens, while softened, still look the size of a quarter and feature enough tricky slopes to send approach shots rolling away from their intended target.
“It’s going to require all the elements I think that we’re trying to get to in this type of championship,” said Hale Irwin, a three-time Senior PGA winner, “straight driving, good irons and good putting. What more can you ask when you have a big event? The players that don’t drive the ball well will suffer and those that miss these greens will suffer.”
Added Kite, “The biggest problem is making the ball stay where you want it to stay, because they’re hitting so soft, if they have any backspin at all, the ball tends to pull back off away from the pin and in a lot of cases, off the front edge of the green.”
The demand for precision along with a crowded field should make for a long day today and tomorrow before the field is cut for the weekend. “I think play is going to be extremely slow because the golf course is going to play so difficult,” Tewell said. “The big thing is going to be just being patient out there and not getting hurt.”
Ridgewood Country Club’s head pro Billy Adams may have summed things up best when he said, “Old man par does pretty well here at Ridgewood.”
Despite the soggy conditions, the players are unanimous in their excitement about playing this year’s Senior PGA Championship at Ridgewood, which played host to the 1990 U.S. Senior Open won by Lee Trevino. The PGA version has been played in Florida since 1940 and at the PGA National Golf Club since 1982. It will travel to Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, next year.
The difficult conditions should produce a leaderboard comprised of familiar names come Sunday. Irwin, Bruce Fleisher, Mike McCullough and Larry Nelson have each won twice on Tour this year and should be considered among the favorites, along with Tewell, who has a knack of playing well in majors. Top players like Gil Morgan, Allen Doyle, Kite and Tom Watson also could make a run.
Notable pairings for the first two rounds include a threesome of Nelson, Fleisher and Kite on the first tee at 9:42 a.m. today, and Tewell, Trevino and Jack Nicklaus at 1 p.m. Irwin and Arnold Palmer will be part of a threesome that tees off at 8:21 this morning.
