Tiger Woods and 19 other pros will play with family members at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club.
The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Orlando, Grande Lakes – site of this week’s PNC Championship – was designed by Greg Norman and opened in 2003 less than 10 miles from Walt Disney World.
After pro-ams Thursday and Friday, 20 teams will compete in the tournament proper Saturday and Sunday. Originally named the Father-Son Challenge, the current format includes pro golfers partnered with either a parent or child. The main attraction will be the return of Tiger Woods to competitive golf as he pairs with son Charlie less than a year after a single-car crash in California left the 15-time major champion with significant injuries.
Grande Lakes will play at 7,122 yards with a par of 72 for the pros. Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the pros face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
“We haven’t seen numbers like this in a long time. These are the best numbers in more than 15 years.”
FARMINGTON, New Mexico — Most people, when considering the chore of lawn and garden care for their homes, probably cringe a bit about the magnitude of the project.
Now imagine that same bit of work encompassing some 7,200 yards of lawn and garden care.
Piñon Hills Golf Course is in the planning phase right now for what’s expected to be a 90-day process to excavate bunkers as well as replacing outdated irrigation systems.
The anticipated start date of the work is shortly after the start of the new year.
This will be the first real renovation project of its kind for the course in several years, according to PGA Tour professional and course general manager Chris Jones.
“If all the materials arrive when expected, we will close the golf course,” Jones said. “In the event materials are delayed, we will not close the golf course until such time they arrive.”
In a statement released last month on the course’s website, the intent with some of the work being done is to “restore the desert and native areas to a non-watered, natural state,” which means replacing and repairing existing watering systems.
“This will give us a state-of-the-art system in which we can control each one of the 1,500 sprinkler heads from any remote device,” Jones said. “It will save us a lot of water and a lot of money at the same time.”
Piñon Hills will work with a variety of different businesses to assist the renovation process, including Mid-America Golf & Landscape, operated out of Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
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It is expected that more than 30 contractors and workers from that business will be supplying materials for the renovation and will be in charge of supervising the work on the course set to begin in January.
“Once that starts and we completely close down the course, it’s about a three-month process,” Jones said. “There’s a possibility that some side work might still be going on as far as finishing touches, but the bulk of the work takes about 90 days.”
Weather considering, that places the expected reopening of the course sometime around late March to early April.
“The guys who are working the course, they do this for a living and work in any kind of weather,” Jones said. “If we run into some heavy snow, that can set us back a bit but for the most part we’re expecting they’ll work right through the timeframe.”
In addition to the irrigation work, the excavation of the bunkers is another high-profile part of the renovation process.
For that, Piñon Hills is calling on the services of the Better Billy Bunker Method, based out of Hermitage, Tennessee.
Pinon Hills Golf Course in Farmington, New Mexico, is about to undergo a massive renovation which will include restoration of bunkers and updates to irrigation systems. (Contributed photo)
Among their clients have been respected courses like Indian Hills Country Club, located in Bowling Green, Kentucky. They also have received endorsements from superintendents at Augusta National, home of the Masters.
“They go in and take out all the old lining and sand and they make sure the drainage works before making changes to the polymer around the bunkers,” Jones said. “You’ll never see a weed grow through it.”
Ranked as one of the top courses by Golfweek (No. 4 on the list of courses you can play in New Mexico), Piñon Hills has been recognized by many as one of the best public golf courses in the United States. It’s also extremely affordable, with weekday rates under $50, even for non-residents.
Since opening in 1989, Piñon Hills has primarily maintained its original design, but a recent flurry of activity has spurred on need for a change.
The popularity of the sport of golf in general has been wide in the past year, mostly because it gave participants the chance to be outdoors when many indoor businesses were shut down or limited to capacity.
“Since we re-opened (summer of 2020), we haven’t seen numbers like this in a long time,” Jones said. “These are the best numbers in more than 15 years.”
With the emergence of disc golf and footgolf and the ability to play those sports at courses across the region, interest in the courses has seen a huge boost.
“People having access to these courses have seen numbers go off the charts,” Jones said. “The pandemic has been awful in a lot of respects but golf has been an unexpected beneficiary of people getting out and rediscovering the sport.”
The rising popularity of both the sport and the course, as well as the necessity for change was reason enough to go ahead with this project.
According to Jones, more than 90 percent of the current irrigation systems on the course are from the original design and construction, making it unreliable in recent years and time-consuming for maintenance workers on the course.
“This has been a project we felt needed to be done for many years now,” Jones said. “The irrigation system on its own is going to make a huge difference.”
Once completed, Jones hopes that golfers returning to Piñon Hills will not notice many changes, as they’re not expected to have an impact in terms of the length of the course.
“We might move a tee box here or there a few yards left or right,” Jones said. “But we’re not looking to change the course itself. The original design still stands on its own.”
Steve Bortstein can be reached via email at SBortstein@Gannett.com, via Twitter @DTSBortstein or on the phone at (505) 635-2680.
Ernie Els designed the course at Albany, which opened in 2010
Albany in New Providence, the Bahamas – site of this week’s Hero World Challenge – was designed by Ernie Els and opened in 2010. It is part of a 600-acre luxury resort community owned by a Tavistock group that includes Els, Tiger Woods, and Justin Timberlake.
Albany ties for No. 20 on the 2021 list of Golfweek’s Best Courses in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands, and Central America. It will play at 7,302 yards with a par of 72 for the Hero World Challenge.
Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the pros face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
Wynn has one of the highest costs of a daily-fee course in the United States.
Wynn Golf Club, right behind the Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino, fits perfectly into its brash surroundings on the Strip. It’s as Vegas as Vegas can be when it comes to golf course architecture.
Much of the course is brand new, despite golf having been played on the site since 1952 when it became the Desert Inn Golf Club.
Steve Wynn purchased the resort in 2000, and the Tom Fazio-designed Wynn Golf Club opened in 2005. But that layout was shuttered in 2017 as the operators of the adjacent Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino considered other uses for the ridiculously valuable land on which the course sits, and the resort lost millions of dollars in revenue from green fees and other golf-attributable casino earnings.
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After scrapping plans to build a lagoon on the site with new hotel rooms and restaurants, Fazio and his son, Logan, were called to breathe fresh life into the abandoned track. Wynn Golf Club reopened in October 2019 with eight new and 10 refurbished holes, playing to a par of 70 at 6,722 yards.
As far as playing Wynn Golf Club, you don’t have to know someone who knows someone. You just have to have some disposable income.
Tee times can be made by resort guests 90 days in advance, and general public play is open with 30-day advanced bookings. But be ready to fork over the cash: green fees are $550.
Wynn has one of the highest costs of a daily-fee course in the U.S. and while that sounds prohibitively expensive for many players, there are plenty of guests at the Wynn hotel and casino who spin through a lot more on the slot machines in less time than it takes to play a round of golf.
Brian Hawthorne, the resort’s executive director of golf operations, said there’s a lot of value baked into that fee when considering the location on the Strip as well as an all-inclusive experience that includes forecaddie and rental clubs if needed.
“And if you keep somebody from gambling for four and a half hours, we might be saving people money,” he said with a laugh.
So while that kind of green fee is not for every golfer, Hawthorne is right. As he said, “There’s different price points for every type of customer,” and many of the luxury resort’s guests simply aren’t worried about price. This is, after all, a Forbes Five-Star property that uses Rolls-Royce limos to whisk preferred guests back and forth to the airport.
Puttview’s hole-by-hole maps of Sea Island’s Seaside Course provide a peek at the challenges PGA Tour players face this week in Georgia.
Sea Island’s Seaside Course, site of this week’s RSM Classic on the PGA Tour, originally was laid out by famed designers Harry S. Colt and Charles Alison in 1929 and was redesigned by Tom Fazio in 1999.
The event also will be played on the resort’s Plantation Course, which was renovated by Davis Love III in 2019. The first two rounds will be split between the courses, with the final two rounds after the cut being played on Seaside.
The Seaside will play to 7,005 yards with a par of 70 for the RSM Classic, while the Plantation will play to 7,060 yards with a par of 72.
Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges that players face this week on the Seaside Course. Check out the maps of each hole below.
From Japan, China and South Korea all the way to the Middle East, these are the best golf courses in Asia.
Welcome to Golfweek’s Best rankings of the top 25 courses in Asia as determined by Golfweek’s Best Raters for 2021 (pictured atop this story: The Club at Nine Bridges in South Korea).
For the purposes of this story, Golfweek has used generally accepted boundaries of Asia that stretch from the Pacific Ocean westward through the Middle East.
The members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final rating for each course. Then each course is ranked against other courses in Asia to produce the final rankings.
For more on top courses outside the U.S., check out the following lists:
Listed with each course below is its average rating, location, designer(s) and year opened. Private clubs include a p, daily fee courses a d, resort courses an r and courses that host top-tier tour events a t.
See the hole maps for the site of the PGA Tour’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise Houston Open, where Tom Doak recently completed a renovation.
Memorial Park Golf Course in Houston, site of this week’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise Houston Open on the PGA Tour, was recently renovated by architect Tom Doak. The municipal course ranks No. 20 on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list in Texas.
The original John Bredemus layout opened in 1936 and hosted the PGA Tour at various times in the 1940s through the 1960s, but it had become overgrown and shaggy while hosting 60,000 rounds a year. Doak in 2019 completed his $34-million renovation funded through a foundation headed by Houston Astros’ owner Jim Crane, and the Tour returned in 2020.
The course will be set up at 7,412 yards with a par of 70 for this week’s event. It normally tops out at 7,292 yards with a par of 72.
Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges that players face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
Puttview provides our hole-by-hole maps for the host site of the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba on the PGA Tour.
El Camaleon Golf Club, site of this week’s World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba on the PGA Tour, was designed by Greg Norman and opened in 2004 in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. In 2007 it became the first course in Mexico to host a PGA Tour event.
Located about an hour’s drive south of Cancun, the course plays through jungle, thick mangroves and alongside the oceanfront. The paspalum layout ranks No. 18 on Golfweek’s Best course-ranking list for Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands and Central America. It will play to 7,039 yards with a par of 71 for this week’s Tour event.
Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges that players face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
Two stunning layouts in Nova Scotia top the list of Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses in Canada.
Welcome to Golfweek’s Best rankings of the Top 25 Modern Courses in Canada – built in or after 1960 – as determined by Golfweek’s Best Raters for 2021 (pictured atop this story: Cabot Cliffs).
The members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final rating for each course. Then each course is ranked against other courses in Great Britain and Ireland to produce the final rankings.
Golfweek also ranks top Classic Courses in Canada, and the 2021 version of that list will be made available next week. For more on top courses outside the U.S., check out the following lists:
Listed with each course below is its average rating, location, designers and year opened. Private clubs include a p, daily fee courses have a d, and resort courses are marked with an r.
Puttview offers hole-by-hole maps of the Robert Trent Jones Sr. course in Bermuda, site of this week’s PGA Tour event.
Port Royal Golf course in Southampton, Bermuda – site of this week’s Butterfield Bahamas Championship on the PGA Tour – was designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and opened in 1970. Roger Rulewich completed a renovation of the course a little more than a decade ago.
With several holes alongside the Atlantic Ocean, the public-access layout will play to 6,828 yards with a par of 71.
Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges that players face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
