Muirfield Village may not be a heavyweight fighter this week, but the golf course showed it can take a punch and remain standing.
All the talk coming into Thursday’s first round of the Workday Charity Open was how PGA Tour players would make mincemeat of Muirfield Village, which was set up under softer conditions to ease the wear and tear of hosting back-to-back events.
The Memorial Tournament begins Thursday, and Tour officials did not want the Jack Nicklaus-designed course worked over like an out-of-shape boxer just days before another 120 players pound the manicured grass for the 45th Memorial.
To safeguard the course, greens were heavily watered to make sure not to brown out from the stress of a 156-player Workday field.
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The softer and slower greens were running about 11½ on the Stimpmeter when players teed off. Rough had been cut to about 3 inches. The Memorial usually has greens running 13 to 13½ and rough begins at 3½ inches and grows to 4 inches or higher by the end.
In other words, the Course That Jack Built supposedly was ripe for the pickin’. For sure, there was plenty of red on the scoreboard — 63 players broke par, including 35 who shot in the 60s — but nobody went crazy low on a steamy day that saw temperatures reach 94 and air quality reach dangerous levels for sensitive groups.
None of the latter category gathered at Muirfield Village. Workday is the fifth straight Tour event to be held without fans because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The lack of crowd support did not bother Collin Morikawa. The 23-year-old Californian shot a 7-under-par 65 to grab a one-shot lead over Canadian Adam Hadwin in his first visit to Muirfield Village.
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“It’s a very tough course obviously, but you just have to map your way around it,” Morikawa said. “You’ve got to be really smart.”
And good. Morikawa was both, sandwiching an eagle at No. 5 and a lone bogey at No. 18 around six birdies.
“I mean, it happens,” he said of the hiccup at 18. “I think it was just slight fatigue.”
If a 23-year-old tires while playing golf, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Muirfield Village gladly will give up the occasional 65 as long as it can protect itself against the low 60s. That protection supposedly was not going to be in place for the Workday version of Muirfield, but while the course did not offer up anything close to U.S. Open conditions — reportedly those are coming next week — it also did not get KO’d. Morikawa’s 65 matched the same leading score after the opening round of last year’s Memorial.
And anyone who wants to insist that the Workday setup would be a pushover should avoid telling Phil Mickelson, who shot 41 on his second nine, or Brooks Koepka, who shot 41 on his first nine, or Bubba Watson, who shot 43 on his first nine.
For one round, anyway, Muirfield and its so-called easier setup need not apologize. It might, however, need to towel off, because the round ranked among the hottest days of golf ever at the place.
First-round scoring was aided as much by the humid, still air that typifies July conditions in central Ohio — as opposed to the occasionally breezy and often wet weather fans are used to seeing in late May and early June for the Memorial — as by the receptive greens. Plus, just because Muirfield Village is set up easier does not make it easy.
“It’s still a golf course, no matter how soft it’s playing, it can sneak up on you,” said Hadwin, whose 66 included seven birdies and a bogey. “You get too aggressive, you miss a couple balls, you’re scrambling for pars and you can sort of kind of just get off-kilter.”
Even softened, Muirfield Village’s greens are no palooka.
“It’s sort of a tamer Muirfield Village than we may be used to (but there’s) still a lot of slope on those greens,” Hadwin said.
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