The 2022-23 season had 47 tournaments that were contested over 50 golf courses in eight different countries. Now that the season has concluded, the stats gurus at the PGA Tour have calculated the numbers to determine which ones were the most difficult.
Of those 50 courses, five had an average score of more than one stroke over par per round. Just one course was over par two strokes per round. Sixteen of the 49 had an over-par average. TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium Course, a par 71, had the average score closest to par at 70.98.
The golf courses which hosted the 2023 major championships check in at Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 6 on the list of most difficult venues.
What course proved to be the most difficult? What about the easiest golf courses? Check out this list below. Stats courtesy pgatour.com.
Viktor Hovland and Collin Morikawa are lurking — and other storylines from the third round of the Memorial.
There are 18 holes left of the 2023 Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, and it’s anyone’s ballgame.
Heading into Sunday, there are 31 players at or within four shots of the lead.
Atop the leaderboard, however, are Rory McIlroy, Si Woo Kim and David Lipsky. Lipsky bogeyed Nos. 17 and 18 to drop out of the final group.
Kim has shot under par in all three rounds thus far, including a 1-under 71 on Saturday. McIlroy, who’s looking to win for the first time since the CJ Cup in the fall, made a late birdie at No. 17 to get to 6 under.
Some of the big names within striking distance include Viktor Hovland (5 under), Collin Morikawa (4 under), two-time Memorial champion Patrick Cantlay (4 under), 2014 Memorial champ Hideki Matsuyama (4 under), Sungjae Im (3 under), Jordan Spieth (3 under), Matt Fitzpatrick (2 under), Rickie Fowler (2 under) and 2020 winner Jon Rahm (2 under).
Sunday is going to be a good one.
If you missed any of Saturday’s action, no worries, we have you covered. Here’s everything you need to know from the third round of the Memorial Tournament at Jack’s Place.
“It was a crap hole before and it’s a crap hole now.”
Jason Day called the par-3 16th at Muirfield Village Golf Club “a stupid hole.” Jordan Spieth called it “not a great hole in pretty much everyone’s opinion that’s playing today,” and one caddie when asked about the changes that course architect Jack Nicklaus signed off on to the hole noted, “it was a crap hole before and it’s a crap hole now.”
Shots fired!
It’s important to point out that Muirfield Village, which Nicklaus built with help from Desmond Muirhead in the early 1970s, is widely regarded as one of if not Nicklaus’s finest layout of more than 400+ courses he’s designed worldwide and one of the most beloved courses on the PGA Tour. Still, it’s not too often that Tour pros publicly pan a design change, especially at Jack’s Place, where the tournament host has won more majors than any player that ever has teed it up. But such is the case this week at the Memorial after Nicklaus added a new tee box this year that stretched the hole to 220 yards.
“I don’t like the 16th length. It’s just not really a hole that should be playing at 220,” Day said.
The par-3, which requires a player to carry a lake to a green that even Nicklaus himself described this week as the size of “a postage stamp,” always has played tough: it was the sixth-hardest hole in 2022, and in tournament history it has played to an average of 3.16, the third most difficult hole. On Friday, with the back tee box in use and measuring 211 yards, it played to 3.347, the toughest hole at Muirfield Village, relinquishing just eight birdies while the field struggled to 38 bogeys, four doubles and one dreaded “other.”
“After we redesigned the hole prior to the 2013 Presidents Cup, it just didn’t play like I wanted or what the Memorial field liked,” Nicklaus said in describing the hole in this year’s Memorial tournament program. “The green wouldn’t hold shots, especially on the back left. It turned out that the left side pitched away from you, and that should not have been the case. So, we took eight inches from the middle of the green and added eight inches to the left. Now, although golfers are using the same club as before, the green runs toward them and not away from them, and thus holds shots better.”
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During his pre-tournament press conference on Tuesday, Nicklaus elaborated on the new tee box – he also added another 20 yards to the 17th hole – and looked forward to its use.
“It’s probably downhill maybe 14, 15 feet. So it doesn’t play as long as the yardage says, but it’s a rather imposing shot to sit back on a tee and look down there and say, that little postage stamp is where I’m going to try to hit it from here?” Nicklaus said. “To me, today it’s a driver, but not for them. They will probably have to go all the way back from an 8-iron to a 7-iron. But anyway, it’s pretty good.”
Jordan Spieth plays his shot from the fairway on the 13th hole during the first round of the Memorial Tournament golf tournament at the Muirfield Village Golf Club. Mandatory Credit: Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports
Not if you ask Spieth.
“Well, 16’s just not a great hole in pretty much everyone’s opinion that’s playing today,” Spieth said on Thursday when the field made just five birdies all day at 16. “So you’re just trying to get a ball, get a putter in your hand for 2. It’s 203 yards adjusted into the wind with a firm green that runs away from you on both sides and has one shelf that you can land it into.”
“It’s just a small target,” Jon Rahm said. “That’s it.”
Even former Tour pro turned NBC/Golf Channel analyst Smylie Kaufman tweeted a dig at the much-maligned hole saying, “Besides the 16th for the most part the golf course rewards great shots and penalizes bad or just off shots.”
When two-time Memorial champion Patrick Cantlay, who shot 67 on Friday despite a subpar putting performance, was asked to name his best shot of the day, he chose his tee shot at 16, even though he ended up having to chip and scramble for a par.
“Believe it or not, I hit a really nice 6-iron on 16 that landed pin high and bounced over the green. But that might have been my best swing,” he said.
How did that look in the air?
“It looked great,” Cantlay said.
Did you think you were going to have to work that hard for a 3?
“No,” Cantlay said.
And that’s the rub: good shots aren’t necessarily being rewarded.
Could it be that Nicklaus will hear the bellyaching and head back to the drawing board yet again? We’ll have to wait and see.
Justin Thomas and defending champion Billy Horschel are headed home early.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Hideki Matsuyama knows that golf can be cruel.
The Japanese golfer, winner of the Memorial in 2014 and the Masters in 2021, has dealt with a neck injury of late that has stolen some of his distance and forced him to sit out for a month. Asked how’s he feeling, he said, “I feel great. You never know, though, tomorrow morning.”
One day, you have the world by a string, you’re winning the Memorial and your dream of your family celebrating with you on the 18th green comes to fruition. That was Billy Horschel at the 2022 Memorial. One year later, he shot 84 and was holding back tears as he tried to process what had happened during a live interview. Horschel was sent packing on Friday but maybe with an ounce of confidence restored after making six birdies and shooting even-par 72.
That 12-stroke one-day improvement should provide some solace to Horschel as he searches for answers to how his game has soured since one of the crowning achievements of his career.
Justin Thomas’s dip from PGA Championship winner last May to missed cut at the Memorial isn’t as drastic as Horschel but he’s none too happy to be leaving Jack’s Place early and his game appears to have a few more holes in it than he would like with the U.S. Open less than two weeks away.
Among those players who were feeling great like Matsuyama on Friday? World No. 5 Xander Schauffele’s score improved by 11 shots – from an opening-round 77, his highest score since the second round of the 2022 Masters, to a second-round 66. Matt Kuchar went from 79 to 67. And how about nine-time Tour winner Brandt Snedeker, who shot 73-72—145 to make the cut in his first start since September after undergoing experimental surgery on his sternum. World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler snuck in on the number — it took 3-over 147 or better to be among the 66 players moving on to the weekend — despite missing a short par putt at 18 that left him dismayed. Golf, it giveth and it taketh away.
As Horschel noted on Thursday, “As low as it feels, it feels like I’m not that far off at the same time. Which is insane to say when you see me shoot 84 today. It doesn’t, it wouldn’t make sense to a lot of people. But I don’t think I’m that far off.”
Confidence is knowing your best golf is still to come. Here are the notables who missed the cut and are hoping better golf for them is just around the corner.
Rickie’s eagle, Rory’s rebound were among the second-round highlights.
The leaderboard is littered with big names through two days at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio.
Justin Suh, who made a run at the Honda Classic earlier this season, leads at 8 under after 36 holes. He played solidly on Thursday, signing for a 2-under 70. But Friday was a different story.
Suh used birdies on Nos. 3, 5, 8, 11, 14 and 15 to get to 6 under on his day before giving one back at No. 16. However, he stuffed his 174-yard approach into 18 to nine feet and converted the birdie to finish off his 6-under effort.
On his heels at 7 under is Hideki Matsuyama, who rode a hot putter all day Friday to a 7-under 65. Matsuyama won at Muirfield in 2014 and is in prime position to add another Memorial Tournament trophy to his collection.
Patrick Cantlay, Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Rickie Fowler are all inside the top 10.
If you missed any of the action on Friday, no worries, we have you covered. Here’s everything you need to know from the second round of the Memorial Tournament.
“Once you get a taste of (winning), you want to get back there as soon as possible.” — Davis Riley
DUBLIN, Ohio – When former U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover pulled up to the front gate at Jack Nicklaus’s Muirfield Village Golf Club this week, he asked the attendant how he was doing.
“He said, ‘If I was any happier, I’d be dancing.’ I’d never heard that one before,” Glover said. “And then he followed that up by saying, ‘And nobody wants that, trust me.’ ”
On a warm, sunny Thursday at the Memorial, Davis Riley danced around Jack’s Place to the tune of 5-under 67, to lead Englishman Matt Wallace by a stroke.
Riley, 26, made birdie on three of the final four holes to vault to the top of the leaderboard. But it was a par save at the second hole that jump-started his round after an errant tee shot left stopped behind a tree. Riley pitched out sideways and then wedged inside 3 feet and holed the putt.
“I felt like that was kind of a momentum-keeper shot and hole and, yeah, that kind of kept the round going,” he said.
He made a birdie at the third and finished with a flurry of birdies including a 13-footer at the ninth.
“I thought that I left the last one short and thankfully it fell in on the last roll and it was a good way to end the day,” he said.
A year ago, he shot an opening-round 67, too, and was part of a six-way tie for the lead before finishing T-13. Riley, who claimed his first PGA Tour win last month at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, entered the week having missed four straight cuts.
“I hit a really hard reset at the beginning of this week and said to my caddie James (Edmonston) – he helped me out a lot with that and he’s like, ‘Look, you just need to keep doing your thing, good golf is right around the corner.’ I know it’s weird saying that when you win, six, seven weeks ago, but it’s just one of those things to try to kind of get that consistency part, I feel like I need to be a little easier on myself and just keep playing my golf,” he said. “Once you get a taste of (winning), you want to get back there as soon as possible, and I feel like I’ve been getting in my own way a little bit.”
Asked if he would treat himself to one of Muirfield’s trademark milkshakes after his strong start, Riley said he’d hold off because it would keep him up all night and he’s got an early wake-up call for his 8:12 a.m. tee time. “If tomorrow goes well I’ll probably have to have one,” he said.
The Golden Bear and the color yellow are represented well.
DUBLIN, Ohio — The Golden Bear and the color yellow are represented well at the merchandise tent at the Memorial and main pro shop at Muirfield Village Golf Club.
The homage to Jack Nicklaus’s nickname and the color shirt he wore in the final round of the 1986 Masters as a gesture to a friend is fitting. After all, this is Jack’s Place, home to the PGA Tour’s annual stomp in his childhood stomping grounds since 1976 and a designated event for the first time this week.
The field is stacked with seven of the top 10 and 28 of the top 35 in the world. And the merchandise tent is stacked with hats, t-shirts and even hoodies. Perhaps the most controversial item is an item from Camp David, which is selling a sweatshirt emblazoned “the MT.” That may be the first time anyone has called the Memorial Tournament by that nickname.
Here’s a look at the gear on sale this week at Jack’s Place.
DUBLIN, Ohio – Swing instructor Sean Foley likes to say that the relationship between PGA Tour pros and their coaches should be measured in dog years.
That’s because when Tour pros hit a slump they typically point fingers at either their caddie or their coach.
“You can’t change your wife,” Foley joked.
Billy Horschel returns to Muirfield Village Golf Club this week as the defending champion, but his game has soured since he claimed his seventh PGA Tour at the Memorial last June. Horschel didn’t try to sugarcoat it when asked to assess his play during a pre-tournament press conference on Wednesday.
“The season’s been pretty bad, pretty abysmal, to tell you the truth,” said Horschel, who entered the week No. 108 in the FedEx Cup standings, with only the top 70 advancing to the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and reconnected with caddie Micah Fugitt earlier this month.
Billy Horschel walks the ninth fairway with his caddie Micah Fugitt during a practice round ahead of the 2023 Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club. (Photo: Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch)
But it has only sent the 36-year-old Horschel, who played on his first U.S. Presidents Cup team last fall, back to the drawing board with his longtime coach, Todd Anderson. The duo is approaching 15 years of working together, which is a lot of dog years.
In the fall of 2008, Horschel was on the verge of graduating from the University of Florida, where coach Buddy Alexander had helped turn him into an All-American talent. But Alexander also knew that Horschel would need someone to look after him on a full-time basis once Horschel turned pro. He recommended three potential coaches for Horschel to visit.
“I was the first one that he came to see, and he didn’t go see the other two, and we’ve been working ever since,” Anderson said.
In addition to the Memorial last year, Horschel has won a World Golf Championship, a Tour Championship and FedEx Cup (2014), and the BMW Championship, the flagship event of the DP World Tour. Horschel demands a lot of himself and those on his team, and he and Anderson, who he calls one of his best friends and a mentor, have developed a trust and confidence that have made their relationship thrive.
“He takes care of me like I’m a family member,” Anderson said. “He’ll pick you up on the way to the course, whatever it is. If he hears I have to take a shuttle to the course, he’ll say, ‘No, I’ll just come by and get you.’ It might be a mile or two out of his way, but he’s going to drive by and pick you up so you don’t have to take the shuttle in.
“If he goes to a major and rents a house, I’m always going to have a room there if I want it. If we’re going to the British Open, we’re flying together, I’m flying first class with him, and I’ve worked with I don’t know how many Tour players over the years, they’re not all like that. In fact, most of them aren’t like that.
“The other thing is, I don’t know if you want to print this or not – we have an agreement at the end of the year, he’s always given me a bonus every year I’ve worked with him, and I can’t say that for hardly any other Tour player I’ve worked with.”
But the relationship has been put to the test of late. This off-season, Horschel and Anderson attempted to make some changes to his swing that backfired. After missing the cut at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Horschel and Anderson and the rest of his team engaged in a lively 45-minute discussion about the state of his game in the parking lot. When he got back to his hotel, Horschel’s frustration boiled over.
“I’m not a sappy guy,” Horschel said. “But I broke down and I cried a little bit.”
He and Anderson have diagnosed the problem and they’ve seen some encouraging signs.
“It’s getting closer, but it’s still a little bit of a challenge and it’s just some bad habits I’ve gotten into that we’re just trying to work out of,” Horschel said.
During the course of their 15-year relationship, Anderson conceded there have been rough patches for Horschel before, but they’ve always worked through them. He’s a big believer in staying the course.
“I think where a lot of players make mistakes is that they jump around from coach to coach. You look at the best players in the world, they don’t change coaches,” Anderson said, noting World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler has worked with the same coach (Randy Smith) since childhood as has Rory McIlroy (Michael Bannon) while Justin Thomas has had his dad as his coach his entire career.
“I think there’s a certain trust and chemistry that has to be established. I think that’s where a lot of these young players that jump around to different coaches, they lose that continuity,” Anderson said. “If you start jumping around to a bunch of different coaches and they start messing up the foundation that’s made you great, that’s when you really get lost, when you lose the foundation of who you are as a player. Billy’s always stuck with me and always kind of believed in the process that we would go through to try to get him back on track.”
And they’ll search for that track together with dogged determination.
Jack’s Place traditionally attracts a star-studded field but being elevated to a designated event hasn’t hurt.
DUBLIN, Ohio – Jack Nicklaus called the field at this week’s Memorial Tournament “probably as good a field as we’ve ever had.”
“They’re all here,” he said on Tuesday in a press conference ahead of the tournament he hosts at Muirfield Village Golf Club, the club he built and that has played host to an annual PGA Tour stop since 1976.
Jack’s Place traditionally attracts a star-studded field regardless of status but being elevated to a designated event with a $20 million purse hasn’t hurt the 120-man field. Indeed, seven of the top 10 in the Official World Golf Ranking and 38 of the top 50 are in the field as well as 25 of the top 30 in the FedEx Cup standings and 22 of the 27 players that have won on Tour this season.
He added, “For all intents and purposes all the top players in the world are here.”
But those impressive figures don’t include two of the four reigning major champions — British Open winner Cameron Smith and PGA Championship winner Brooks Koepka — and regular participants such as Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and 2018 winner Bryson DeChambeau.
Nicklaus said he sent a congratulatory note to Koepka after he won the PGA two weeks ago at Oak Hill, where he won the Wanamaker Trophy in 1980. Nicklaus has tried his best to stay out of the confrontation between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, but he has an opinion on most every subject and never has been too shy to tell anyone what he really thinks.
“There were certain players that it was probably the right thing for,” Nicklaus said of joining LIV. “It probably spurred the PGA Tour, I don’t think there’s any question about that, either, to move it to greater heights. But it wasn’t for me, it wasn’t for what my legacy was. Obviously, I pretty much started what the Tour is out here.”
Golfers wait to tee off during a practice round for the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club. (Photo: Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch)
Asked if he was disappointed not to have the reigning major winners in the field this week, he said, “I don’t even consider those guys part of the game anymore. I don’t mean that in a nasty way. This is a PGA Tour event and we have the best field we can possibly have for a PGA Tour event for those who are eligible to be here. The other guys made a choice of what they did and where they’ve gone and we don’t even talk about it.”
Nicklaus added that six or seven LIV players are members of the Bears Club, the private club he built in South Florida, and that all of the players have had their membership renewed and remain active at the club.
“It’s just where they chose to play golf,” Nicklaus said. “I wish them all well.”
Asked if he would permit LIV players to return to compete in the Memorial in future years, he said, “It’s not up to me.” He continued: “I don’t know if I’d let them back or not. They made a choice about what they want to do and that’s what the rules are.”
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Nicklaus played in an era where professional golf for most of the players was a subsistence living. He still remembers earning $33.33 for his first check at the 1962 Los Angeles Open for finishing 50th.
“The first year I played you made the cut — 70 players made the cut, but they only paid 50. And I made money in every tournament I played in my first year. And I had a lot of ’em that I just made the cut,” he recalled. “I shot 64 in the last round in Pensacola to make last money. I think I shot 65 last round in Palm Springs to make maybe last money or close to it. You know, in those days to pick up $250, which is what we were making when we would just make the cut, you know, you wanted that $250. That took care of another week or two of playing golf.”
Was there ever a point where he looked at the money the pros are making today and thought it was staggering?
“I look at it every day, are you kidding me?” he said. “It is staggering.”
But for Nicklaus, winning was the ultimate prize.
“I was all about how good I could be in a sport and money just took care of itself,” he explained. “Some guys, they might not even care about playing golf, they’re just good at it. It’s a means to an end for them. If that’s what it is, that’s fine. Guys who have stayed for the most part are guys that play the game of golf for the game of golf and for the sport of it and the competition. To me, that’s what the thing is all about. Are they getting rewarded for that? Absolutely, they are, I think that’s great. We never made any money playing golf. What’s my lifetime earnings on the regular tour, $5 million?”
Nicklaus guessed his retirement fund from the PGA Tour was $237,000 and that Tiger Woods’s would be $100 million.
“We had to play golf to make a name to go make a living. If I had been playing today would I be doing golf course design, would I be doing other things?” Nicklaus mused. “These guys are really making a fantastic living and setting up their families for a lifetime by really playing the game well.”
McIlroy has back-to-back top 20s at the Memorial, and Schauffele hasn’t finished outside the top 20 since Bay Hill.
After a week in the Lone Star State, the PGA Tour is in Dublin, Ohio, for the 2023 Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village.
The field is loaded and features the top five players in the Official World Golf Ranking: Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele.
Scheffler enters as the betting favorite at +600 followed by Rahm at +750 and Cantlay — who’s a two-time Memorial champion — at +1000.
Billy Horschel is the defending champion thanks to his four-shot win over Aaron Wise last season.
There are a few players taking the week off, including Tony Finau and Max Homa. Players are allowed to miss one designated event this season.
Here are five prop bets and position plays for the 2023 Memorial Tournament.
