The final Major event of the year, the PGA Championship, starts on August 13th. Tiger, Phil and the rest of the Tour’s top players will use this upcoming week to prep and get ready for the Championship by playing in the Bridgestone Invitational in my home state of Ohio. After that it’s onward to the Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minnesota for the start of the PGA Championship.
This will be the 91st PGA Championship but only the second time at Hazeltine. The course was built by the famous Robert Trent Jones in 1962. Hazeltine will play just over 7,600 yards long for the Championship. The layout of the course has narrow fairways over rolling hills. It’s also known for having small greens and, to make matters worse, half of the holes have a water hazard of some sort.
The last time the PGA Championship was played at Hazeltine was back in 2002. That was the year, you may recall, that Rich Beem narrowly edged out Tiger Woods as the latter tried to make a late comeback with a series of birdies to close out his round. Since that event several changes have been made to the course. It is now 300 yards longer and several bunkers have been added and tee boxes have been moved.
This year’s field is packed full of golf superstars with 100 out of the 101 topped ranked players in the world planning to attend. As always, I’m pulling for Tiger because I’m a total front-runner when it comes to picking the winner. I’ve basically been a terrible prognosticator this season so take my pick with a grain of salt.