This is the first of two posts describing the setup of my 2023 PGA Championship replay. In this one, I cover the usual factors pertaining to Day Conditions as well as some of the specific challenges of playing Acorn Hill (Oak Hill Country Club – East Course).
The actual tournament took place May 18 – 21, 2023 in Pittsford, NY. Oak Hill has hosted a number of prestigious events to include the U.S. Open (1956, 1968, 1989), the PGA Championship (1980, 2003, 2013), the U.S. Senior Open (1984), a Ryder Cup (1995), the Senior PGA Championship (2008, 2019), and U.S. Amateur Championship (1949, 1998).
More on its design and history can be found on the PGA site and on its Wiki page. The latter also provides links to other major championships and many statistics for this event, including: information on the field, how players qualified, and top 10 leaderboard standings for each round.
Actual Course Layout
According to the USGA rating system, the Oak Hill East Course, from the Championship tees, plays to a course rating of 77.3 and slope rating of 153. As a 7394-yard par 70, the East Course is a difficult test. The scorecard from the 2023 PGA Championship is provided below:
Off the Tee
As the name Oak Hill suggests, Acorn Hill (APBA’s rendition) features many trees along its fairways and a stream that meanders across the property bringing water into play on holes 1, 6, 7, 10, 11, and 13. In addition, Out of Bounds (OB) markers are present on holes 4, 5, 8, 9, and 14.
Sand traps protect every green, and Acorn Hill includes deep greenside bunkers on holes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 15, with hole 2 also having deep fairway bunkers.
What makes the course the most challenging is its narrow fairways, which at 275 yards from the tee, measure on average about 22 yards wide. Using a driver is a risky proposition in that good drives typically move 15 yards left or right of the line of play on good shots. A driver’s total dispersion of 30 yards is more than the 22-yard average width of the fairways on par 4 and par 5 holes. For comparison, Magnolia’s fairways have an average width of about 33 yards at 275 yards off the tee. With aiming, good drives at Magnolia will find the fairway most of the time. Not so at Acorn Hill.
To make things worse, the designer has added a course rule stating that the maximum club played from the rough is a 7-iron and that two-thirds of the time (after an extra dice roll resulting in 11 – 46) the player must drop down six lines before the scramble adjustment is applied to get the final lie roll result. Thus, on long par 4’s only the longest hitters with a favorable lie roll from the rough can reach the green with a 7-iron. I expect layups to be common on these holes.
Finally, the many trees that line most fairways mean a shot just off the fairway stands a good chance of either being in the trees or being blocked by them. On holes 4, 7, and 9 a tree extends to within 5 yards of the centerline. In addition, trees on the insides of doglegs greatly increase the probability of being blocked on some holes. Taken together, these factors further reduce the player’s chance of hitting the green in regulation.
One remedy is to give up the distance off the tee on the longer par 4 holes and drop back to a 3- or 4-Wood off the tee, which typically moves 10 yards left or right on good shots. At least from the fairway, most players have a chance of hitting the green with another fairway wood or long iron.
Hitting Greens in Regulation (GIRs)
Actual qualifiers are defined as the players that played all 4 rounds of the actual event. For this tournament that number is 76; the field started at 156. The actual qualifiers hit 47% of the fairways and 60.5% of the greens.
As is my practice for setting up a replay on a course I’ve not played much previously, I run a little mini-event with different types of players. I include a sample of the players in the current year PGA card set, a few All-Time Greats (ATGs), and few of the ladies from the current LPGA card set. I then select a variety of wind, roll, and pin placement options.
For my 32-player sample set, the players hit the Acorn Hill fairways 49.6% of the time, yet only hit the greens in regulation 50.9% of the time. The weak showing in GIRs from the sample group suggests hitting 60% of the greens for the replay competitors will be very hard to accomplish, especially with the 7I restriction and scramble adjustment for balls in the rough.
Putting
Acorn Hill course board rules also increase putting difficulty by requiring putting results to be read one line below the PRN (1 thru 31) for all putts on holes 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 14, 16, 17, and 18. The exception is on hole 13, where the results are read one line above the PRN (1 thru 31).
The actual qualifiers averaged 29.2 putts per round. Research from previous replay tournaments I’ve done using the Major Championship Putting boards has shown that they add about 2 strokes per round and result in 30 or more putts per round on average.
Since this actual event averaged fewer than 30 putts per round and given that putting is already made harder by the course board rules described above, I tested the use of the Regular Putting boards with the sample group. They averaged 29 putts per round, which I believe supports the use of Regular Putting boards for this replay.
To increase putting difficulty a bit more, pin locations were chosen by using an algorithm that assigned difficulty points based on hole locations from off the centerline (CL). A summary of the algorithm and its results are shown below:
Notice that for Acorn Hill there isn’t a great deal of difference in difficulty for the six pin locations on this course. The same algorithm was used to select pin locations in the setup for the 2022 Women’s PGA Championship replay at Metro DC, which had more variation.
Replay Course Layout
With pin locations set, the next thing was to determine hole distances. As shown below, APBA’s rendering of course distances closely match the PGA Championship layout, except for hole 13 which played 28 yards longer during the actual event. The basic published Acorn Hill course distances for each hole also closely match the average distances associated with the 4 pin placements selected. Given the minor difference among course setups, the replay will use the distances associated with pin locations 1, 2, 3, and 5.
The Weather and Course Conditions
The actual event was played with daily high temperatures ranging from 63º F on Thursday to 73º F on Sunday. A light rain rolled in on Friday, and continued Saturday. Thus, the roll conditions for the replay are as follows:
- Day 1: Normal [No fairway or green roll adjustments]
- Day 2: Normal [No fairway or green roll adjustments]
- Day 3: Soft [Fairway roll (-5 yards) / green roll (no adjustment)]
- Day 4: Normal [No fairway or green roll adjustments]
Ranging from 6 – 9 mph, the winds were generally calm for all four days. The wind direction started the tournament coming from the north, shifted around to come from the southwest on Friday, and then to the west for the weekend.
APBA uses a prevailing and quartering wind system for Acorn Hill. The rules for how to apply them are on the course boards and demonstrated in this Game Caddie video. Given the course layout and hole notes found on the course boards, the wind conditions in effect for the tournament are as follows:
- Day 1: Calm – Type C
- Day 2: Calm – Type B
- Day 3: Calm – Type A
- Day 4: Calm – Type A
Overall Scoring Difficulty
As mentioned, the actual field started with 156 players on Thursday and was cut down to 76 players for the weekend. (The cut line was +5.) For the replay, I will use the 70 carded players (out of 80) that came with the 2023 set who actually played in the tournament. All 70 players will make the cut in the replay.
Of the actual qualifiers that played all 4 rounds, only 11 players broke par. The total field’s average for the tournament was 72.7 strokes. The actual qualifiers averaged 71.4 strokes.
Interestingly, my mini-event of 32 players with varying conditions resulted in an average score of 72.9 strokes, only 0.2 strokes higher than the actual field. It remains to be seen what scores the 70 replay players will produce under the conditions and setup just described, but as they say, “That’s why we play the game.”
What’s Next?
The next post summarizes the actual overall tournament results for the field and for selected players. I will also examine storylines of players who made this tournament worthy of a replay–at least in my opinion. I’ll cover the LIV golfers and their performances in the event, the PGA Tour’s top players’ performances, and the achievements of a club pro, Mike Block, who competed admirably throughout the tournament.
Scott, thanks for the detailed explanation ! Can’t wait to read about the tournament