I had a chance to watch a little bit of the RBC Heritage tournament on tv Friday. The blustery wind there reminded me of the APBA All-time Greats (ATG) tournament I have in progress. The first ATG round was played at Yatch Club (Harbour Town) with blustery wind and soft course conditions.
I thought it would be interesting to see how the holes at Harbour Town played for today’s pros vs. the ATG group at Yatch Club under similar conditions. After comparing RBC Heritage’s second round results with my ATG’s first round, the similarities are striking with one major difference.
I played all 144 ATG golfers at Yatch Club, while 130 pros finished Round 2 at Harbour Town. Both courses are par 71. The ATG’s shot an average score of 72.63, while the pros at Harbour Town fared slightly worse at 73.16.
The three hardest holes at Harbour Town that day (14, 18, and 8) were ranked 3, 4, and 2 in terms of difficulty at Yatch Club. These are highlighted in red in the table below.
The three easiest holes at Harbour Town for Round 2 (2, 5, and 13) ranked 18, 17, and 11 at Yatch Club. These are highlighted in green. Ten holes had average scores within +/- 0.10 stroke of its counterpart. These are marked with an asterisk (*).
The major exception is hole #4 (par 3), which played much easier at Harbour Town with an average score of 3.04. At Yatch Club, the results were more than a half stroke higher at 3.56. This is shown in purple.
Some of this might be explained by the way APBA scales its greens, which can make real-life small greens play even smaller in the Master Game. Another factor is that the pin location for the ATG group (#3) was within one diagonal of water, making it risky to pin-seek even with a good angle. That contributed to lots of two-putts, See the image below.
This one hole accounted for 32 of 112 penalty strokes for the ATG group. By comparison, tough hole #14, also a par 3 with water running the length of its green, produced only 14 penalty strokes. Its pin placement was somewhat more forgiving, being two squares away from water but on the very edge of the green. See below.
