In the presumably posh player’s locker room located within
the Sydney Opera House-style clubhouse at Liberty National Golf Club, host of
last week’s PGA Tour Playoffs opener The Barclays, complaints about the course occurred
with the same regularity as outbreaks of Swine Flu on college campuses as fall
semesters began across the country according to various reports filed from
Jersey City throughout the course of the tournament.
Tiger Woods seemed to hint at Liberty’s ridiculousness by implying that the course was still an arduous test despite the fact that he and his peers played from the ladies tees during Saturday’s round, and when asked what he thought about the layout prior to the event, Woods smugly replied, “It’s interesting.”
But love it or hate it, Liberty National, which cost owner and developer Paul Fireman a reported $150 million to construct, delivered in my opinion the most compelling golf tournament of the year and created a significant buzz about the ultra-private club that continues to hum below the surface like an agitated pack of ground bees.
While 99.9 percent of his press conferences fall somewhere between Andy Reid and Bill Belichick on the mundane and monotone scale, Tim Finchem was quite Nostradamic before the PGA Tour's best teed off when he said, "What we are looking for is an outstanding competitive format, something that creates excitement, and here again you just don't know until you have some history on a golf course how it's going to play out competitively.
"But we know the visuals are going to be great, and if the players oblige as they normally do by giving us a good, exciting finish on Sunday, that will be positive."
Check and Check.
Unheralded Heath Slocum made one of the more improbable putts of the 2009 season to seal a career-defining victory over the likes of Ernie Els, Steve Stricker, Padraig Harrington and Woods. His 20-foot roll looked even more superhuman after one of the game's most clutch putters of all-time pushed a six-footer on the same green just minutes prior to Slocum's arrival.
For the men who put such effort, time and money into creating a course that will probably lose money in the long run, listening to or reading anonymous reports about players railing on their dream project must have been disheartening (even if they're all wealthy and wouldn't lose sleep over it). Woods for instance came across as a dinner guest who unjustifiably criticizes the cook before he samples the meal. But we can't remove Tiger from his place at the table because he is the one who pays for the groceries.
One of the most insightful comments came from someone posting on the message board at Golf.com.
"Oh and one more thing," the poster wrote. "I didn't think the course at Liberty National looked so bad on TV, maybe in person it was an eyesore, but CBS certainly didn't present it that way in their coverage.
"For the average golf fan that is used to playing munis and public courses that place looked fantastic. Please try to keep some perspective when you're talking about these places as 99.9 percent of the viewers will most likely never have a chance to play some place as nice as these so called "bad" PGA Tour courses."
Designers Tom Kite and Bob Cupp could sense the storm approaching, both literally and figuratively as they addressed the media before the tournament as a patch of bad weather approached the New York area.
"Our goal is to stay out of the political game, build the best golf course we could to challenge the best players, put the best agronomic conditions in place that we could and let the players come up here and tell us how good it is or how bad it is," said Kite.
Some players had good things to say, including Phil Mickelson, who is a member. Mickelson said he liked the varying degrees of difficulty present throughout the course.
"The hard holes here are ridiculously hard," Mickelson said after his first round. And they easy holes are pretty easy, and because of that, we are going to see lots of birdies and bogeys, which is exactly what happened in my round."
Padraig Harrington said it deserves to host a major championship.
Personally I liked Ernie Els' take on Liberty National, and thought it was a fair assessment.
"It's a great setting, Els said of the course that features striking views of the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the New York City skyline. "You couldn't ask for a better clubhouse. The range is great. Even the golf course is in great shape. It's just some of the greens we don't agree on with the designers. They can design what they want. As I say, it's a little different but I have no problem with the golf course."
The course may never achieve a reputation that equals its
price tag, but for one week it produced a great deal of debate and a fantastic
golf tournament. Players like Geoff Ogilvy, Sergio Garcia and Woods need to seriously
start taking into account how the average golfer will react when he hears players
of their stature criticize Hazeltine, Augusta or even Liberty National.
"I'm not building golf courses for the sake of golf courses," Fireman, who made his fortune as the chief executive of Reebok, said in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article. "We've got enough of them. What I want to do here is build another Augusta...I want to produce a Rembrandt."
I don't think anyone is ready to put Liberty National into the class of Augusta National, but for a golf course built on top of a toxic waste dump in New Jersey it's probably not a bad place to spend an afternoon.