Tour Guide: Memorial Park Changes

Club TFE’s Tour Guide takes a trip to Houston this week for some reporting on how changes to the 17th at Memorial Park might not work exactly as intended. Plus thoughts on Memorial Park as a tournament venue, why Scottie Scheffler (shocker) is a horse for this course, and a look back at an incredible holed pitch shot from the Valspar.

Bring on the Backboards?

By Brendan Porath

This week’s PGA Tour event presents one of the rare instances in which the best players in the world tee it up at a course that’s not closed off to the public or at some resort or TPC charging extravagant triple-digit green fees. The absolute most a Houston resident will pay to play the Tom Doak-renovated Memorial Park Golf Course is $38 on a weekend morning. Seniors play it for $15. The tee sheet is jammed. There is a walk-up list that opens at 6:30 a.m., and there are usually 35 people waiting to sign up. Locals help at the course—not just for free golf, but for the increased chance to get on the tee sheet, which has two times reserved for volunteers. So it is a booming civic treasure.

But Memorial Park also needs to walk the line between civic treasure and tournament host. It is well funded, with the Astros and Cranes pouring money into buildouts and promo, and now it has an improved spot on the schedule. It also comes with a new 17th hole, one that was altered in the hope that more pros would attempt to drive it near or onto the green.

In the preceding Houston Open here in the fall of 2022, many players simply popped a high-lofted iron out to the middle of the fairway, about 200 to 215 yards out, and then hit another short iron or wedge into the green. Eventual winner Tony Finau, boasting as much pop in the bat as anyone on tour, never thought of going for the green. On Sunday, he hit his tee shot 202 yards and his approach 150 yards. Here’s the scatter plot from last year:

Shotlink data from 2023, showing zero attempts made to drive the green at 17; black dots are bogey or worse, blue dots are pars, red dots birdies (PGA Tour)

So what did they change? They added some 25 yards to the hole and created a larger landing zone in front of the green to entice more of the pros to go for it on this penultimate hole. The green was pushed back to an area where a tree once lingered in the background. There is no real rough around the green, but there are two new bunkers on the left for those trying to send one from the tee on a less risky line. The water still comes into play on multiple sides.

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By one account from the course, Doak was out there regularly during the summer, on site for shaping and overseeing the update to the hole. They closed it at the end of June and reopened the hole in September. It has been closed for the last six or seven weeks to bring the green along as the tournament approached. Players have been warned about the changes and that the green is firmer than the others in pre-tournament materials.

The Tour sent this memo informing players of changes to 17, including the likely increased relative firmness compared to other greens on the property (Fried Egg Golf)

According to one regular at the course, the second shot is now more difficult for the regular weekender. An approach from the layup zone left must now find a narrower green, one that is still quite new and firm as noted above, and balls can bound into the water that creeps in behind the green from the right.

But the elite tour pro does not play a game with which the weekender is familiar, and often does not play a course setup familiar to the regular muni player, either. You see, the 17th at Memorial Park, among the best public-golf values in the country, has been Tour-ified for this week’s Houston Open. The pros may now be more enticed to go for this drivable par-4 with an increased landing zone in front… but there will also be the warm embrace of a trademark PGA Tour backboard behind this firm green and running some 50 yards up the fairway. Here’s testimony from someone intimately familiar with daily play at the course and the preparations for the PGA Tour event: “Doak redid the hole this summer to make guys go for it more, but these bleachers are unreal. Guys will just be blasting it into them.”

Of course, the best in the world might run a sweet cut up into the front of the green, but there’s just as much potential that they’ll start shipping it into the backboard the PGA Tour has set up all around the newly redesigned hole. A backboard may not be exactly what was intended by the architect, but this is the line every course walks when it welcomes the chase for the FedEx Cup to town. It’s a piece of design work and tour setup worth watching this weekend.

A Proper Test for All Golfers

By Joseph LaMagna

Outside of the major championships, Memorial Park is one of the best golf courses remaining on the 2024 PGA Tour schedule. A par 70 measuring over 7,400 yards on the official scorecard, the Houston Open strikes the right balance between challenging professional golfers and providing a fun experience for the tens of thousands of golfers who play the publicly-accessible Memorial Park each year.

Memorial Park is a creative design, full of variety and holes with distinct character. Walking around this golf course feels quite different than walking around somewhere like Bay Hill where each hole looks a heck of a lot like the previous. A key reason I strongly endorse Memorial Park is that the golf course features large greens with tight runoff areas, one of the best characteristics for testing professional golfers. The longer and firmer the golf course plays, the more it tests pro golfers’ ability to control the ball on the ground, an increasingly rare phenomenon outside of courses like Augusta National.

I don’t want to overstate the challenge imposed by this golf course; you can shoot a pretty low score out there. Previous winners of this tournament have shot between -10 and -16, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this week’s winner go lower. There are no heavy penalties associated with wide misses off the tee at Memorial Park. It’s a course that allows pro golfers to be aggressive with driver off the tee without too much consequence for errancy on the majority of holes. As much as people might like to see more carnage off the tee, the golf course still examines pro golfers’ skills in other areas while remaining playable for the 10-handicapper, who may not lose a golf ball the entire round. The appeal of this golf course is its variety and the importance of controlling shots into and around the greens.

I think the sixth hole flies under the radar, but it is a strong representation of the simplicity and challenge of Memorial Park. Winding gently to the left, the 443-yard par 4 has tree trouble down the left side of the hole and features a severe runoff area around the left side of the green. With ample room off the tee, players won’t be intimidated by the tee shot, but missing the green left on the approach shot presents a serious challenge, especially to left pin locations.

Dispersion at Memorial Park's 6th hole in 2023 (PGA Tour)

The sixth hole is kind of Memorial Park in a nutshell: simple, accommodating of high handicappers, and offering a sufficient mix of challenge and scorability for the best players in the world.

I’m not going out on a limb here, but this is an excellent golf course for world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. The course setup allows Scheffler’s world-class approach play and short game to shine, and this is the type of golf course that elevates talent to the top of the leaderboard. Though the field isn’t particularly strong, I’d be surprised if a longshot finds himself atop the leaderboard late on Sunday afternoon. Scheffler shares the course record (62) here and has finished in the top 10 in each of the previous two editions of this tournament. He has a strong chance of winning his third straight start on the PGA Tour this week in his home state.

One Shot From Last Week

By Will Knights

Congrats to Peppy Peter, but we aren’t going to talk about him today.

On Sunday at the Valspar, Carl Yuan chipped in not once, not twice, but three times. I would argue that two of them were pretty lucky, but the first hole out was a thing of beauty.

Dripping it in for a chip-in eagle!@CarlYuanGolf | @ValsparChamp pic.twitter.com/Bn84igJTq3

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) March 24, 2024

I pride myself in my short game, but this kind of 30-yard pitch shot is easily one of my least favorites. Needing to elevate the ball quickly to a green that is running away from him, Yuan clips this ball perfectly so that it grabs and then releases down the slope. The obvious difficulty in the shot is that he has to open the clubface and swing very hard on a rather short shot. This opens the door to hitting the ball thin or fat, something that is easier to avoid if you’re attempting a low shot along the ground. It takes a ton of practice to have that kind of speed and hit a shot with that kind of precision.