Tour Guide: Talking Twin Cities

Welcome to this week’s edition of Tour Guide! The week after a major always feels a bit like a hangover on the PGA Tour, and this week’s event in Minnesota certainly doesn’t break that particular trend. But we also get the Senior Open at Carnoustie, which at the very least is another chance to see both links golf on television AND some players getting blown out to sea.

Let’s dive in!

From Troon to This?

By Joseph LaMagna

There’s no sugarcoating it: the 3M Open stinks. It’s an especially stark contrast to what we just witnessed at Royal Troon, so much so that it is virtually an entirely different sport. Look, I’m not swerving out of my way to pop the PGA Tour. I am an ardent defender of some TPC venues, like TPC Sawgrass (unsurprisingly) and others like TPC Scottsdale and TPC San Antonio. However, TPC Twin Cities is a very rough golf course to watch. It’s long, there’s water on almost every hole, and it features a closing stretch with opportunities for both birdies and bogeys which people seem to like. That’s about all there is to it.

In my opinion, TPC Twin Cities is basically a less demanding version of Bay Hill that also features softer playing conditions, a presumably uncontroversial characterization given Arnold Palmer’s role in the design of both courses. Fortunately the forecast calls for some wind, which would drastically elevate the entertainment value of this golf tournament should the wind materialize. One thing worth watching, though, is a player having one of the most maddening and statistically anomalous seasons on the PGA Tour.

Keith Mitchell’s year is truly insane. There are only two players who rank in both the top 10 in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee and Strokes Gained: Approach: Scottie Scheffler and Keith Mitchell. Mitchell’s short game and putting are just so bad that he can hardly sniff a top-10 finish. He’s ranked 126th in Strokes Gained: Around the Green and 159th in Strokes Gained: Putting. With half-decent play on and around the greens, Mitchell would be a steady force on tour with status in all tournaments. He’d model a little bit like Corey Conners, who rarely wins golf tournaments but consistently racks up top 20s. Instead, Mitchell is ranked 76th in the FedEx Cup standings with no finishes better than T-9, and he’ll need to make a significant leap in the next two events to have a chance at cracking the top 50, which would secure a spot in signature events next season.

The 3M Open is a prime opportunity for him to do exactly that. The golf course is long and suits Mitchell’s skill set nicely. In his last two appearances in Blaine, he finished T-5 and solo fifth. With much improved iron play compared to prior seasons, Mitchell is on the short list of players to keep an eye on this week. If he doesn’t take advantage of this opportunity, it’ll be hard for Mitchell to not feel like he had by far the best ball-striking season of his career without much to show for it.

Memory Lane: 2023 Senior Open Championship

By Will Knights

In doing research for this Tour Guide section I came across what can only be described as one of the great travesties of the digital age: the final round of the 2023 Senior Open Championship is not on YouTube. That may sound like hyperbole, but for those of us who watched it live, the final day at Royal Porthcawl will go down as one of the more memorable golf-watching experiences of our time. With winds whipping along the Porthcawl coast, the senior tour fellas got their britches blown off by Mother Nature, with the average score for the final round finishing at over 78.5. 78.5!

The only explanation for YouTube’s blatant lack of respect for the olds is that the platform is largely used by the youths. For our purposes we’ll define youths as anyone ineligible for the Champions Tour. Anyway, there are two main clips from that final day that are worth your time. The first recaps Alex Cejka’s winning moments and the second covers the playoff. Here are a few moments in particular for you to review.

4. “Do you play more wind or do you play more slope?” Very rarely is the wind strong enough to impact a putt, but it sure was at Royal Porthcawl last year. Alex Cejka, putting from 15 feet away, played only the wind on this putt and was able to find a rare birdie.

3. Hitting a pitch shot hard enough to bear through this wind is incredibly impressive, let alone while having to open the face this much just to clip the ball cleanly.

2. To get into the playoff, this tap-in par was much more difficult than you would think a one-foot putt could be.

1. Cejka’s first tee shot of the playoff went right down the middle, if not the left side of the fairway, but the people on the tee all pointed right as soon as it was struck.

That amount of wind will make anyone look foolish.

We likely won’t get conditions anywhere near this dramatic this weekend, but we can only hope. See how you can catch all the coverage from Carnoustie here.

Tour Guide is a weekly Club TFE feature looking at the world of pro golf, focusing on course details, players to watch, swing analysis, and the occasional light-hearted romp through golf history. (header photo courtesy 3M Open on X/Twitter)