Tour Guide: Up in Michigan

Tour Guide heads to the Motor City, home of the Lions (good), Tigers (not good), Red Wings (not bad but just missed playoffs), and Pistons (abject disaster). For this week’s Tour Guide, we tackle the ins and outs of Detroit Golf Club and take a trip down Memory Lane to a historic moment in golf television at Southeast Michigan’s previous long-running PGA Tour stop: the Buick Open.

Talking Drivers & Detroit Golf Club

By Joseph LaMagna

One of my dumbest ideas for professional golf is that, in an effort to combat distance gains, there should be a limit on the number of times each golfer can hit driver each round. Maybe you’re restricted to hitting driver a maximum of, say, four times per round, or the limit could change based on the golf course. The benefits are fairly obvious: 460-yard par 4s would regain their teeth, and it’d be fun to watch players strategize about when to pull driver. It’d be an added dimension for a game that’s evolved towards simplicity. The flip side is that players would probably hate this idea and prevent its implementation, and even if that wasn’t an obstacle it wouldn’t be the easiest rule to enforce. It’s not a serious suggestion, but if there were ever a week to experiment, it’d be at this week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic.

Detroit Golf Club, a Donald Ross design built in the early 1900s, is routinely torn apart by the PGA Tour players who make the trek up to Michigan. Since the event’s debut in 2019, the winning score has been -23 or lower in four of the five tournaments. With Tuesday’s storm and potential for more rain later in the week, Detroit Golf Club will be soft yet again this year. Combine soft conditions with a flat golf course that isn’t well-positioned to defend itself against the modern game, and you’re going to get another week of super low scores. That’s what’s on tap in Michigan.

The recipe for success at this golf course is very straightforward, in my opinion. With little exception, be aggressive off the tee and choose targets on tee shots that maximize your chance of finding the fairway. Putting well will also take on elevated importance this week.

One of the course’s few defenses: the trees, which can obstruct lines of play if players miss in the wrong spot off the tee. Accordingly, there are some tee shots where players need to be conscious of the trees, but in general I’d be very aggressive on tee shots here. The fairways are pretty wide and lined only with trees and rough, with no other real hazards to navigate. Thus, wide misses tend not to be penalized too heavily. Given the setup of the golf course, you can let it rip off the tee, especially when conditions are soft.

The ShotLink plot that I find most representative of Detroit Golf Club is from the eighth hole of last year’s first round, which I filtered to show just bogeys and birdies.

As you can see in the plot above, players who pushed it farther down the left side were rewarded with a plethora of birdie chances. This is the type of hole where some players may talk themselves into the “smart” play of laying back off the tee, but this is very rarely a smart play. There’s plenty of room to push a shot 280+ yards on this hole, and you can recover from a miss on this tee shot. As acceptance of data-backed strategies continues to grow on the PGA Tour, more and more golfers embrace this style of play. Many other plots at Detroit Golf Club look similar to the plot above, where aggression is rewarded with a simple approach shot and a strong chance at birdie.

This week, I’d expect a good driver of the golf ball who can also putt to win. If you’re not long off the tee, you’d better be strong with your wedge and putter. The greens at Detroit Golf Club can be tricky from certain spots and players are going to have a bunch of birdie looks, so you can expect more of a putting contest this week than many weeks on tour.

Perhaps the player I’m most interested in watching this week is Will Zalatoris. Since returning to the PGA Tour from injury last year, he’s lost an appreciable amount of ball speed. For reference, he ranked 15th on Tour in 2021-22 at 181 mph. This year, Will is 69th on tour at 176 mph. He’ll likely keep gaining ball speed as his recovery progresses, but as of right now he’s not where he used to be. Zalatoris has also struggled mightily on the greens this season, ranking 145th on tour in Strokes Gained: Putting. I don’t want to count him out entirely as he’s one of the most talented players in a weak Rocket Mortgage field, but I’d be surprised if he contends.

Memory Lane: Buick Open Moments

By Jay Rigdon

The Rocket Mortgage Classic has been on the PGA Tour schedule since 2019, but it’s certainly not Michigan’s first Tour event. From 1958 through 2009, the Buick Open was played in the greater Flint area, with the majority of the run taking place as a sanctioned PGA Tour stop at Warwick Hills.

While it’s certainly great to have the Tour in Detroit, it remains a bit of a shame to have lost an event with such historical significance. (Not the first or last time that will happen on the Tour’s watch.) At first I was going to make this entirely about the 2004 edition, which featured a duel between Vijay Singh and John Daly. But when I searched for video to include, I came across this retrospective from the PGA Tour on four of the most memorable moments in the history of the Buick Open, produced to mark the final edition in 2009.

And while that video does indeed feature an amusing segment on that 2004 Daly-Vijay showdown, it was the first moment featured that ended up sending me down the kind of Wikipedia rabbit hole this segment is made for.

The video leads off with a jump back to 1962, where we have Jerry Barber making the first ever televised hole-in-one. Barber (who at 5’5” was often referred to as “Little Jerry Barber”, because historically there’s nothing golf media loves more than making sure everyone knows a short player is short) telling the story is a wonderful time capsule. From the use of a 2-iron to Barber’s charming modesty (the moment where he says he was excited because he hoped he’d have a chance at a birdie feels very much like something no player would ever say now), it’s all very much of its era.

It also led me to discover that Barber played himself in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie, which featured (you’ll be shocked to learn) Jeannie giving Major Nelson supernatural golfing abilities on a lark, leading to a variety of comedic hijinks. Barber’s scene is on YouTube as well, and amidst a fairly predictable series of line deliveries from a non-actor, he gets one punchline and kind of nails it.

Also, those zooms in on impact with the ball are excellent, and a fairly kinetic way to film golf! If you’re wondering why Jerry Barber of all pros got the call to appear on a network sitcom in 1966, it’s likely because he was right there in Los Angeles as the longtime pro at Wilshire Country Club. In addition to the availability, he’d been playing captain at the 1961 Ryder Cup just five years earlier, the same year he won the PGA. If you’re curious, that scene was not filmed at Wilshire, but at Griffith Park, still home to two municipal courses in Los Angeles.

Little Jerry Barber, a big part of golf television history in two very different ways.

Locally Quotable

By Jay Rigdon

Ernest Hemingway has a strong connection to Michigan, with plenty of stories set in the northern portion of the state.

In 1925 (the same year his Upper Peninsula-set classic “Big Two-Hearted River” was published) Hemingway weighed in on the need to for equipment regulation in golf, writing in a letter that “The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.”

Prescient! Though even as a “regulate the equipment now” person, it’s admittedly amusing to imagine Hemingway traveling to 2006, rolling in a few bombs with a plumbers neck Ping Craz-E, and recanting his entire theory.