85th PGA Championship: Oak Hill East is tight, fast and perfect for Tiger

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Oak Hill East vs. The Tiger. The Tiger vs. Oak Hill East. One of the great golfers of all time vs. one of the great courses of all time. With the world watching.
Rochester has waited years for this confrontation of golf heavyweights. It’s safe to say that those of us in this neck of the woods-no pun intended-have been anticipating this moment ever since that morning back in 1996 when Tiger Woods woke up and said, “I’m turning pro” and started counting his millions.
Well, the wait is almost over. High noon, aka the PGA Championship, is finally upon us. On one end of professional golf’s Main Street stands Woods, grimly determined to win his first major championship since the 2002 U.S. Open (poor baby!). And on the other end stands Oak Hill Country Club’s East Course, longer, stronger and equally determined to stand her ground against perhaps the strongest field in professional golf.
Oak Hill East wasn’t exactly a 98-pound weakling back in 1989, when it hosted the U.S. Open and Curtis Strange won with 2 under par and only three others were 1 under. But things have changed drastically since then. In 1989, a guy named Ed Humenik led the PGA Tour in driving distance with an average of 280.9 yards. In 2002, John Daly led with 306.8 yards.
Now, with new technology in clubs and balls, if a pro golfer fails to hit it 300 yards off the tee, we wonder why the guy quit his day job. Oak Hill has bulked up for the barrage, and this year the course will play in excess of 7,100 yards with fairways no wider than some residential streets, rough 5-foot-5 Ian Woosnam could hide in, and greens so fast the coins used as ball markers may slide off them and into the rough.
For weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out what Woods will shoot at Oak Hill. Will he back off his driver and hit shorter clubs off the tee for accuracy? Or will he grip it and rip it, figuring if he can hammer it 325 yards, so what if he’s in the rough?
Oak Hill East is a far cry from Royal St. George’s Golf Club, site of last month’s British Open, where the first question asked on the first tee was, “Where do you hit it?” Everyone agreed that lucky bounces were just as important as ball striking because of severe undulations in the fairways. Hit it down the middle and your ball might ricochet into the deep rough. And vice versa.
At Oak Hill, though, what you see is what you get. No quirks, no gimmicks. At Oak Hill, it is here’s the tee and there’s the green a quarter-mile or so down that narrow corridor
of mowed grass. Hit it straight and you get rewarded. Hit it off line and you’ve got problems. Pretty simple.
Oak Hill East is a perfect fit for Tiger. At 7,134 yards, par 70, fast and tight, it won’t be a wedge-fest putting contest. You have to play the East Course, and nobody manages his game better than Tiger. Besides, Woods is due-make that overdue-to win his ninth major as a professional and my guess is he’ll tee it up here with more resolve than the rest of the field combined.
Anyway, whom else would you pick to win at Oak Hill? Phil “I’m Not Here to Lay Up” Mickelson? Nah, he’s too aggressive for his own good, and proud of it. Ben Curtis, the 396th-ranked player in the world who spent a week in Never-Never Land by winning the British Open? I figure he’ll still be pinching himself when he reports for work at Oak Hill.
Then there is the usual cast of characters: Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Sergio Garcia, Jim Furyk, 2002 winner Rich Beem, and so on and so on. If pressed for a so-called dark horse, I’d take Fred Funk-he tied for fourth in last year’s PGA Championship-because he’s the most accurate driver on the Tour.
Over the years, obscure players have come out of the woodwork in other majors on other courses, but not at Oak Hill, where the winners have been Cary Middlecoff in 1956, Lee Trevino in 1968, Jack Nicklaus in 1980 and Curtis Strange in 1989.
So, when all is said and done, I’ll take the best in the world, bet the favorite at Oak Hill.
(Rick Woodson is the Rochester Business Journal’s sports columnist. His column appears each Thursday online at www.rbjdaily.com and each Friday in the print edition.)

08/01/03 (C) Rochester Business Journal