Patrick Cantlay blasted the PGA Tour's choice of golf courses, providing another potential issue for the organisation with the LIV Golf series threatening to take over the sport. The 30-year-old is competing in the BMW Championship at Wilmington Country Club, which begins today.
He heads into the tournament as the defending champion, and noticed similarities between the 2022 venue and Caves Valley, where he won the title last year. The American described the course as as a 'bombers paradise' and claimed the courses used week-in week-out on the tour favour the big hitters.
“I don't think there's too much strategy to this golf course,” the world number four said, as quoted by Golf Week . ”I think it's pretty right in front of you and similar to last year. The venues between last year and this year are actually really similar, I think, in style of golf.
“I'm so surprised that [the Tour hasn't] figured it out,' he added. "It just seems like we're getting more and more of the same bomb-it-as-far-as-you-can golf courses week after week.” The par-71 course, which is 7,534 yards in distance, consists of three front nine par-fours that are 490-plus yards, and there are two par-fives on the back which are more than 600 yards.
“It's so surprising to me that the golf courses that none of the guys who hit it far, they don't go to Hilton Head, they don't go to Colonial, they don't go to the short, small, dogleggy tree-lined golf courses," he added. In order to combat the big hitting players, Cantlay thinks the PGA tour should play on tighter courses and struggles to understand why this is not a regular occurrence.
“The way we combat the distance, the way these architects seem to think they want to combat distance is by taking all the trees out and playing it 7,600 yards and put the tees way back and all the par-5s are at 600 yards. I don't think that makes any sense," he explained. "I'm surprised every time I come to a golf course where they say it's recently been redone and then there's no real shaping of golf shots. It's just how far can you hit it and grab your driver on every hole and hit it as high and hit it as far as you possibly can.
“If you can hit it 315 yards, you've taken out all the bunkers, and you're maybe in the rough, but it's way better in the rough with a 9- or 8-iron than it is maybe in the fairway with a 5-iron if you were to lay up to the fat part of the fairway before the bunkers.” Cantlay did not stop there as he joined Jon Rahm in criticising the ongoing FedEx Cup, claiming a playoff format is not compatible with golf. "Well, (the playoff format has) changed so many times I'm not sure anyone has got the perfect formula yet. I'm not sure. It's hard to do playoffs in golf. I think we've seen that," Cantlay added.
“I'm not really sure. I think there's got to be smarter people than me that have more experience putting this on than — it seems to get tweaked every year, and I'm not necessarily sure why. We went to the everyone starts at a different score to par a couple years ago. That still feels strange to me. Like I said, playoffs is obviously a challenge in golf, and I'm not sure anyone has figured it out, the perfect formula yet.”
Only the top-70 players from the PGA Tour FedEx Cup standings qualified for the BMW Championship and are competing for the season-long prize, the FedEx Cup. Only 68 players will tee it up, and only the top 30 in the standings advance to the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta. The winner of the FedEx Cup Playoffs will take home $18 million (£14.9 million) and the FedEx Cup.
