They Love Shaughnessy

From the Brad Ziemer of the Vancouver Sun:

Jerry Kelly was not in the mood for chit-chat, so the PGA Tour veteran was succinct and to the point when asked for his opinion on Shaughnessy Golf & Country Club.

"It's a great golf course and I don't think we play any better on Tour, period," Kelly said after his pro-am round on Wednesday.

And this:

"This is one of the top-five golf courses on the PGA Tour already after just one practice round," said Andrew Magee. "You hear all the rumblings in the locker room and on the driving range and the players are saying this is the kind of golf course we all think we should be playing every week on Tour. This is just fabulous.

"It's just got long holes, short holes, views, trees, dogleg rights, dogleg lefts, it's got a real versatile mix of holes. It's just a beautiful place."

"It seems like you are going to have to have all of your wits about you here," said former PGA champion Jeff Sluman. "It's a shotmaker's golf course, for sure. It's not one of those courses where you can smash it and grab it. If we could play something like this every week, it would be unbelievable."

The premium this week will be on keeping the ball in fairways that have been pinched to an average of 26 to 28 yards wide. Once finding the short grass, players must then hit approach shots to greens that are tiny by PGA Tour standards.

"You have to really drive your ball straight here," said Magee. "Nobody who hits it off the fairway is going to play well this week. You have to hit it straight, you have to hit it below the hole. The greens are fast and it's just a classic golf course. It's a very fair course, but it's just tough."

"You hit it in the rough and I would say from any more than 150 yards out you are not going to be able to get to the greens," added DiMarco. "Fairway is premium this week. The greens are sneaky quick. You get on the wrong side and they can be really fast. It's playing tough."

Now, I don’t want to pick on these guys because they’ve really only seen the horribly shallow modern form of narrow fairway and high rough golf. You know, tightrope walking golf. The kind that's supposed to put a premium on ball striking and ends up turning things into a putting contest.

Anyway, wouldn’t it be neat to hear of just one course where the players say something like this:

"Placement off the tee is at a premium this week. The greens really ask you to place your tee shot depending on the hole location. There isn't much rough, but because the bunkers are such nasty hazards, you don't know what kind of lie you might get. So you really have to be careful flirting with the hazards."