English Grinds and Wins at Torrey Pines

by | Jan 29, 2025

The PGA Tour finally played a golf course that challenged the competitors’ entire skill set at Torrey Pines.  Torrey Pines is the longest course on Tour but more importantly, it has rough, and this week a mixture of challenging winds to add to the test.  Par at Torrey Pines was the standard for success compared to the birdie fests that preceded this event on the Hawaiian leg of the opening of the season.  These players are so good that it is quite entertaining to watch them struggle to exercise all of their skills.  The amateur player doesn’t realize the skills these players have as they seek to overcome difficult conditions.  You can’t miss fairways at Torrey.  The rough at Torrey Pines is spongy, gnarly and was relatively high for this event and the fairways were cut a bit narrower than the local San Diego fee player will experience in a daily round.

Torrey Pines is the site where Tiger Woods won his last US Open in a miraculous 18 hole playoff with Rocco Mediate in 2008 with a severely injured leg.  The tournament’s first 36 holes are played on the two courses at Torrey–North and South.  The North Course is the easier of the two courses where birdie opportunities abound.  The South Course is a different story with significant length and rough and on Day 2 of the event the wind arrived with a vengeance.  Course conditions became unplayable as balls on the green began to move and play was actually suspended for a few hours until balls stopped moving on the greens.  The average round for the tournament on Day 2 was a gaudy 75.2.

It looked as though Peter Aberg was going to run away and hide in this tournament with a spectacular opening round 63.  As Aberg stated, “You have to keep the ball in the fairway on this golf course.”  Aberg’s performance could not be sustained in the second day as blasts of winds arrived as he was suffering from flu symptoms and just trying to avoid dropping out.  He couldn’t overcome missing fairways and the malady spread to his putter.  The leaderboard became a bouncing ball as no one could master the difficulty presented by the course combined with the weather.  Max Homa, a past winner of this event, missed the cut as well as Tony Finau and last year’s winner Matthieu Pavon.  Fourteen players would withdraw from the event as some strain of flu spread throughout the PGA locker room.

The leaderboard became a horse race with players rising and falling as fairways became harder to hit and putting became an arduous task and play slowed to a crawl as the field tried to figure things out.  Andrew Novak, SJ Im and English kept trading places on the leaderboard but English hung close to the top carrying a tenuous one shot lead into the final round.  English is a proven winner on Tour having won his last event at the Traveler’s Open in Hartford, Connecticut in 2021.  Hole by hole, leadership exchanged places but English held his ground as Novak made a push and then failed to execute in critical spots.  Novak made a spectacular 25 foot meandering putt on the 5th hole to briefly lead and would contend to the end.  Sam Stevens had a shot to catch English, but his shot to reach the 18th in two found the pond that guards the green.  He almost holed the penalty shot for a birdie but it slammed against the stick and he had to settle for second place with an ending par.  As they approached the treacherous 18th hole with the final round pin strategically placed a few paces from the pond, English knew that a par would probably produce a victory.  His tee shot ran perilously left of the fairway but cleared the dense trees that shaped the hole.  He had a good lie but smartly decided to put the ball back into play for a easy 115 yard pitch shot to the green where he would two putt for the event winning par.  English looked in control but he was grinding hard inside his head to stay focused on what was necessary to secure the victory.  He ended up with an 8 under par victory and a final round 73 to win by a whisker.

12th hole

Torrey Pines

Torrey Pines is the gem of municipal golf courses and enables the daily fee player to attack the layout of the US Open for a fabulous experience and is a valid candidate to be as good as Pebble Beach.  My soon to be published book, PARdon Me, has a chapter completely devoted to  Par 3’s and I must admit that I missed one–the 3rd hole at Torrey Pines.  The 3rd is a beast at 201 yards from the back tees carved out of the canyon with a huge undulated green surrounded by spinachy rough and well placed bunkers.  The par 4, 12th hole at 520 yards is the longest par 4 on the PGA Tour and the average professional score on this hole is 4.5 as moist weather conditions produce lies that make it very difficult to execute greens in regulation.

3rd hole

Slow Play

Perhaps it was the difficult conditions or the tight competitiveness of the tournament but slow play was in evidence at this event.  Players treated these greens as if they were looking for books in a library.  English’ group played the final round in five hours and thirty minutes and even prompted some commentary from the TV broadcast.  It’s very unfortunate that slow play such as this hurts the game of golf significantly as the amateur golfing public immediately decides to emulate these players without their skill sets.  It is a scourge of the game and we need to PGA to develop a shot clock on the putting greens of PGA events.  It worked well for baseball and can work well here on Tour.  I always trust my first read and pull the trigger.  It’s a nice feature of TGL with the shot clock and amazingly enough, Tiger Woods lost a hole in a recent TGL match as he allowed the shot clock to belch while he stood helplessly over a putt to tie the hole, which he then lost via penalty.  Slow play will continue to plague the development of the game as the same maladies exist in the amateur collegiate circuits as well.  The shot clock is the solution to get this issue under control.

 

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