The course that hosts the KFT championship has a serious impact

Feigning weakness to gain the upper hand – it’s a strategic maneuver that Muhammad Ali made famous against George Foreman when the two clashed in Zaire in 1974. Over 30 years later, Pete Dye made him famous in French Lick, Ind., by moving more than 2.5 million cubic yards of earth to create his championship course named after him in French Lick Resort in 2009.

Golf course architecture and pugilism rarely intersect. However, the two are intertwined here at this 8,100-meter (that’s right, 8,100-meter!) golf course where its late creator displayed his ropes prowess. Coincidentally, this year marks the beginning of the course’s long commitment as a course host Korn Ferry Tour Championship, which means the current class of aspiring PGA Tour players will need an iron jaw — and some serious hitting power of their own — if they want to succeed.

For the average amateur, well… the course throws up nothing but gamblers. But, this does not mean that the fight should be one-sided.

When asked to compare the location to all the other domestic sites he had worked on up to that point, Dye said, “I’ve never had anything remotely like this. Here, we had such a difference in elevation. from start to finish, so all we had to do was keep fighting it to get that elevation change so that one could walk on this golf course. We had to do a lot of pushing and shoving. There was so much surface here… you could make it 20,000 yards if you wanted to.”

In the end, 8,100 yards proved quite long, especially when you factor in Mother Nature’s contribution to a round. “We’re out in the trees and out in the open, and the wind here affects us almost every day,” says Dave Harner, director of golf at French Lick Resort.

In other words, you can expect the course to sometimes play even longer than the posted scorecard rate.

First-timers to this brutal championship course should also know that the first two holes don’t really convey what a golfer will encounter. (This is Dye leaning on the ropes, allowing you to charge forward.) Even from the third set of tees, which play a tick over 6,700 yards, the par fours are manageable. Here, Dye is just feeling you out, keeping you at bay by just throwing punches. You can walk off the second green with confidence, but everything changes on the third. That’s when Dye lands a powerful punch. Incidentally, it is the first of many.

The third hole plays 554 yards from the blue tee – 641 yards from the championship tee – and the piece of the fairway that leaves the tee along a ridge that then winds left and climbs up a raised green is awfully tight. The fescue-covered hill that drops to the inside of the doghouse is noticeably steep, meaning that if you miss your line to the left, you can go off the fairway and take a penalty shot. If you somehow manage to find your ball, you’ll feel lucky for the moment, but only until you realize that your next shot will look more like t-ball than golf. This is how far above your feet your Headline is likely to be positioned.

“It’s the tightest golf course you’ll ever play that doesn’t have a tree,” Harner says. In fact, the widest fairway on the course—the 12th hole—measures just 85 feet from end to end. That said, if you can prioritize hitting the fairway (and are lucky enough to hit all the shots that hit that mark), the payoff is substantial. “The freeways,” notes Harner, “are pretty level.”

So what’s the trick, you ask? More than perhaps anywhere else, the secret to success is playing from the right tees. Depending on where you choose to work it, the course “has dual personalities,” as Harner admits. In other words, venture to the back tees at your own peril.

“We have some people who want to play the new ones,” he says. “But after a few 250-yard-plus holes on the fairway, they tend to change their minds.”

Even when playing from tees commensurate with your skill level, the course demands your absolute best – seemingly with every swing of the club – if you just want the chance to post a favorable score. I recently learned this first hand while playing the blues.

On the aforementioned third hole, I went hard, hitting a drive that pulled the wide fairway bunker at the right end of that narrow patch of short grass and came to rest near the center of the fairway at about 275 yards. away. I followed it up with a triple hybrid as clean as I could hit, and watched my ball fly over the inside corner of the dogs. However, even after those two shots, I still had 130 yards left to a high green, which is known as one of the toughest on the course.

The fifteen holes that followed introduced relatively small putting surfaces—the largest green on the course is only about 5,000 square feet in area—while shortened bail areas spanned the greens themselves.

And while it’s easy to assume that the golf course was designed with the intention of being brutally difficult – Dye was famous for saying, “Golf is not a fair game, so why should I build a fair golf course ?” — the truth of the matter is that he created the layout with the motivation of making sure it was relevant in the future.

“He always argued that the ball and equipment go a long way,” Harner says of Dye. “He built this golf course assuming no changes would be made and in 20 years, 8,100 yards would be fine. It’s a futuristic game, not a devilish game.

“In time,” Harner continues, “this course will come to be regarded as one of golf’s toughest and truest tests.”

Considering more than half the field at this weekend’s Korn Ferry Tour Championship failed to break par after the tour’s opening two rounds, it’s safe to say that’s already the case.