Expect the Blue Monster to Play Tough This Week on PGA Tour

There are infinite ways to describe a golf course, from the blunt to the subtle, each helping us conjure an image in our collective minds of just what it looks like and how it’s going to play during a specific tournament.

Personally, my favorite description is an oldie-but-goodie, one echoed by Adam Scott when asked about Trump National Doral’s Blue Monster, host of this week’s Cadillac Championship.

“It’s going to ask a lot of questions of everyone all week,” he said.

That’s such an alluring turn of phrase in so few words.

It suggests that rather than telling you how to best play its holes, this plot of land will essentially challenge the golfer to figure it out on his own.

Now, it can certainly be argued whether Scott was simply paying lip service to the course or really feels like a final exam is coming. He won here a decade ago, the last time a PGA Tour event was held on this property, offering an invaluable experience which most of his fellow competitors won’t have this week.

“It’s a challenge,” he explained. “It’s called the Blue Monster for a reason. It’s a big golf course, very penal. The wind can blow, and that’s the biggest challenge out here. So you’ve got to strike it well, just demanding tee to green.”

The word demanding might be an understatement.

This week’s scorecard will show the course playing to 7,739 yards, with all four par-5s at least 578 yards and two of them over 600. Similarly, three of the four par-3s are at least 215 yards, while all but one par-4 is over 415. Throw in the fact that water is in play on nearly every hole and the wind is expected to blow up to 28 mph for parts of this weekend, and you’ll understand why we might see another single-digit under-par score atop the leaderboard come Sunday afternoon.

The Monster is indeed a beast.

“This course, in particular, is pretty straightforward in a sense of like you can see off the tee box where you need to hit it; it’s just a matter of hitting it there time and time again,” said world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. “There’s not really many tricks to this golf course. It’s just very, very difficult. It’s a flat piece of land. There’s just a lot of bunkers, a lot of water and the golf holes are long. So with that combination, it’s going to be tough.”

This venue underwent a renovation by famed architect Gil Hanse back in 2014 and the changes showed in the scoring.

As I wrote in my betting preview of this event, conditions immediately toughened up. In the half-dozen years directly before this overhaul, the winner’s total averaged 17.5 under par and was never worse than 16-under. In those final three years of the tournament, the average winner was just a notch better than 8-under, with none of the three better than 12-under.

“I’ve got a feeling it’s going to play a lot harder than it’s played in the past,” said Jhonattan Vegas, who finished in a share of 31st place here in 2011. “Obviously, they did a bunch of changes to the course and if the wind picks up and the weather gets right, it’s going to be an incredible test.”

“Greens are relatively big, especially when the wind is not blowing as much,” explained Justin Rose, another of the very few players with experience on this course. “But obviously there’s a lot of little sections to the greens that, as the weather gets a little tougher, or should you get some gusty winds you kind of, I think incrementally this course gets harder and harder.”

That’s the prevailing sentiment for Doral this week.

Over the first three months of the PGA Tour calendar, winners have posted an average total of better than 17.5 under par, with every champion finishing with a score of at least 11-under.

There are at least some suggestions that this week could be different at Doral.

At the very least, this course will ask all the right questions.