Every week on Globalnews.ca Canadian golf stars Graham DeLaet and Adam Hadwin take readers behind the scenes of the PGA Tour, providing insights, perceptions and observations as they battle at the game’s biggest tournaments.
It is hard to put the experience of playing the 16th at the TPC Scottsdale, where the Waste Management Phoenix Open is played, into perspective that the average golf fan would understand. After all, it was the first time I’d played it, and there is no comparison on tour. It is the only hole you play where it is fully enclosed with stands, meaning there can be up to 20,000 people going nuts watching us hit our shots on the par three.
My whole goal was not to get booed—the fans will let you know it if you hit a bad shot—and I just wanted to hit the green. Because of that I was nervous at the Monday pro-am and there weren’t many people there. That made me more nervous on Thursday, during my first round there last week.
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Coming into the hole, I was surprised at the fact that the course is kind of quiet. You know there are a lot of people on the final holes, and there are crowds around the clubhouse and the practice green, but the front nine is actually rather calm. That changes when you come up to the 15th green and realize there are 150,000 people on the final three holes.
The 16th has this reputation for being really wild, really loud and unlike anything else in golf. That doesn’t really bother me—it is just part of the tournament. They try to quiet the people down in the stands, but that never really works. And really, I doubt it bothers most pros. If you asked golfers on the PGA Tour what bothers them, they’d point to the random individual who moves behind you when you’re swinging, or the single person who yells something. If there’s 2,000 people moving you don’t notice that one individual and that goes for noise. And while they do yell on the 16th hole, they at least wait until you hit the shot.
Which brings me to my first round last week. I hit a solid shot and it took a great bounce. The crowd wasn’t all that loud when I hit it, but there was some initial cheers as they recognized it was a pretty good shot, and as it turned left towards the hole the cheers got a lot louder.
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It turned out to be the closest to the hole for the day, which was very cool, and I made a birdie. It was amazing to be on a golf hole and experience what a hockey player goes through every night in Vancouver or Toronto, playing in front of 20,000 people. It wasn’t even that busy when I played it on Thursday; I can’t imagine what it was like on the weekend. It is a lot of fun. We only play that style a couple of times a year and I really enjoyed it.
Would I like that atmosphere more often? It wouldn’t bother me at all if it were more frequent. If tournaments needed to do that for attendance, then I’d go along with it. It is what I do for a living. I adapt. There are guys who don’t like it and there are probably guys who would like more events like it. As you get older you get stuck in your ways and like certain things and don’t like others. But as a rookie on the PGA Tour, I take everything for what it is. I don’t question it—it is much better than I’ve had it. In 15 years I might have a different take on it.
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A rookie on the PGA Tour, Abbotsford, BC’s Adam Hadwin can be seen playing the Farmers Insurance Open on Global TV this weekend.
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