The course hosting the KFT championship packs a serious punch

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

Golf course architecture and pugilism rarely intersect. However, the two are intertwined here at this 8,100-yard golf course (that’s right, 8,100 yards!), where its late creator displayed his mastery of the rope-a-dope. Incidentally, this year marks the beginning of the course’s longstanding engagement as the host of the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, which means the current class of aspiring PGA Tour players will need an iron jaw — and some serious punching power of their own — if they are to succeed.

For the average amateur, well … the course throws nothing but haymakers. But, that doesn’t mean the fight has to be one sided.

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

In the end, 8,100 yards proved plenty long enough, especially when you factor in Mother Nature’s contributions to a round. “We’re out of the trees and in the wide open, and the wind up here impacts us pretty much every day,” says Dave Harner, French Lick Resort’s director of golf.

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

First-timers to this brute of a championship course should also know that the first two holes don’t truly convey what a golfer is about to encounter. (This is Dye leaning back on the ropes, letting you charge ahead.) Even from the third set of tees (the blues), which play a tick over 6,700 yards, the opening duo of par fours are manageable. Here, Dye is just feeling you out, keeping you at bay by only throwing jabs. You may walk off the second green with confidence, but it all changes at the third. That’s when Dye lands a power punch. Incidentally, it’s the first of many.

The third hole plays 554 yards from the blue tees — 641 yards from the championship box — and the sliver of fairway running away from the tee along a ridgeline that then snakes to the left and climbs uphill to an elevated green is intimidatingly narrow. The fescue-covered hillside that falls away on the inside of the dogleg is notably steep, which means if you miss your line to the left, you might as well drop from the fairway and take a penalty stroke. If you should somehow manage to find your ball, you’ll momentarily feel lucky, but only until you realize that your next shot will more closely resemble t-ball than golf. That’s how far above your feet your Titleist will likely be positioned.

“It’s the tightest golf course that you’ll ever play that doesn’t have a tree,” says Harner. In fact, the widest fairway on the course — the 12th hole — measures a mere 85 feet from edge to edge. That said, if you can prioritize hitting the fairway (and you’re fortunate enough to execute all of the shots that accomplish that goal), the reward is substantial. “The fairways,” notes Harner, “are fairly level.”

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

“We get a few people who want to play those back tees,” he says. “But after a few holes with 250-yard plus carries to the fairway, they tend to change their minds.”

Even when playing from tees that are commensurate with your skill level, the course requires your absolute best — seemingly with every swing of the club — if you want the mere opportunity to post a favorable score. This, I recently learned firsthand while playing from the blues.

At the aforementioned third hole, I started off strong, hitting a drive that drew off the broad fairway bunker on the right edge of that narrow sliver of short grass and came to rest near the center of the fairway about 275 yards away. I followed it with as pure a three hybrid as I could hit, and watched as my ball flew over the inside corner of the dogleg. Yet, even after those two shots, I still had 130 yards left to an elevated green that notoriously plays as one of the trickiest 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 closely mowed bailout areas outstretched the greens themselves.

And while it’s easy to make the assumption that the golf course was designed with the intention to be brutally hard — 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, he created the layout with the motivation of ensuring it was relevant far into the future.

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

“As time goes on,” Harner continues, “this course will be regarded as one of the toughest and truest tests of golf.”

Given that more than half the field in the Korn Ferry Tour Championship this weekend failed to break par after the tournament’s opening two rounds, it’s safe to say such is already the case.