PARKER — While the layout of Colorado Golf Club is the same for the Solheim Cup as it was for the 2010 Senior PGA Championship, the holes will look a little different next week.
When CGC hosted the 2010 event, the fairways were lush and green and had various levels of graduated rough that the PGA requested. But next week, the 7-year-old course will play as it was intended by designers Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw — fast and firm, with open fairways and just the native grass as the trouble (as well as the course’s 104 bunkers).
The fairways will be much wider, with just an average of a 6-foot transition zone of 2-inch rough.
“It’s going to play how it’s supposed to play,” U.S. team captain Meg Mallon said last week. “It’s going to play how Coore and Crenshaw wanted it to play. The native grass should come into play, and the native grass is going to come into play. There’s nothing that’s going to catch the ball.”
But even though the fairway landing areas are wide, placement in the fairways will be key. The width is designed to tempt players out to the edges in search of the best angles into the greens. A well-played aggressive line will create a great scoring opportunity. An aggressive line not executed properly brings the native grass very much into play.
And the physical width can be deceiving. Coore and Crenshaw left the natural slopes and undulations of the land intact when the design firm built CGC. Those rolls and slopes can dramatically reduce the effective width of the fairway at times.
“If you put your ball in a particular place in the fairway, you have a much better option into these greens,” said Mallon, who has been around the course since it opened in 2006. “It does make you squeeze if you want to get the best approach in.”
After playing the course in July during a practice session, the European players got a taste of how the course would shape up. It might seem like an advantage for the big hitters off the tee box, but they too know placement is key.
“The course is pretty straightforward off the tees,” said Swede Anna Nordqvist, “but you have to know the greens and where to hit, and where you can miss it in the right spots.”
The greens vary in size, but none are easy. An observation by Golf Channel analyst Curt Byrum, who played in the 2010 Senior PGA Championship and will cover next week’s Solheim Cup: “There are a few of the greens, not all of them, that have tremendous undulation in them, one of them being the par-5 16th hole.”
After her practice rounds this summer, Spaniard Carlota Ciganda described the greens as “very fast and very slopey.”
The course officially will play at 7,066 yards next week (it was set at 7,604 yards for the 2010 PGA event). The biggest differences in the Solheim Cup layout are the No. 7 hole, which normally is a par-5 but will play from the forward tees as a 448-yard par-4, and No. 12, which is a par-4 but will be made into a 531-yard par-5 and plays into the prevailing winds out of the south.
“The course is quite generous off the tee, but the greens are quite challenging,” European captain Liselotte Neumann said. “There’s some great holes here, especially for the best-ball matches.”
David Krause: 303-954-1893, dkrause@denverpost.com or
