There was something so very odd about the East Lake Golf Club here three days before the start of the Tour Championship. The look was off, the feel all wrong Tuesday. Why, here it was so near to the crowning moment of the PGA Tour season, and East Lake took on the eerie appearance of ... simply a golf course.
A beautifully fundamental and elegant golf course.
Gone was the usual assemblage of grandstands and vendor tents that is one tilt-a-whirl short of a state fair.
So, too, the temporary city of hospitality areas erected each year to cater to the appetites of those who like to be stationary, seated and sated because, well, why should they sweat when they’re not the ones playing for $15 million?
Normally on this day, there would be a complex of suites and “dining chalets” reaching down both sides of the fairway for hundreds of feet from 18th green, creating a canyon of capitalism.
Instead, on Tuesday, a lone TV tower stood sentry between this finishing stage and the Tudor clubhouse. All else was a canvas of green, the retro color of golf here in the age of the coronavirus.
Friday marks the start of the 20th Tour Championship held at venerable East Lake, where Bobby Jones cut his teeth. Because of the concessions forced upon golf this year because of the pandemic – no galleries, therefore no need for all the amenities that come with them – it may forever rank as the weirdest, most disconcerting one.
“It’s unprecedented, surreal – all those adjectives have been used,” said Martin Stephenson, the tournament director.
“My office looks out on the first tee, and I’m usually staring at the back of massive concession tent. There are trucks running all around me – it’s organized chaos. This year it’s been quiet. You can see the entire property. Outside of TV towers and what we have set up for our volunteers – it’s bare,” he said, somewhat wistfully.
This notion of finishing golf’s playoffs – and thus the golf season – here in Atlanta is starting to get some real history behind it. In 1997, East Lake and the Champions Club in Houston had begun hosting the event on alternating years. Come 2004, East Lake was designated the annual site of the conclusion.
When Tom Cousins brought East Lake back to life as part of a grander neighborhood renovation, the PGA Tour first thought it would make a fine stop for a mini-tour level event. As Cousins recalled in a 2013 interview: “I said, uh-uh, if we ever have a golf tournament, it ain’t gonna be the second rank.”
Through the years, the FedEx Cup format has undergone multiple mutations. Manufacturing a playoff mindset in golf has not always come easily or naturally. But the finishing tournament at East Lake has most assuredly achieved first-rank status.
Along the way, the first 19 stops at East Lake have produced some more modern keepsake moments to go with all the black-and-white Bobby Jones mementos scattered about this place.
Here at the 20th anniversary, the undisputed No. 1 Tour Championship moment has to be Tiger Woods’ 2018 victory, back when mobs could form for happy reasons. The scene of his stroll up No. 18 on that Sunday, with thousands of delirious celebrants storming past the gallery ropes, has become this event’s visual anthem.
“That transcends golf, that’s one of the iconic moments, I would say, in sport,” Stephenson said. “It looked like 12,000 people on 18 fairway. I’ve never seen everyone behind a player like that. Even in Tiger’s heyday, it wasn’t that everybody was cheering for him. Every single person on the grounds was cheering for him, going nuts over that. We were starved for it. He hadn’t won in five years, hadn’t been back (at East Lake) in five years. It was awesome.”
Here are the next four moments:
No. 2: Rory McIlroy holes out from 137 yards for eagle on No. 16 on his way to a playoff victory in 2016. Trailing by three shots with three holes to play, that shot put McIlroy on the path to a four-way sudden death playoff that day. He eventually won on a 15-foot birdie putt on that same No. 16.
No. 3: In the first year of the FedEx Cup, 2007, Woods shattered the tournament record, finishing 23 under and winning the Tour Championship by eight shots. Nothing to do but to bow to the master and give him more gold.
No. 4: Bill Haas turned then No. 17 (the nines were flipped in 2016) into a Whitewater attraction in 2011. He saved himself on the second playoff against Hunter Mahan by sticking one leg into the shallows of East Lake, his ball half submerged there, and splashing out a miracle shot to within three feet of the pin. He then won on the next hole.
No. 5: Back when separate titles were possible, before the staggered scoring system implemented last year eliminated that, two of the biggest names shared the main stage in 2009. Phil Mickelson won the Tour Championship, while Woods claimed the FedEx Cup. “We had a great photo of Tiger and Phil standing next to each other smiling afterward – you don’t get that very often,” Stephenson said.
For each of those highlights, the roar of the crowd was the music of the moment.
That will be absent in the 20th, and strangest, Tour Championship. Just 30 players and a whole lot of green space.
“We’ll miss (the crowd) a lot,” Stephenson said.
“It will be a very odd week for us. A very quiet week, both literally and figuratively.”
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