CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Golden hour starts early on a warm spring evening at Quail Hollow Club. The light pops amongst the shadows of the pines and oaks, the ground’s various highlighted contours battling for attention. The day’s breezes relent, a resplendent sense of evening quiet replacing the ruffle of branches.
Groups of members, in twos and threes and fours, scatter about the front nine, racing nightfall. Most of them on foot, chasing what appear from a distance to be solid shots, these groups are trying to complete as many holes as possible on the 64-year-old course that ranks comfortably within the top 100 modern courses in the United States.
If this sounds like the perfect way to end a day, well, it really is. The twosome of 40-something men hustling along with their bags on their backs are laughing as they walk off No. 8 green. A husband and wife hurry past, talking in their cart about dinner menu options at the club before they both play off the forward tees of No. 9. A group of younger men on foot, each with a golf swing that would be the envy of scratch golfers anywhere, engage in a friendly bit of banter about who owes whom how much as they blast balls off the ninth tee.
This version of Quail Hollow Club – the rendition the members experience day after idyllic day – could serve as a roadmap for elite club management. Happy golfers, perfected and friendly playing conditions, the game moving fast as the mid-March twilight lingers. Where does one sign up?
But there’s another side to Quail Hollow. A more sinister nature of the course to be nurtured, rising from the ground as the days grow longer, lying in wait to pounce on the best golfers in the world. As the 107th PGA Championship takes flight May 15-18, Quail Hollow will transform from an impeccable and imminently playable member’s course into a major-championship challenge replete with high and thick rough, slick greens and tiny targets. With a title on the line, it can be a beast.
Sitting in the sun on that perfect March evening, watching the members have a ball, it’s hard to envision the upcoming changes. That job is better left to Keith Wood, Quail Hollow’s Director of Green and Grounds. It’s his job to oversee the club’s transformation from member play to major championship. He’s done it before, and working in partnership with PGA of America Chief Championships Officer and top set-up man Kerry Haigh, Wood plans to do it again.
Quail Hollow prepares for PGA Championship
On that evening in mid-March, Quail Hollow was just coming to life after winter. The turf was gorgeous to behold, wall-to-wall perennial rye grass as green as green gets. Naturally a bit sticky and able to hold vast amounts of moisture, the rye grass provides a favorable cold-season playing surface for the members.
In mid-May for the PGA Championship, the rye grass still will be in play, but it will be joined by the underlying carpet of Bermuda grass in fairways, rough and approaches. As Wood explains, that will change almost everything. Quail Hollow will transform from relatively soft and friendly into a fast and firm test with plenty of teeth.
“The Bermuda grass will wake up,” said Wood, who has worked at Quail Hollow for a decade and overseen course conditions for the 2017 PGA Championship won by Justin Thomas and the 2022 Presidents Cup won by the Americans. “It’s coming alive. I’m very happy with the turf quality and where we’re going to be in just a few short weeks.
“Once that Bermuda grass wakes up and starts putting out some roots, it starts using up the moisture in the soil. It’s also providing a denser, tighter surface because it’s starting to compete with the rye grass for space in the canopy. Things are going to be firm so that balls can bounce and give people the opportunity to shape the ball versus just hit it long.”
And therein in lies Quail Hollow’s greatest test. Originally designed by George Cobb and opened in 1961 and later reworked by several architectural masters, the course features a wonderful mix of doglegs veering off in all directions. Championship contenders must work the ball, curving their shots to match the fairways’ frequent bends while avoiding overhanging branches and vibrant rough.
It starts at No. 1, which plays as a par 5 for the members but a long par 4 for the PGA Championship, sliding off a hill and hard to the right in the landing zone. The par-4 second hole then curves sharply to the left, requiring a very different tee shot. Those opening holes provide a great introduction to Quail Hollow, where long and straight tee balls can bound through firm fairways into various spots of bother. A complete player, however, can match his shots to the many curves. The drier Bermuda grass will put a premium on such shotmaking skills.
“If we have those firm conditions and you just hit it long without shaping it, you’re probably going to end up in the rough because the ball is going to bounce,” Wood said. “We can put a real premium on hitting fairways, hitting greens and making putts, which is what major championship golf is all about, right?”
Quail Hollow’s history of tournaments
Quail Hollow is home most years to the PGA Tour’s Truist Championship, formerly the Wells Fargo Championship among other names since the Tour returned to the club in 2003. That top-tier Tour event moved to Philadelphia Cricket Club this year as the PGA Championship takes center stage and Quail Hollow hosts its second major championship. Quail Hollow has a long history of elite tournaments, dating to 1969 when it first was the site of the Kemper Open, a PGA Tour event that had an 11-year run. Quail Hollow then became the site of a PGA Tour Champions event, the PaineWebber Invitational, from 1983 to 1989.
The list of winners at Quail Hollow, their names on plaques affixed to an outside fireplace at the course’s turn, reads like an entry list to golf’s Hall of Fame. Tom Weiskopf won here three times. Raymond Floyd, Vijay Singh, Jim Furyk, Jason Day. Tiger Woods in 2007. And, of course, Rory McIlroy, who has prevailed at Quail Hollow four times, including in 2024. All of them and plenty more are elite ballstrikers who could bend a ball at will.
Working with Haigh to establish expectations, it’s up to Wood and his experienced crew to lay the groundwork for another star to shine this year.
Their recipe includes rough standing upright as if at salute and grown somewhere near 4 inches tall, those firm and bouncy fairways, and quick greens that will top out somewhere near 13.5 feet on the Stimpmeter, which is used to judge how far a ball will roll. For day-to-day member play, Wood said, the incredibly smooth Tif Eagle Bermuda grass greens roll about 11.25 – for those non-golf nerds among us, that’s how many averaged feet a ball will trundle across a putting surface in various directions after sliding down a standardized device. As the greens rise from the normal 11-foot speeds into the low 13s for the championship, putting will become very interesting, to say the least.
Member play closed in the weeks approaching the PGA Championship, allowing Wood to focus on providing premium conditions.
“We’ll do a lot of fertilizing and we’ll do a lot of things in high-traffic areas, really just trying to get the property to start flourishing and really come together,” Wood said. “We’ll get the fairway landing areas just absolutely perfect and really pay attention to our water management on the greens, helping them firm up. Then it just has a lot to do with the time of year and what Mother Nature gives us.”
Wood has a lot of tools at his disposal. Modern irrigation methods allow for precise application of water, down to individual sprinkler heads. Moisture meters are used to test all areas of the course. Quail Hollow has invested in SubAir Systems, which feature pipes beneath the putting surfaces that allow Wood and his team to remove excess water and even control temperatures – Wood said the SubAir System shouldn’t be necessary during tournament week, but it’s nice to have it in case of heavy rains. All kinds of technology are in play – there is a lot of data available to assist greenkeepers at well-heeled courses that have invested in providing premium playing conditions.
Wood, who worked at Sedgefield Country Club in North Carolina and Florence Country Club in South Carolina before joining Quail Hollow, has been around the game long enough to remember an era when such technology wasn’t available.
“I laugh with some of the younger greenkeepers now, telling them that when I was their age, we had a pocket knife,” Wood said. “I would slip that pocket knife into a green and then feel the blade to figure out if I needed to water. With the tools today, it’s great to be able to manipulate things, and they help us with a lot of issues. They help us build a healthier root zone that can handle stress so we can push things to the limit.”
By and large, Haigh allows Wood to handle that task. Wood said that although Haigh has set up dozens of major championships and international team competitions, the experienced Englishman leaves it up to Wood to grow the grass.
“I tell you what, Kerry is one of the best in the business,” Wood said. “He is everything inside the ropes. His whole job is just to make sure the consistency is there from day to day. He doesn’t ask me what speed the greens are running. He doesn’t ask me what the firmness numbers are, or about metric water content. I don’t know if he can care less about any of that. Instead, he’s like, ‘I want to use the front-right hole location on 18 today, and we don’t need to be any faster than we are right now.’ Then it’s up to us. That’s how he manages the week.
“He’s just one of the great old-school set-up guys that you don’t see anymore. So to answer the question of how is it to work with him and his staff, it’s fantastic.”
The ultimate goal, Wood said, is to set up the ultimate test of the best.
“We want a fair course, and a challenge,” he said. “We want it to play long but not soft. … Honestly, from my point of view, we just want to see a great competition. On Sunday, as the leaders are making the turn to the back nine, you know, we want to have six or seven guys in contention. That’s exciting, a lot of competition, good drama.”
Designed by George Cobb, Arnold Palmer and Tom Fazio
The work extends well beyond the growing of grass. Quail Hollow originally was laid out by Cobb, but nothing has remained static. The legendary Arnold Palmer oversaw changes to the course in 1986, strengthening its championship challenges. But most of what is seen on the ground today is the result of decades of work led by Tom Fazio, one of the most successful golf architects of the modern era.
“There’s not much of the George Cobb design left, except for a little bit of the routing,” Wood said. “Mr. Palmer came in and did some work, and it still was a Cobb course. Mr. Palmer took what was there and created new greens complexes, new bunkers, things like that. But after Mr. Fazio really started having some influence and doing things on the golf course, it really became a Fazio course.”
The early Cobb design was a product of its times, with flashed-up bunkers rising to meet elevated putting surfaces that required an aerial attack through tight tree-lined fairways. Fazio has changed it all since in 1997, from greens and fairways to bunkers and water hazard engagements. His work began at the behest of club president Johnny Harris, a powerful North Carolina businessman and philanthropist who is the son of club founder James J. Harris. Johnny Harris and Fazio clicked, and they have transformed the course with the clear purpose of hosting important tournaments.
“We want a PGA Tour event to come back here, and we want to bring a major championship to Charlotte,” Harris told Fazio, as Fazio recalled in a conversation with Golfweek’s Bradley S. Klein in 2017.
Neither Harris nor Fazio were afraid to shake things up. The course now plays through wider corridors, still with trees at the sides but with much more room to navigate while allowing ample sunshine to nourish turf. The greens are flatter to the ground, much more natural in appearance than the pushed-up originals. No. 16 is a perfect example, with the waterside green of the long par 4 open and flat at the front to allow a running approach.
What hasn’t changed is the core golf experience, with no homes encroaching on play. Expect to hear many favorable comparisons to Augusta National Golf Club, another major-championship test on which Fazio has worked. And like Augusta National, Quail Hollow has been lengthened substantially over the years to better challenge elite modern players – for this year’s PGA Championship Quail Hollow will play to 7,626 yards with a par of 71.
Renovations to the Green Mile at Nos. 16, 17, 18
Much of Fazio’s early focus was placed on new and especially challenging closing holes in a stretch famously dubbed the Green Mile. The dogleg-right, par-4 16th was pushed 50 yards to the left alongside a lake, bringing the water into play on both the tee shot and especially on the approach. The tees to the over-the-lake, par-3 17th – its green surrounded short, left and long by water – were flipped to the right side of the 16th green. And No. 18 was reintroduced as a monster par 4 with a devilish little stream on the left running the length of the hole. For a penalty area that players can and often do leap over, that little flow of water never fails to present a myriad of headaches, much like the narrow burns found on links courses in Great Britain and Ireland.
In the run-up to the 2017 PGA Championship, Fazio remade several more holes and led the effort to convert the greens to healthier Bermuda grass. The opening hole was converted to a dogleg par 5, which will play as a par 4 for the PGA Championship. The old third and fourth holes were re-sequenced to play as Nos. 2 and 3, and the old par-5 fifth was split into two holes, a par 3 and a par 4. The uphill, dogleg-left par-4 11th was given a new green that stretched the hole.
In 2023, Fazio was back at it in what Wood called more of a housekeeping renovation in which the greens were re-grassed with the modern Tif Eagle Bermuda grass.
“There was very little architectural change in 2023,” Wood said. “We did change the 13th tee complex, and we added a tee on 16, but that was it. What we did do was resurface the greens, and there were a few hole locations that we softened here and there just so Kerry could use some corners of the greens and get the speeds up to 13. And we redid the bunkers and put new liners in the bunkers. But in no way was the work done that summer intended to do anything to change the architectural nature of the golf course. I tell the members, it was like changing the carpet in your home. Every so often, we have to do the same thing on the golf course.
“Mr. Fazio has kind of worked his way around the property, and we’re excited to see what happens in the future, to see if he gets a chance to touch a few more holes. It is a Fazio golf course now, a lot of his influence. It’s just worked out very well for us.”
It all culminates in what promises to be an exciting tournament in which no lead is really safe midway through the back nine. Quail Hollow presents plenty of birdie opportunities, but especially on Fazio’s revamped closing Green Mile, players will try just to hold on. It’s a thrilling challenge for any level of golfer, from the club member on a sunny spring afternoon to a top touring professional in the hunt for a major title.
“Championship golf is ingrained in the culture of the club,” Wood said. “It was an idea set forth a long, long time ago by the founders of our club. And every single club president who’s had the honor of leading this club has made sure those values continued on. Mr. (Johnny) Harris has done an excellent job of that, because he’s really taken what his father set forth with, a vision to have tournament golf here in the Carolinas and Charlotte. …
“There’s a ton that goes into all this, but at the end of the day, all this work is so we can crown an excellent champion. That’s the goal. We’re doing everything we can to make that happen.”
Read the full article here