Firestone Country Club

The PGA Tour has been playing at Firestone for quite a long time, first at the World Series of Golf, and now as part of the World Golf Championship series.  Now I must admit, even though I've never played the course, I have fond memories of it.   The first golf video game I ever played had only one golf course, Firestone.  This was a very long time ago, back in the 90's.  It was on my grandparents old computer, which was running on Windows 95.  I remember that it was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen, and to this day, I can still remember the game fondly.  That said, I know quite a lot more about golf than I did when I was seven, and it has to be said, Firestone is a terrible golf course.  It's the ultimate expression of one of some of the worst trends in golf.  The routing of a golf course is extremely important, a poorly routed golf course can never reach its fullest potential.  If you look at the Firestone's South Course from an aerial view, you'll notice that virtually every hole runs in straight lines, parallel to each other.  This is the worst thing a golf course could do.  Every hole will look the same.  It doesn't help that every hole is pretty much the same.  The par 3's are all around 200 yards, and the par 4's have very little variation.  Ideally, you could have almost 200 yards between the longest and shortest par 4's, but Firestone has less than 100.  I'll grant that the par 5's are a little interesting, and the 16th is justly famous, but it only has two of them.  So here we have a golf course that looks and plays in the most boring fashion possible.  Perhaps it's little surprise the professionals love it there, since everything is right in front of them and there's no surprises.  Maybe Tiger will do something interesting so that the week won't be a complete bore.

Update: Tiger shot a 61 today.  After two days, he's ahead by seven shots.   He did something interesting.