Top: The 18th hole on the
Straits course, nicknamed
“Dyeabolical,” certainly lives up
to its name. It requires a
demanding carry on the tee
shot to a fairway that slopes
downhill toward sand dunes
and Seven Mile Creek if carried
too far. Below: Vijay Singh won
the previous PGA
Championship contested at
Whistling Straits in 2004,
defeating Justin Leonard and
Chris DiMarco in a playoff.
dubbed Irish — play as close to character as
possible. “It was designed to play fast and
firm like a links, and that’s how we
conditioned it,” Friedlander says. “We also
developed a graduated rough program, with
the rough getting progressively taller, and
tougher, the further you got away from the
fairway.”
Alice Edland, the former head of
hospitality at Kohler, remembers the tension
being somewhat less than it was before the
first Kohler major, at Blackwolf Run in 1998,
because the company had been through
this before. But no one was prepared for
what happened near the golf course two
days before the Championship. “A local
farmer had put down a bunch of fertilizer
on one of his fields, and the whole place
stunk,” she says. “People from our landscape
department went around to other area
farms and asked them not do the same thing
themselves. The aroma was really bad.”
Straits Course was Tougher
Over Time
Fortunately, that aroma had disappeared by
the time the PGA Championship started.
But something still stunk in Herb Kohler’s
mind, and that was the way the Straits
played. Darren Clarke shot a 5-under
67 to
lead after one round, with Ernie Els and
Justin Leonard posting 68s just behind him.
“Mr. Kohler was not happy because he
thought the course was soft, but that was
more a function of weather than anything
else,” Friedlander says. “It had been cold
and windy the first three days of the week.
But when the actual competition started, it
was sunny and calm.”
Another factor was the course set-up
itself, which was designed to get tougher as
the tournament went on. Then there was
Dye, who had arrived in Kohler the day
before play started and proceeded to cut
down some of the rough. “I thought Herb
THE PGA OF AMERICA
64 THE OFFICIAL PROGRAM OF THE 2010 PGA CHAMPIONSHIP
