It doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand that Europe’s best golfers get to play on Europe’s very best courses. If you run through any self-respecting list of the very best layouts in Europe then it quickly becomes very clear that tournament golf and world-class tracks very rarely go hand in hand.
For years Valderrama has always been a mainstay for both. Everybody loves Valderrama. Despite the severity of the test – John Catlin won here with a winning score of +2 in 2020 – the players love it. The facilities are like nowhere else, the range is said to be out of this world and it gets the juices flowing. It is possible to score well – Adrian Otaegui somehow got it round in -19 this year to win by six – but you will have played your very best stuff to weave your way between the cork trees. Even better it is relatively short, at just a few yards over 7,000, and still it can trick the very best.
As fans we like going back to our old favourites, we like a bit of history and we like revising some of our favourite holes where anything and everything can happen – Valderrama first played host to the European Tour in 1988. For years it provided the stage for the season-ender when topping the money list was a big part of the charm of the tour.
If you want an idea of how big it was then, and how things have slipped, the overall prize money when Bernhard Langer and Colin Montgomerie famously shared the title in 2002 was bigger then than it was this year.
Part of Augusta and The Masters’ huge attraction is our in-depth knowledge of the course and the players’ ability to hit certain shots, at Valderrama we might not enjoy such an encyclopaedic knowledge of the place but we know more about it than the bulk of its peers on the DP World Tour calendar and we know that the last few holes can make a mess of a good round. Whatever score you’re on after 11 holes it’s generally understood that it’s unlikely to get any better from there on in.
In terms of courses there’s not a huge amount to get excited about the new DP World Tour schedule for 2023….
..
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Golf Monthly RSS Feed…