When Mark Rolfing was recently at SentryWorld in Wisconsin, there was snow scattered throughout the majestic, 18-hole parkland golf course on the city’s north side.
The snow will be gone and the course will look considerably different when the longtime Golf Channel and NBC broadcaster returns this summer as an analyst for the U.S. Senior Open, which will be contested at SentryWorld from June 29 to July 2.
Rolfing thinks the course, which has undergone massive renovation the past two years to get ready for one of the USGA’s flagship events, will be a great test for the best senior golfers in the world and believes it will be the blueprint for future major championship golf venues.
Rolfing, who is an ambassador for Sentry Insurance, talked with USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin about SentryWorld hosting the major championship, Wisconsin becoming a golf destination, LIV Golf, the proposed rollback of the golf ball to limit distance, the future of the PGA Tour and more.
“It is going to be a phenomenal venue. The course itself is going to be a great championship test and I really believe that what you’re going to see here at SentryWorld is the future of championship golf, because it’s not an overly long course. It’s going to be set up quite difficult, putting a real premium on driving accuracy. The fairways are going to be narrow, the rough is going to be high, and this is the way that championship golf at any level is going to go in the future because we’re going to run out of land and run out of water on this planet, and you can’t built 8,000-yard courses. By the time you start thinking about how to do that, they won’t be long enough. And, by the way, the longer you build a course the more it’s going to be to the advantage of the bigger hitters. So I think wide fairways and low roughs and things like that for championship golf are going to start changing. These are more the kinds of tests you are going to see, a SentryWorld kind of test. This course is going to put more premium on driving, I think, than any venue I’ve seen in quite some time. Driving is going to be the most important thing out here.”
“I don’t think they want to make it too tough, obviously. But I think they want to showcase what I would call the other aspects of a golf course than just aesthetics. Typically, when you think of SentryWorld you think of the Flower Hole. You think of the beautiful area of lakes. Shots like that,…
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