The PGA Tour goes back to Doral on Thursday after a ten-year absence, and the tournament that opens at the Blue Monster bears almost no resemblance to the one that left it. The Cadillac Championship in its previous life was a World Golf Championship, the strongest field in regular-season golf, played by a hundred-or-so of the best players in the world for a purse that was generous by 2016 standards and looks quaint by 2026’s. The version that begins this week is a 72-player no-cut signature event, with a $20 million purse and 700 FedEx Cup points to the winner, on a course that Gil Hanse spent 2014 reworking and that has since hosted four LIV Golf seasons in the years the PGA Tour was somewhere else.
The reason the Tour was somewhere else is the same reason it has come back. The 2016 WGC-Cadillac was the last event the Tour played at a Donald Trump-owned property; the championship’s sponsor stepped away that summer, the field went to Mexico City, and Doral spent the intervening years building a different kind of relationship with professional golf. The political weather around all of that has changed several times in the decade since, the LIV-PGA Tour conversation has gone in several directions, and at the end of all of it the Tour has decided that the cleanest way to add an early-spring signature event in Florida is to play one at the course that gave the calendar a Florida swing for fifty-four consecutive seasons before the relationship lapsed. The Blue Monster has been there the whole time. The conversation around it has done all the moving.
What the Tour gets back
Doral was the kind of stop that did not need to be advertised. From 1962 through 2016, more or less every March, the best players who happened to be in America gathered at the Blue Monster, hit shots into wind that came off Biscayne Bay in a way no other Florida course quite matches, and produced a leaderboard that filled itself in by Sunday with the names you expected to see on it. Adam Scott, who won the last edition in 2016, plays the field this week as the field’s only previous Doral champion. He earned his start through the Aon Next 10 ranking, and although he is not the favourite to win again, the fact that the only player who has held the trophy here is back to defend it adds a continuity to the proceedings that the Tour clearly wanted.
The Hanse renovation that was completed before the 2014 season is the version of the Blue Monster that this week’s field will see. The bones of the old Dick Wilson layout from 1962 are still recognisably there. The corridors are still wide where they were always wide and tight where the bay or the canals or a strategically placed lake were always making things tight. What Hanse did was steepen the bunkers, recontour the greens, and add a back tee or two on the holes the modern professional had outgrown. The result is a 7,739-yard par-72 that plays longer than its number on the days when the wind comes up off the water, which it usually does. The old WGC version was won at fifteen under in 2016, and the redrawn course is unlikely to give up much more than that this week unless the conditions soften.
Scheffler favoured, again
The world number one arrives in Miami the way the world number one usually arrives anywhere: a clear betting favourite at around three to one, fresh off two consecutive runner-up finishes, and apparently in the form of his career. Scheffler has spoken this week about the strangeness of being world number one through a stretch in which the player ranked second has won three of the last four events he has entered. Matt Fitzpatrick is not in this field. Neither is Rory McIlroy, who is taking the week off, nor Ludvig Aberg, who has elected to skip a Florida start ahead of the PGA Championship at Aronimink in three weeks’ time. The thinning at the top of the leaderboard is not vast, but it is real, and Scheffler will start the tournament as the only player in the field with the recent pedigree to be considered untouchable on a typical week.
He has also confirmed that he will take the week after Doral off, a quietly significant piece of scheduling. The PGA Championship at Aronimink begins on the 21st, and a back-to-back Doral-then-PGA fortnight, particularly with the Florida humidity that the Blue Monster routinely produces, is the sort of build-up no one his caddie’s age would have planned. By going light through the week of the fifth, he gives himself a longer runway than most of his rivals will have.
A field with a top end and a shape
Behind Scheffler the field reads as a roughly accurate snapshot of the post-Masters Tour, with one obvious gap. Tommy Fleetwood is here, defending his FedEx Cup of last summer and looking for the breakthrough win that the field has been waiting for him to convert into for two seasons. Cameron Young, who won the Players in March, is the second betting favourite, a number that suggests the bookmakers think Doral suits him more than most. Collin Morikawa, Justin Rose, Russell Henley, and Chris Gotterup are all in the field. Justin Thomas, who finished runner-up to Fitzpatrick at Harbour Town two weeks ago, is back. Alex Fitzpatrick, fresh off the Zurich Classic win that secured his Tour card and his Cadillac start in the same Sunday afternoon, is in the field for the first time at a signature event.
The gap is at the very top. McIlroy, the back-to-back Masters champion, is taking a planned rest week. Aberg has been similarly rationing his April starts. Matt Fitzpatrick, the player whose form would in any other week make him second favourite to Scheffler, is in Sheffield with his brother. The cumulative effect is that the leaderboard at Doral on Sunday will almost certainly contain only one of the three players who could plausibly have arrived as Scheffler’s clearest equal. That player is Cameron Young, and his game has been, since the Players, the closest thing the Tour has to a second tier.
The course and the question
The Blue Monster’s reputation, before Hanse’s work, was that it was a long course set up to reward bombers, with greens flat enough to make the par-fives reachable and the par-fours soft. Hanse’s revisions went in the other direction. The greens were recontoured to introduce subtle ridges that punish approach shots from above the hole, the bunkers were made deep enough that recovery from sand is no longer a free shot, and the par-fives were lengthened to the point where a player needs to commit to attacking them with a long iron rather than drift in with a wedge after a layup. The result is a course that no longer favours one shape of player over another, and that produces winning scores roughly five shots higher than the pre-Hanse version did at the same wind.
The question this week, the first time the redesigned Blue Monster will be tested by a full PGA Tour field of this quality, is which kind of player it has now started to favour. The LIV editions of the past four seasons have produced winners who were either short-game wizards or strokes-gained-approach leaders, with the bombers oddly absent from the trophy ceremonies. Whether that pattern survives the demands of a signature event with no cut, no shotgun, and no team component is the genuine sporting interest of the week. A win for Scheffler would tell us very little we did not already know. A win for someone like Russell Henley, whose game has the ball-striking precision the new Blue Monster appears to reward, would tell us rather more.
The Cadillac Championship deserves the place on the calendar that it has been given back, and the Tour deserves credit for sorting out the scheduling and the politics in a way that has produced a March-feeling event in late April. The trophy that is presented on Sunday afternoon will go to a player who has not won at this course before, simply because almost no one in the field has played a competitive round on it. What follows from there is the question of whether the Blue Monster can become, again, the early-season fixture that produces the year’s best leaderboard. The first answer to that question arrives on Sunday evening.