A confession up front. The best round of tournament golf I have watched in years was the 2024 Open at Royal Troon, which measured 7,385 yards on the card, which is long enough, but every major since has pushed past 7,500 and the conversation has pushed along with them. More length. More rough. More bunkers. More elevated tees to add more length. The modern professional calendar has developed a kind of yardage anxiety, as if a course that does not break 7,400 is somehow failing to hold up against the players.
This week the Tour is at Harbour Town, which measures 7,213 yards off the tips, and the winning score last year was eighteen under. Nobody has suggested the course needs lengthening. The reason is that Harbour Town asks questions yardage cannot answer — where do you want this ball to land, what shape will get it there, and can you hold your nerve when the green is smaller than the back of a station wagon — and the answers are more interesting than any you will get on a 7,600-yard bomber’s paradise. It is, in the simplest terms, a better test of the game.
The distance arms race has misdiagnosed the problem
The argument for lengthening golf courses has always been that the professional game has grown too powerful for the classic designs. Augusta added a new back tee at the 13th. The USGA has leaned on bent tees and rope-lined fairways so heavily that the US Open course setup is now its own genre. The R&A has moved through the great links rotation adding tees where tees can be added. The stated rationale is player safety, competitive balance, and preserving the identity of the hole. The unstated rationale is that nobody wants Bryson DeChambeau reaching the 5th at St Andrews with a driver and a wedge.
The problem with that rationale is that adding yardage rarely fixes the issue. It makes the holes longer, but the players are longer too, and in five years the hole plays the same as it did before the tee got moved. What lengthening does change is the golf course’s character. You can feel it walking Augusta now — holes that used to reward the angles reward the distance, and the players who used to be able to contend on feel and touch now have to play a different, blunter kind of golf. The course has been bent towards the big hitters. And it is not even clear the big hitters find it harder.
What short courses actually require
Short courses have one advantage that no long course can replicate, which is that they cannot be overpowered. A driver on every hole is not a strategy at Harbour Town. A driver on every hole at Pebble Beach is a strategy that will lose you the tournament by Friday. These are courses that force the player to think about where the ball should land before they think about how far to hit it, and thinking about the landing zone is the thing that separates good golf from the video-game version of it we have slid into.
The consequence is that the best short courses produce more interesting winners. Harbour Town’s list from the past decade — Fitzpatrick, Cantlay, Burns, Morikawa, Spieth, Thomas — is a list of shot-makers rather than bombers. The Players, at TPC Sawgrass and a touch over 7,200 yards, produces the same kind of list. Pebble Beach, where the Open returns in 2027 at a playing length that will barely crack 7,100, tends to be won by the best complete golfer in the field rather than the longest one.
Meanwhile, on the bomber’s courses, the same four or five names keep winning. This is often celebrated as a sign of the game’s meritocracy, that the best players rise to the top. It is more accurate to say that when you design every major venue to reward the same skill, the players who are best at that skill will keep winning. That is not a meritocracy. That is a selection bias.
The obsession that does not serve the viewer
There is a television argument for short courses that nobody makes often enough. Golf on television is best when the leaderboard is unstable, which is another way of saying when the course rewards creativity more than it rewards power. The 2024 Masters that Scheffler won was a fine tournament; the 2023 Masters that Jon Rahm won was a better one; the 2019 Masters that Tiger Woods won was the best I have watched, and all three were played on essentially the same course. What made the 2019 tournament better was that Augusta gave up birdies and eagles in clusters, and the final-round charge is more exciting when players who are four back actually believe they can win.
Short courses give up birdies and eagles in clusters. Long, narrow, penal courses give up pars and bogeys in clusters, which is not the same kind of television. The US Opens that are remembered fondly are almost all played on venues where the leaderboard moved on Sunday. The US Opens that are remembered with a shrug are the ones where someone made nothing but pars and won by four. Setup matters. Length is usually the thing that stops the setup from doing its job.
The counter-argument, and why it does not hold
The obvious counter-argument is that the modern player has simply outgrown the classic venues, that 330-yard drives have broken the old courses, that the professional game has to be played at its own length. I do not find this persuasive. The professional game has always grown past the courses of the previous generation. Jack Nicklaus outgrew the courses designed for Ben Hogan, and the courses of Hogan’s era were not torn up and lengthened beyond recognition. They were allowed to keep being what they were, and the players who could adapt to them kept winning. The idea that the 2020s are uniquely different feels more like a rolling excuse than a diagnosis.
The better response to distance is to make length count for less, not for more. Firmer fairways. Greens tilted so that the short-iron approach is not the advantage people think it is. Pin positions that punish aggressive lines off the tee. This is how Harbour Town has stayed relevant for fifty years without a major redesign, and how the Old Course has stayed relevant for five centuries. You do not have to make the course longer. You have to make the course’s questions harder to answer with brute force.
The case for a Harbour Town season
It is not seriously proposed that every Tour stop should be 7,200 yards. Some weeks the players should play long venues and let the big hitters win, and that is fine. But the Tour calendar as it stands leans heavily towards the 7,500-plus designs, and the short stops — Harbour Town, Colonial, Pebble Beach in its February incarnation — stand out each year as the weeks that produce the most varied winners and the most interesting golf to watch. A calendar with more of those weeks would be better for the players, better for the viewers, and better for the courses themselves, which are being bullied into a length they were never designed to carry.
The shot-makers deserve more weeks that belong to them. The bombers already have enough. Harbour Town, this week, is a useful reminder that a 7,213-yard golf course can hold a Tour field to a winning score in the high teens under par and still feel, from the first tee to the 18th, like a genuine test. That is worth defending. And the game would be richer if there were more of it.