After tense, brutal stretch, PGA Tour pros embrace 1 big change: Low scores

Back in March, Min Woo Lee earned a career-changing win at the Texas Children’s Houston Open. How have things been going since then?

“It’s been honestly very bad,” Lee said Thursday after his first round at the Rocket Classic. It was a blunt assessment, but fair: since that win, his best finish in seven starts is 49th at the Masters. Lee has limitless firepower but can get wild off the tee, a weakness that has been ruthlessly exposed by the Tour’s exacting tests these last few months.

“I haven’t felt great on the course, especially playing at a course where, when you hit it in the rough, you’ve literally got to hack out,” he continued. “Oakmont, Memorial, most of the Signature Events are just very, very tough. Then you’re nearly playing — instead of four majors, you’re playing more majors because they’re trying to make it as tough as possible.”

That, too, checks out. Since Houston, Lee’s seven starts have come in two majors and five Signature Events. At more forgiving setups, the big-bombing Lee is accustomed to using his driver as a weapon — but it’s been neutralized in recent weeks, with wayward drives negating his length advantage. It also speaks to the setups at the Tour’s biggest events this time of year: they’re very difficult.

A month ago, just 11 players finished their week under par at the Memorial Tournament. Two weeks ago, just one player, J.J. Spaun, finished his week under par at the U.S. Open. We’ve seen plenty of long rounds, hard rounds, frustrated players, tense exchanges. On Thursday at the Rocket Classic, though? Things looked, felt and played very different. And 129 players shot under par.

“I was really excited for this week, I wanted to get to hit in the rough and actually hit onto the green,” Lee said. He hit just seven of 14 fairways but 13 of 18 greens and shot 9-under 63, leaving him T3 after the first round. “I don’t even think I did that much different today and I scored 10 times better than what I have been scoring.”

“More fun and less stressful”

The Tour has been running its top players through a gauntlet of late. Oakmont, where Lee missed the cut two weeks ago, is among the hardest golf courses in the world and played that way for the U.S. Open; players averaged 4.18 strokes over par for the week, by far the highest number of the season. The Masters and PGA also rank inside the year’s top six toughest courses with respect to par, with Quail Hollow (+1.51) and Augusta National (+.81) beating up its big-time attendees.

And Memorial host course Muirfield Village, even as a par 72, averaged +1.38 strokes over par. Thick rough and fast, slopey greens are a tough combination at any level. So when Lee, like many top pros, played the PGA, then the Memorial, then the U.S. Open it felt like playing three majors in a row.

PGA Tour Hardest Courses (2025)

1. Oakmont (U.S. Open): +4.18
2. Torrey Pines South (Farmers Insurance Open): +1.69
3. Quail Hollow (PGA Championship): +1.51
4. Muirfield Village (Memorial Tournament) +1.38
5. Innisbrook (Valspar Championship) +.87
6. Augusta National (Masters) +.81

Players typically expect a relatively chill respite at TPC River Highlands the week after the U.S. Open but even there they were greeted with thicker-than-usual rough, and the winning score of 15 under par proved it a surprisingly tough test.

Which brings us to this week’s Rocket Classic, hosted at Detroit Golf Club, a plenty difficult golf course for you or me but, as scores proved on Thursday, much more welcoming for the best in the world. On Thursday the field averaged 2.9 strokes under par. Should that number hold for the rest of the week it’d be the easiest tournament of the year since the first, the par-73 Plantation Course at Kapalua.

It was no surprise that Lee sounded relieved to be competing on a friendlier field.

“In the long term you want to play the Signature Events, you want to play those events and you want to hit as accurate as possible, but yeah, still trying to figure out driver,” he said. Then he added with a smile: “Yeah, hopefully the PGA Tour can have more courses like this, it would be a bit more fun and less stressful.”

He’s not the only one. Wyndham Clark was in Lee’s group on Thursday and shot six under par. He, too, has been playing mostly Signature Events and majors and he, too, has struggled, most visibly in an incident at Oakmont. Clark finished T5 at Houston and didn’t crack the top 25 again until last week at the Travelers; his stats suggest that misses off the tee have neutralized his distance advantage, too.

“I’ll tell you what, this year’s just been a grind weather-wise and with courses,” Clark said. “You know, each major course has been very difficult … Every Signature Event has been very difficult. So it is very nice to have a course where birdies are more likely, where 2-, 3-under isn’t necessarily a good score where lately it’s been a great score. So it’s nice to see some birdies, it’s nice to watch Min make some because you know they’re out there and it’s nice for us players to sometimes shoot low scores.”

“A lot of wedges”

Two players, Aldrich Potgieter and Kevin Roy, shot 62 on Thursday. And while Potgieter is arguably the longest player on Tour, low scores weren’t exclusively reserved for bombers: another guy who went low was 49-year-old Zach Johnson, one of the Tour’s shorter drivers. He found plenty of fairways — and plenty of short clubs in.

“I mean, a lot of wedges. A lot of like, 9-iron to wedge. And those are scoring clubs for me so I had to take advantage,” he said.

Johnson described his bogey-free 65 as delightfully drama-free.

“Again, it’s boring,” he said. “Get the ball in the fairway, lean on the wedges, hopefully control your spin and make good putts.”

This is where, if you’re an opinionated golf fan, your feelings on right and wrong and “proper tournament golf” come in. When Johnson says “boring” he is not, of course, making any sort of statement about the Rocket Classic as an entertainment product. But it’s interesting to consider how all of those brutal tests and this friendlier one fit into the fabric of the Tour. A recent fan survey found that viewers prefer scores closer to par and that’s a goal of the new-look Tour Championship. (The Signature Events do trend tougher; if you toss out the outlier Sentry they’re about a half-stroke higher per round than non-Signature Tour events, and closer to a stroke if you include majors.) But getting to a score of even par without brutalizing the golf course or the increasingly optimized group of players proves increasingly difficult. As a result, you can wrap plenty of golf’s existential questions into one low-scoring round at the Rocket Classic. How much does par matter? How much do we want to watch players struggle? How do you defend a course without U.S. Open-style rough? Will you wreck pace of play with hard setups? Does the ball go too far? How long do these courses need to be? What’s the most entertaining version of professional golf, anyway?

You can mull those over. Or you can sit back, open-mouthed, and enjoy the birdies, knowing that variety is the spice of life — and that there are tougher tests ahead.

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