Hazeltine: A hackers guide
Kimmo Ekroth is the world’s worst 9 handicapper and thankfully won’t be representing Europe in this weeks biennial match up.
He is though one of the best travelled golfers we know, one look at his Instagram @ekekimmo will give you and idea of how our Finnish friend spends most of his time.
He has recently incorporated luxury golf travel business www.golftraveller.com so others can benefit from his expertise.
As part of his job on a crucial familiarisation trips to Hazeltine he had the privilege of playing the course. We caught with him after that, here are his pretty special pictures from the trip and his top 5 things to watch out for as the action unfolds this weekend:
1) Fast, like really Fast greens
The bent green grass greens are super slick, I would would expect them to play a key part. So maybe a good putter who thrives on fast greens will do well.
2) Swing Holes
The 7th is a short par 4 and definitely a birdie opportunity and the 10th plays severely downhill so they will have short clubs in, could be lots of halves in 3’s. Of the others, the 12th is one where par might be enough to win a hole.
3) The Par 3’s are a strength
They are a definite strength of the course, bags of diversity and they have lots of options to move tees around, 13 can get out to nearly 300 yards – which seems crazy to me!
3) Hazeltine is Huge!
It is a massive golf course, as a Trent Jones Snr design it is not that old and almost feels like a purpose built golf stadium with the club house high on the hill overlooking the whole property
4) Should be a birdie fest..
There are definitely lots of birdies out there, with multiple scoring holes, not that I took of advantage of any, but then I never do….
