That should be—and probably will be—the last major championship we see at Valhalla.
As much as I enjoyed seeing Xander Schauffele wrestling the PGA Championship away from Bryson DeChambeau and Viktor Hovland during a dramatic back-nine showdown, Valhalla is not worthy of major championship golf.
It’s no judgment on the city of Louisville or the state of Kentucky, which has provided outstanding support of four PGA Championships dating back to 1996. Hospitality sale records were broken this year. The fans were enthusiastic.
The problem is in other areas.
On the financial side, the PGA of America, which bought Valhalla in 2000, sold the property in 2022 and have built a course at their headquarters in Frisco, Texas, which will soon begin intermittent hosting duties (2027, 2034 and beyond). There is a lot less incentive for them to go back to Valhalla, which effectively turned into a lame duck host. The tournament is heading to larger markets in the coming years—areas like Charlotte, Philadelphia, Dallas, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C.
The logistics were a nightmare even before—and I still haven’t processed this—the best golfer in the world was arrested by what appears to be an overzealous cop who escalated a harmless situation. The PGA Championship’s footprint has been getting larger over the years, and it’s reasonable to think that some of Valhalla’s infrastructure is no longer appropriate.
And on a note more specific to the golf itself, this is no longer a major championship golf course.
While the leaderboards at Valhalla’s four PGA Championships have induced drama, the golf shots themselves are rarely interesting. It’s a badly designed layout with strings of indistinguishable holes. The greens are flat and simple. The fairways are easy to hit. Consequences for missing in the wrong spot are minimal.
Yes, soft conditions contributed. But a firmer course wouldn’t hide deficiencies on this level.
That was underscored with some jarring stats. Before yesterday, no major championship had surrendered multiple scores of 20-under or lower. Schauffele’s 21-under was the best mark relative to par in major history. And according to Justin Ray, this year’s tournament had a 214-under combined total amongst the field. The previous best scoring in PGA Championship history was 40-over at Riviera in 1995.
More than 250 shots!
I don’t mind the low scoring on its own, but it needs to come with meaningful punishment for poor golf shots. We consistently saw bad shots end up in totally fine places, and that isn’t major championship golf.
When Schauffele hit a nasty rope hook on the par-4 second, the rough caught it before it reached the water. When his second shot went long, it funneled back into a bunker, leaving him a simple shot that he hit to a few inches. Similar situations—like Schauffele hitting two decidedly mediocre shots on the 17th only to be faced with the most basic up and down possible—were happening all over the place.
DeChambeau said he had his B-game at Valhalla and shot 20-under.
There just wasn’t any teeth to the course. At no point did it feel likeplayers could go backwards unless they completely melted down.
I know a lot of people don’t care about any of that. They want drama down the stretch with great characters. We got that at Valhalla. Schauffele went out and won it—he’s a deserving winner. So was Mark Brooks in 1996, Tiger Woods in 2000 and Rory McIlroy in 2014. They all won in memorable finishes.
But I think it’s important to note that great leaderboards and enjoying a golf tournament doesn’t equal a great golf course. You could put this field on a $20 muni anywhere across America and get a great leaderboard.
It’s one of the oddities of the game—the best major venues separate great golf from good golf, giving us a worthy winner who often shines above the rest. Worse venues often get packed leaderboards. Everyone is hitting to the same spots, taking the same strategy.
We only get four majors per year, and one of them is at the same course every year. We need variety. There is a place in major championship golf for a “turkey shoot” kind of major where going low is more encouraged—where pure entertainment value has just as much of a pull as a course being an exacting test of golf—but it needs to live in an arena where good shots are rewarded and bad shots are punished.
Valhalla is not that place, and I don’t think we’re going to be seeing it in the future regardless of how I feel.
We’ll remember Valhalla for the players and the finishes—and it’s been remarkably fortunate in that way—but we won’t remember it (positively) for the test.
Can it host a regular PGA Tour venue? Absolutely. Another major? Not a chance.
There may have been a time when Valhalla was more of a stern test, but that wasn’t when players were reaching 196 mph ball speed (as DeChambeau did Sunday) and hitting short irons into 500-yard par-4s.
I’m sure there are some people who enjoy when a course doesn’t have any reasonable defense, but there has to be some line drawn with how we identify the best golfer at a major. We have the entire rest of the year to encourage throwing darts and not punishing bad shots if the PGA Tour or any other league wants to do that.
The majors deserve to be something more.
And with that, it’s time to wave goodbye to Valhalla.
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