Lucas Glover tears into Caves Valley Golf Club on SiriusXM: 'I feel sorry for the members'
Lucas Glover, the 2009 U.S. Open winner who isn’t afraid to share his thoughts, wasn’t a big fan of host Caves Valley Golf Club during last week’s BMW Championship. The six-time PGA Tour winner hosted a new episode of his SiriusXm PGA Tour Radio show this week and said, “I feel sorry for the members that have to play that now, because it’s virtually unplayable.”
Caves Valley outside Baltimore was designed by Tom Fazio and opened in 1991. It is ranked by Golfweek’s Best as the No. 6 private club in Maryland. The PGA Tour played the layout in the 2021 BMW Championship as part of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and Patrick Cantlay and Bryson DeChambeau tied at 27 under par with Cantlay going on to win the playoff. Soft conditions that week favored low scoring.
Fazio and consultant Buddy Marucci, a former U.S. Amateur champion, led a renovation of the course in 2023 with the goal of toughening up the course before the Tour returned this year. Fairways were narrowed, the course was stretched to 7,601 yards, all the greens were rebuilt and a Precision-Aire system was installed beneath the greens to help create firmer conditions. The course did play tougher this year, with World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler winning at 15 under par.
But at what cost? The course still played soft, Glover said, because it’s the middle of summer and bent grass greens typically must be kept damp in hot weather. Glover – who tied for 40th at 5 over at Caves Valley and failed to advance to this week’s Tour Championship – had many thoughts, as seen in the excerpts from his SiriusXM show below:
Not to have come off as sour grapes here, but I have never in my 21 years heard the consensus from the field being unhappy with the golf course. Usually it’s split. You know, if it’s not great, you’ll have half the field (say), “That’s not bad,” and the other half “It sucks,” or whatever. But I think it was pretty much everybody didn’t really like Caves Valley. And it’s a shame because it’s a heck of a place. …
It’s a shame that because the tournament in 2021 was in August in Baltimore, and it’s hot and it was soft, and 20 something under (par) played off, that they decided to redo it just to make it more difficult for the PGA Tour. And harder doesn’t always mean better, is the best way I could say it. And it seemed like a very lazy renovation. He just changed a couple of par 5s to par 4s, added 500 to 600 yards and changed most of the greens and made them crazy, literally crazy. And it’s a shame, because that’s such a great place, such a great experience. And I left there baffled and feeling very sorry for their membership, because it’s sad that that’s what people think is good golf and good golf course design now. …
And I’ll give you a great example. That shot Scottie made on 17 (a pitch-in birdie), which was an unbelievable shot. If he gets that wrong, A, it could have gone in the water. B, it could have gone off the green to the left. C, why are we playing the hole there? (It’s) 215 yards, there’s three more tee boxes ahead of it, and the pin is 3 off the right on a side slope of about 4 percent grade because there was nowhere else to put the pin. We’d already used the other three. That green’s thousands of square feet big, and we had three and a half hole locations. Does that make it a good green? No, it’s terrible. …
And we had a Tour event there, and it doesn’t shock me that the best player in the world won, because obviously he’s mentally the best and physically the best, and he could handle it and deal with it. But there were just some crazy, crazy, crazy things that they did to that golf course. And it’s a shame, because unbelievable experience, great food, great staff, great locker room, great everything. And from a Tour player perspective, it didn’t do the place any justice to have to play that that way.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Lucas Glover critical of Caves Valley renovation after BMW Championship
