CASTLE ROCK, Colo. — More than 8,000 yards of golf course on a hillside at an altitude greater than 6,000 feet is no doubt the definition of a good walk spoiled. Ask a caddie. Or a player.
“I was joking with Austin Kaiser [his caddie],” Xander Schauffele said, “saying I might have to intentionally hit more club than some guys off of tees just so I can catch my breath by the time I get to my golf ball. I think if you're first up on some par 3s after a long walk, you might be huffing and puffing a little bit more than normal.”
Throw in a math quiz on every shot and this is the BMW Championship at Castle Pines Golf Club that begins here on Thursday.
The altitude, generally listed as 6,200 feet, presents the greatest challenge aside from catching one’s breath after an uphill walk. Obviously, a golf ball carries farther at altitude than it does at sea level, and the PGA Tour does not often come to the Denver area, this a decade after its last tournament in the area.
“Playing at elevation or at altitude is a little bit of a challenge, depending on the window that you play it, and that's what I felt like these first couple days. We really tried to get a baseline of those things,” Ludvig Aberg said. “Then obviously it's going to affect if you knock it down a little bit or get it up in the air. But I try to keep it very similar. I don't try to complicate it. Try to simplify it and make it very similar to how I treat a normal tournament.”
The PGA Tour calculates that at this altitude, the 8,130 yards, the longest in PGA Tour history, is the equivalent of 7,350 yards at sea level, “fairly standard for the PGA Tour.”
“Definitely you have to pay attention to it,” Patrick Cantlay said. “I think the biggest thing is paying attention to trajectory. If you get the ball a little up in the air, it can go quite a bit further. In general, the landing areas aren't bigger even though the dispersion is going to be bigger.
"There's just a little more emphasis on distance control and controlling your trajectory to make sure you play the right [club]. It's roughly 10 percent, so you get it that 10 percent extra.”
Scottie Scheffler said that he generally will depend on caddie Ted Scott to do the calculations involved in arriving at the proper club selection at this altitude.
“This week he's doing a lot of the math,” Scheffler said. “We have our numbers and how far the ball goes here, and we still have our numbers at home. So we have two ways we're trying to do it, depending on the shot, just to where I know that I can get comfortable with the shot we're trying to hit. Some of that is I have a stock number of what the club goes here, so if my 8-iron goes 165 at home, let's say it'll go like low 180s here, something like that.
“We can do it that way or Teddy can do the percentage just based on the time of day. It also changes based on how long the ball is in the air. Uphill shots the ball doesn't have as much time to fly in the air just based on it being uphill, so it'll be a smaller percentage and then downhill it'll be a bigger percentage.
“There is a lot of work that goes into it, so it's a pretty big adjustment for us.”
Viktor Hovland, meanwhile, actually took his Trackman launch monitor onto the golf course during practice rounds and the pro-am.
“We've just been on the range trying to do some work with seeing how far the ball is going,” he said, “and brought a Trackman out on the golf course and kind of checked every single shot in the pro-am and in the practice round yesterday to see if it matches up from what we saw on the range.”