At this week's Tour Championship, the 30-player field is discovering the newly renovated East Lake Golf Club, with tremendous work done by architect Andrew Green.
Now, they're learning that the PGA Tour is discovering the new course, too, and they're putting internal out of bounds in force for the final event of the FedEx Cup playoffs.
The PGA Tour has notified players that it is creating internal out of bounds. The Tour has noticed players are looking for alternative ways to play the par-5 sixth hole and the par-5 18th hole, namely by playing up the seventh and 10th fairways, respectively. In particular, the new, more menacing shape of the water hazard bisecting the finishing hole has caused players to consider driving well left to open up safer pathways to the green.
With the creation of internal out of bounds, the Tour will all but snuff out any chance of that happening. For players on the sixth hole, the seventh fairway will be considered out of bounds. The same will be true of the 10th fairway for players competing on the 18th hole.
The Tour changed their minds on adding internal out of bounds after thinking initially that the measure would be too much. However, players were openly considering the alternate routes with the removal of trees at East Lake. Scottie Scheffler was one of those players.
“The way they reshaped the fairway there, the fairway crowns like this and it’s a very difficult fairway to hit, and if your ball goes into the right rough and you don’t get a good lie, you have to chip it 10 yards down the fairway because there’s nowhere really to lay up,” Scheffler said. “Before there used to be some opportunity there, where now there’s not. You’re now hitting it across the lake. If you hit it into the right rough, you’re now hitting it over a pond to a fairway that’s pretty narrow. If you hit it in the left rough you probably can’t hold the green from there, and if you don’t get it to the fairway, you’re going to be in the water.
“It seems like a safer play to take all that out of play, hit it down 10. The green is going to be pretty extraordinarily hard to hold anyways with it being a downslope and having a long club in there. It’s more you’re playing for birdies. There is less opportunity I think for eagle than there was before.”
Internal out of bounds functions just like regular out of bounds, which is usually meant to draw a property line for players. If a player hits out of bounds, they must take a one-shot penalty and hit again from the same spot they just hit. It's a harsh penalty. Some courses use internal out of bounds to discourage players from taking routes that fly in the face of the intended architecture or could cause harm to other players and pace of play. This is more common in clubs in the United Kingdom and Ireland, but elite-level professional events have created event-specific internal out of bounds as well.
