ATLANTA — The clubhouse at East Lake Golf Club is a shrine to Bobby Jones, the great amateur golfer who is likely known more for founding Augusta National a few hours down the road or winning the Grand Slam.
But Jones got his start in the game here, where numerous trophies, prizes, mementos and photographs adorn the walls and hallways.
It is where he honed his game, where he is said to have played his first and last rounds and why the course came into prominence, having been redesigned by Donald Ross in 1913.
A local charitable group went to great lengths in the early 1990s to revitalize the neighborhood and the PGA Tour came in a few years later to bring its season-ending Tour Championship to the venue—first on an every-other-year basis and annually since 2004.
Since 2007 it has been home to the FedEx Cup’s final event, with a bonus pool of $100 million this year and $25 million going to the winner.
And to get it this year, the 30-man field will be playing virtually a new golf course.
The routing of East Lake remains the same but most of the holes look completely different.
A restoration began soon after Viktor Hovland won last year’s Tour Championship that concluded in June. Nobody played the course until recently and the 30 players who are in the field for this week’s tournament are somewhat amazed at what they are seeing.
“As soon as I walked on the property, I was kind of shocked,” said Hovland, who last year won the BMW Championship and the Tour Championship on his way to capturing the FedEx Cup title. “It looks nothing like it used to.
“Seems like he's basically changed every single hole out there. It was just kind of wild how much you can actually change the holes with not really moving holes around. It's all kind of in the same place, but yet none of the holes look exactly the same.”
“He” would be Andrew Green, a golf course architect who also redesigned Oak Hill Country Club, site of last year’s PGA Championship and also a Ross course.
Green got into the weeds of trying to restore the course to the way Ross originally designed it. He went into the club archives. He studied government topographical maps, including ones he found from 1949. He noticed numerous areas where the course has been changed over the years and wanted to get it back as close as possible.
“We would want something (photos) in the ’30s or maybe late ’20s, but because the resolution in ’49 was so crystal clear, you can zoom in and start to see shadows and edges, and we paired that with a set of photos we had right before (architect) George Cobb did his work, before the (1963) Ryder Cup, and now we've painted a complete picture of how things sat on the ground,” Green said.
“So you'll just see little hints. A good example would be the first green used to sit right on the boundary, right on the road. We would never put it right on the road again. Its shift created the two levels that mimic the two different greens that were at totally different elevations originally.
“So just a way to kind of use it as a part of the story, try to hold as much of the original intent as we can, but obviously things have changed.”
So much so that Xander Schauffele is treating it as a brand new golf course.
Schauffele is entering the Tour Championship second in FedEx Cup points behind Scottie Scheffler, meaning he’s two shots behind in the staggered-strokes format used for the event.
Three times, Schauffele has shot the low 72-hole score at East Lake, but only once—in 2017—did he get a trophy. That’s when he was the winner of the Tour Championship and there was a separate title for the FedEx Cup champ, won by Justin Thomas.
Now the event has just one winner, and Schauffele has been close, although he feels his advantage on a course he liked is gone.
“It’s just a new golf course,” Schauffele said. “Kind of a glass-half-full guy, so I've played a lot of new courses this year that I've done O.K. at, and this is a brand new property. Literally the bunkers are new, the grasses are new in the fairways, the greens are new, the grass on the greens are new, the runouts are different, the slopes are different.
“I think the only thing that's the same are the directions of the hole. Whatever record I had is the past. I have no memory or anything really on any hole to go off of, not even a tree I could aim at that I used to aim at. It's just that different.
“To me, it's got the same name; it's East Lake Golf Club. It's in the same property, similar square footage. But that's about it.”
Scheffler might welcome the change a bit more. He’s never quite felt comfortable at East Lake. Each of the past two years, he came into the Tour Championship as the points leader and didn’t win.
He’s in the same position now.
“I felt like I hadn’t played my best golf here,” Scheffler said. “So coming here this year, year, seeing a fresh golf course that I think is going to be really challenging I think will suit me pretty well out there.”
Among the biggest changes to the course was the 14th hole being changed to a par-5, making the course now a par-71.
“I could probably try to describe a person that's never been here before what it used to look like, and it's almost like you can't imagine it,” Hovland said. “It'll be interesting to kind of get used to it, that's for sure.
“Just from being here four or five times before and just remembering what it used to be, I just think it was a way more kind of simplistic golf course before. It was simple but it was very, very good. I'm still a little bit biased towards what it used to be.
“But I understand the whole look of the golf course, as soon as I stepped foot here and saw the green areas and stuff, I thought, O.K., this is a major championship golf course. That seems like what he's tried to do with the place.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as For the Tour Championship, 30 Players Will Take on a New East Lake Golf Club.
