When Mark Rolfing was recently at SentryWorld in Wisconsin, there was snow scattered throughout the majestic, 18-hole parkland golf course on the city’s north side.
The snow will be gone and the course will look considerably different when the longtime Golf Channel and NBC broadcaster returns this summer as an analyst for the U.S. Senior Open, which will be contested at SentryWorld from June 29 to July 2.
Rolfing thinks the course, which has undergone massive renovation the past two years to get ready for one of the USGA’s flagship events, will be a great test for the best senior golfers in the world and believes it will be the blueprint for future major championship golf venues.
Rolfing, who is an ambassador for Sentry Insurance, talked with USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin about SentryWorld hosting the major championship, Wisconsin becoming a golf destination, LIV Golf, the proposed rollback of the golf ball to limit distance, the future of the PGA Tour and more.
What kind of venue do you think SentryWorld is going to be for the best senior golfers this summer?
“It is going to be a phenomenal venue. The course itself is going to be a great championship test and I really believe that what you’re going to see here at SentryWorld is the future of championship golf, because it’s not an overly long course. It’s going to be set up quite difficult, putting a real premium on driving accuracy. The fairways are going to be narrow, the rough is going to be high, and this is the way that championship golf at any level is going to go in the future because we’re going to run out of land and run out of water on this planet, and you can’t built 8,000-yard courses. By the time you start thinking about how to do that, they won’t be long enough. And, by the way, the longer you build a course the more it’s going to be to the advantage of the bigger hitters. So I think wide fairways and low roughs and things like that for championship golf are going to start changing. These are more the kinds of tests you are going to see, a SentryWorld kind of test. This course is going to put more premium on driving, I think, than any venue I’ve seen in quite some time. Driving is going to be the most important thing out here.”
How tough a test and how challenging can they make SentryWorld?
“I don’t think they want to make it too tough, obviously. But I think they want to showcase what I would call the other aspects of a golf course than just aesthetics. Typically, when you think of SentryWorld you think of the Flower Hole. You think of the beautiful area of lakes. Shots like that, aesthetic type shots. What is really undervalued out here, I think, is how good the shot values of these holes are. It’s a really well-balanced course. It’s not going to favor any kind of particular player. It reminds me, in a lot of ways believe it or not, of TPC Sawgrass. It doesn’t look like it, but it’s going to play very similar to that course in that it doesn’t favor any particular style player. It doesn’t favor a long-hitter. It doesn’t favor a straight hitter. It doesn’t favor a right-to-left player, a left-to-right player. It pretty much tests all the values of a guy’s game and, to me, that’s the best evidence of the quality of a course. We don’t really hear much about SentryWorld’s shot values on these holes. There’s some tremendous shot values out there.”
What do you think of the Flower Hole?
“I like the Flower Hole a lot. I think it’s always kind of been the handle of SentryWorld and I like that. I sometimes think we see too much of the Flower Hole that takes away from how good the rest of the course is, and I think that’s what this tournament is going to do. What NBC is going to show you is how good the 17 other holes are. There’s been a new tee added at the Flower Hole. Before it was just a simple short iron shot, but I think with rough grown in around the green it’s going to play tough. There’s some difficult hole locations. The biggest issue that I’ve kind of got right now with the Flower Hole is how are you going to deal with balls going in the flowers? What we’re hearing is that the balls are going to be taken out of the flowers and there will be drop areas, which you have to make sure that you have an equivalent kind of test for a ball from the drop area as you do from the flowers. So let’s say a guy hits a ball into the flowers and has a really good lie in there and wants to play it. And the answer is, ‘No, you can’t play it. You have to take it out and drop it over here.’ But you’re dropping it in the 4-inch rough. I don’t know. To me that would be an issue. The other thing is typically you would have to find and identify your ball in the flowers in order to take it to a drop area. What nobody wants is a bunch of people tromping around in the flowers trying to find a player’s ball and identify it. That’s going to be kind of a big question mark, in my mind, is how they deal with the flower area in terms of how you proceed.”
In some ways will it be kind of similar to the 17th at Sawgrass?
“Isn’t that the truth? It’s going to play like the 17th because the one thing you cannot do is go long. That’s why those back hole locations at 17 at The Players are so hard, because you can’t get the ball back there. I think almost all the shots that you’ll see into the Flower Hole green are going to be short, on the front part of the green. You’re not going to be able to afford to go long during a U.S. Open, that’s for sure.”
You grew up in the Midwest. Did you ever envision a time when Wisconsin would become a golf destination with SentryWorld, Sand Valley, Whistling Straits and many others?
“Never dreamt of it. All I ever thought about with Wisconsin was fishing and being able to drink beer when I was 18 years old. I loved coming to Wisconsin. Never went to Michigan. I was never much of a Michigan guy, which had a lot of the really good destination golf. But, man, Wisconsin has come flying by Michigan as far as I’m concerned. It’s just an amazing transformation of the game. To see the different styles of play in Wisconsin now — you take a look at Whistling Straits and then you go to Erin Hills and then you go to Lawsonia and Sand Valley and SentryWorld, there is such a tremendous variety of the characteristics of golf here. You can come here for a week very easily and almost feel like you’re going to different parts of the world almost.”
With the PGA Tour returning to a calendar year schedule in 2024, how much more attention do you think the season-opening Sentry Tournament of Champions in Hawaii will get since it will truly be starting off the new season?
“It’s going to be Opening Day. I think the Sentry Tournament of Champions will be Opening Day or something like that. The anticipation level is going to be huge. If you think about this designated events schedule that they have, the top 50 are going to be determined at the end of August. So you’re going to have September, October, November, December. You’re going to have four months without a designated event. So I think that’s kind of good. I actually think in sports, the fans need an offseason almost more than the players. You look, for example, why the NFL is so effective I think is having all that time off. The fans are so lathered up by the time that September comes around. In golf, the last couple decades we’ve been playing every single week of the year and we haven’t created this demand in the spectators’ and fans’ mind. Now, they’re going to have a few months off of really serious big-time golf and that’s going to just make Maui that much better, I think.”
About a year ago you said the PGA Tour and LIV Golf were “in a battle for the heart and soul of golf.” A year later, do you feel better about the situation and about the PGA Tour considering the rival league?
“I feel better about it now than I did then. I went from being sad to mad and I was pretty worried at the time. I had no idea that the PGA Tour was going to be able to react as swiftly and as strongly as they have. I’m really proud of the way this whole thing has unfolded, because really what’s happened is there has been a gigantic shift in the power base on the PGA Tour and that shift has gone from the sort of philosophy of whatever is best for the 150th best player, we need to create playing opportunities, things like that. That was kind of what the thought process has been for a long time. Frankly, whatever was best for Michael Jordan was best for the 12th man on the end of that bench. The top players now pretty much have the power base and came together last July or August and said, ‘Look, we will play more events. We want to play against each other. We want to play for more money and all that.’ But this swiftness of change in the PGA Tour would not have happened without LIV. Has the PGA Tour won? Not yet. But they certainly, I think, have accomplished a lot. My biggest concern is the fracturing amongst the players and fans, and I think that’s got to stop. Golf is too much of a niche sport to have divided allegiances. One of the reasons why golf doesn’t have the same kind of rivalries as the other sports is that golf typically has only a few villains. And right now, the PGA Tour doesn’t have many villains anymore. They’re all gone. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. I think having a (Bryson) DeChambeau or a (Brooks) Koepka or a (Patrick) Reed is probably somewhat good for the PGA Tour. But having said that, I don’t think it’s really going to be good long-term this sort of fracturing of golf at the highest level. Something’s got to give here. I thought there was a time when they would get together and figure it out, but that’s not going to happen. Somebody’s going to win here, somebody’s going to lose.”
Will all of this make the Ryder Cup even more contentious? Do you think it will make it even more interesting to fans?
“What I’m worried about with the Ryder Cup is whether or not it will be competitive. The LIV players can’t play on the European team. What is that going to do to the quality of the competition? Europe’s pretty bare in the cupboard at the bottom of their lineup right now. In that respect, I’m kind of hoping the best players play. On the other hand, for the U.S. the problem-makers are kind of gone. Nobody could figure out who they were going to pair with DeChambeau at Whistling Straits or Koepka for that matter or whatever. I don’t know. I think that golf is the kind of game that we don’t need this division, whether it’s good or bad. It might attract the fringe audience that wouldn’t otherwise be there, but for the most part it’s not good.”
Do you think the distance dilemma needs to be addressed? Is it more in golf course design or maybe smaller drivers, things like that? Is the golf ball rollback a good idea?
“I’m not a fan right now. I will say this, I don’t know either side of the discussion is wrong. I can see positives and negatives on both sides. But what I don’t quite understand is what is the problem here? I really am hoping somebody can tell me what’s the problem that we’re trying to address by rolling the golf ball back. I haven’t had an amateur golfer come to me in a decade and say, ‘I’m quitting the game, I’m just hitting the ball too far and I’m not having any fun.’ Haven’t had that happen once. So now we’re talking about .0001% of elite players. Wasn’t that fun watching Rory McIlroy do some of the stuff he did in Austin (at the match play tournament)? I think it was. So, I don’t really quite understand what the problem is. I’m glad that the stewards of the game are thinking about that, but I don’t know that rolling back the ball is the only answer. There’s a lot of reasons why the ball’s going so far that don’t have anything to do with the golf ball. It needs a lot more study, a lot more discussion, a lot more figuring out how it would actually be implemented. I don’t think we’re there yet on definitively being able to say this is a good idea or a bad idea.”
We’ve talked about some of the things that aren’t great with golf right now. But by all measures, golf is as popular now as it has ever been, especially coming out of the pandemic. How excited are you about the future of not just the PGA Tour but the game of golf in general?
“I am very optimistic about the game and where it’s headed. I hope everybody involved in the game does stop and take a look back at the time during COVID, because I believe that we have three primary challenges with the golf industry in general: No. 1, the game is too difficult, primarily for beginning golfers. No. 2, it takes too long to play. And No. 3, it costs too much. And if you look at COVID and that period, all three of those issues were dealt with. Rules were amended, the time of play changed, discounts were being offered. I hope we don’t now forget about that and go in the direction saying, ‘Oh, things are really good, let’s keep jacking the prices up or building longer golf courses that take longer to play.’ I really hope we learned something from COVID. That was a benchmark time for the golf industry and showed what a great game it is that golf could survive that.”
