The PGA Tour makes its annual trek to Texas this week for the Shell Houston Open at the Tournament Course at Redstone Golf Club. Itís always a fun event and well worth attending.
After a rocky divorce from The Woodlands and its popular TPC Course, as well as a difficult transition period in which most of the best PGA Tour players avoided the event, the 2009 tournament attracted the best field in the history of the event. The 2010 tournament has followed that up with an arguably an even stronger field as six of the the top 10 players in the World Rankings are playing. As a result, the field is as good as any of the non-major, non-World Golf Championship events on the Tour.
Phil Mickelson (3), Lee Westwood (4), defending SHO champ Paul Casey (5), Martin Kaymer (8), Ernie Els (9) and Padraig Harrington (10) lead the field, while Rory McIlroy (12), Geoff Ogilvy (14), Luke Donald (20), Hunter Mahan (21), Lucas Glover (25), Charl Schwartzel (26), Anthony Kim (27), PGA champ Y.E. Yang (29), Masters champ Angel Cabrera (32) and Vijay Singh (34) are other well-known Tour members in the field. In addition, local fan favorites such as past SHO winners Fred Couples, Adam Scott and Stuart Appleby are playing.
The first Houston Open was in 1922 and the tournament is tied with the Texas Open as the third oldest non-major championship on the PGA Tour behind only only the Western Open (1899) and the Canadian Open (1904). This is the fifth Houston Open to be played on the Tournament Course and the eighth event overall at Redstone, which hosted its first three Houston Opens on the club’s Jacobson-Hardy Course while the Tournament Course was being built.
This is the SHO’s fourth year of being played the week before The Masters and the strong field is further confirmation that the tournamentís move to the week-before-The Masters-date was the right one. The Houston Golf Association continues to do a good job of promoting the tournament with Tour players by grooming the Tournament Course in a manner similar to Augusta National. However, the course is actually a flat-land course that bears little resemblance to the hilly venues of Augusta.
Even with its superior conditioning, the Tournament Course is a not a favorite of either players or spectators. Although is has a decent variety of interesting holes, the routing of the course is an unmitigated disaster, with 16 of the holes separated by a long walk and a drainage ditch from the 1st and 18th holes, the driving range and the clubhouse.
Unfortunately, there is not much the Houston Golf Association can do about that routing problem, so let’s just hope that the course’s superior conditioning and the SHO’s attractive tune-up date for The Masters keeps prompting the top players to overlook the routing problem. Here are a few tips on watching the tournament at Redstone.
Although I’ve had my doubts that the HGA would be able to turnaround the SHO at Redstone, I’m happy to be wrong on that score. Houston has a rich golfing tradition and the HGA is a fine charitable organization. It’s going to be another great week at Redstone, so sit back and enjoy the SHO!