Why the PGA Tour was forced to add internal out of bounds at the Tour Championship

You may be watching the coverage from East Lake this week and wondering why there is internal out of bounds in play at the Tour Championship.

The Atlanta golf course, famous for being the home of Bobby Jones and the PGA Tour’s season-ending 30-man playoff since 2004, has undergone extensive renovation in the past 12 months.

Most notable of architect Andrew Green’s changes is around the 10th and 18th holes, where a number of trees that once separated the two fairways have been removed. The fairway at the par-5 finisher has also been narrowed, while the lake that splits it in two has been expanded.

As a result, players turned up at East Lake and soon realised it was safer to play from the 18th tee to the wider, hazard-free 10th fairway, before making their approach to the final green. There was also talk of doing something similar with utilising the 7th fairway when playing the 6th.

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Scottie Scheffler, who tops the FedEx Cup standings and will take a two-shot lead over Xander Schauffele into the tournament, was one of them.

“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,” the world number one explained.

“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.”

As a result, the PGA Tour was forced to act.

A statement read: “For the safety of spectators, players, caddies and everyone on property at East Lake Golf Club, the PGA Tour Rules Committee has established two internal boundaries for this week’s Tour Championship.

“The fairway on No. 7 is out of bounds during play of No. 6, and the fairway on No. 10 is out of bounds during play of No. 18.”

Gary Young, the tournament’s chief referee, added: “This decision was made primarily out of safety concerns, specifically to prevent players from effectively putting people in harm’s way by taking an alternate route. When it sounds like that is going to be a possibility, it necessitates an internal boundary.”

Alex Perry is the Associate Editor of bunkered. A journalist for more than 20 years, he has been a golf industry stalwart for the majority of his career and, in a five-year spell at ESPN, covered every sporting event you can think of. He completed his own Grand Slam at the 2023 Masters, having fallen in love with the sport at his hometown club of Okehampton and on the links of nearby Bude & North Cornwall.

Associate Editor