W hen the Presidents Cup returns to Canada for just the second time, the
International team will be looking to put up a better fight than the 14½ to 19½ loss to the United States the last time the event was played at The Royal Montreal Golf Club’s Blue Course, in 2007. The Blue won’t offer many different opportunities for improvement: It remains a tight, stringent, shotmaker’s design with tree-lined fairways, thick rough and small elevated greens. Though founded in 1873 and purported to be the oldest in North America, the club has only been playing its current courses, the Blue and Red, since 1959 when it moved from a location in historic Montreal to Ile Bizard seven kilometres west. Dick Wilson built both courses on what was mostly farmland and apple orchards, stuffing the Blue full of doglegs and deep greens requiring precision aerial approaches. Rees Jones, who remembers walking the property as a boy when his father, Robert Trent Jones, interviewed for the job, remodelled the course in 2004 and 2005, though he was respectful of Wilson’s tenets of mid- century architecture (only the 12th and 13th holes were fundamentally altered). Jones and design associate Bryce Swanson have been back to make minor tweaks, but success at the Blue will still come down to how the players navigate the formidable closing stretch where water lurks on the final five holes. Here are three late-game land mines that will help determine the matches. The Royal
Treatment The three holes that will decide the Presidents Cup BY DEREK DUNCAN
DUNKING Water on the final five holes of Royal Montreal’s Blue Course, including the 15th, 16th and 17th (pictured), presents the opportunity for Presidents Cup players to splash balls and sink matches.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 59
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