LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Here’s the thing about Valhalla Golf Club: No one really knows how to talk about it.
Stepping foot on the Jack Nicklaus-designed property in advance of the 2024 PGA Championship, its massive proportions can overwhelm you. The walk is long and grueling and the holes are spaced out intentionally, as the course was built to accommodate major championship-sized crowds and infrastructure. The front and back nines are divided by a towering white clubhouse, visible from multiple corners of the routing, giving the place a familiar centerpiece.
The two sides of the course are remarkably different. The front nine feels open and expansive, largely due to tree removal and a links-like routing. There’s a split fairway on the par-5 7th. It’s called “Genuine Risk,” and it dares players to take a shorter, more hazardous path on the left-hand side of the hole, closer to the water. The back nine is tight and tree-lined, highlighted by the signature 13th hole par-4 — which features an elevated island green supported by limestones — as well as the par-5 18th and its horseshoe-shaped putting surface.
It’s in impeccable condition for its first major in a decade. The bentgrass fairways were converted to zoysia, a strain that plays firmer and requires less water, during a 2021 renovation. They feel like carpet and always leave the ball perched on top of the spiky blades. Tee boxes have been pushed to their limits, allowing for a 7,600-yard set-up with a 254-yard par-3 on 14. The Kentucky bentgrass rough is dense, but not overly penal.
“It’s all very right in front of you,” Justin Thomas, a Lousiville native, said. “You just have hit your driver really far and really straight and hit your irons well. That seems to be the theme here.”
So Valhalla is an aesthetically pleasing golf course with a few quirky holes. It favors longer hitters and rewards aggressive play. If past results are any indication, players will eat the place up — especially when the greens are soft, which they should be thanks to forecasted conditions.
So what’s the problem? There’s a missing link in the conversation about Valhalla, and it doesn’t have anything to do with scoring, conditions, or even design.
We tend to talk a lot about tradition during major championship weeks. Typically, the venues that host those tournaments are steeped in it. Augusta National. St. Andrews. Oakmont, Pinehurst and Winged Foot are part of the U.S. Open’s recurring visits to the oldest clubs in the country. But it’s not as though PGA Championship venues lack history and legacy. Atlantic Athletic Club, Oak Hill, Baltusrol, and Bellerive — all courses more than a century old — have hosted the major.
A horseshoe-shaped putting surface serves as the finishing hole at Valhalla Golf Club. (Maddie Meyer / PGA of America via Getty Images)
Valhalla just stands in a different category. Valhalla was constructed 38 years ago for a very specific reason. Founder Dwight Gahm, a Louisville businessman, wanted the club to be a “golf-only” facility that could play host to the biggest championships in the sport. They commissioned Nicklaus to lead that mission on the 486 acres of Kentucky land. Decades later, Valhalla has served its intended purpose. The club will host its fourth PGA Championship this week.
It served as the site of the tournament first in 1996, when Mark Brooks won, but then gained more notoriety in 2000 when Tiger Woods completed the third leg of the “Tiger Slam,” and most recently in 2014, when Rory McIlroy won his fourth major. Valhalla also hosted the 2008 Ryder Cup, won by the United States.
For much of its existence, the PGA of America has owned the property. In 2022, a group of Louisville investors bought the course — after the 2024 PGA was scheduled — and it has not yet been added to the list of future PGA Championship venues.
“It has some flash to it,” says Hunter Mahan, who competed on the winning U.S. squad in 2008. “It was really built for entertainment and TV.”
In golf, the best way to stand out as a course is to be either really old or brand new. Show us 100 years of evolution, allure, and challenge. Or unveil something that you can claim no one has ever seen before. Valhalla, which opened in 1986, is in its awkward stage. It’s too new to boast the status of a classic. It isn’t visually striking enough for us to ignore its age, and the design comes from an era of golf architecture that experts don’t exactly laud.
Those quirky risk-reward holes? Many golf architecture experts deride them as unnatural gimmicks. Yet for the past 30 years, Valhalla has consistently found itself on Golf Digest’s Top 100 list.
So how do we evaluate Valhalla? How do we define it? The answer might be simpler than we think.
“A lot of cool things have happened at Valhalla,” Mahan says.
At the 2000 PGA, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh were paired together in those first two rounds. Nicklaus was playing in his final PGA Championship, Woods was going for his third consecutive major victory in one calendar year and Singh was the defending Masters champ. Paul Tesori, Singh’s caddie at the time, recounts the Friday round as the most crowded he has ever seen a golf course. When he missed the cut, Nicklaus “passed the torch” to young Woods. The now 15-time major champion became the first to accomplish the three-major feat since Ben Hogan in 1953.
“Nicklaus nearly holed it on the 36th hole to make the cut, while Tiger was going for something we never thought would happen again. That is going to plant Valhalla in a lot of people’s memories,” Tesori, who is back at Valhalla this week on Tom Kim’s bag, says. “The battle of Bob May and Tiger — It was a David vs. Goliath situation. Goliath won that time.”
Jack Nicklaus, left, and Tiger Woods played together at the 2000 PGA Championship at Valhalla. (Jeff Haynes / AFP via Getty Images)
Valhalla might not have an extensive history, and it might not have an universally-renowned design. The winning scores have been admittedly low (anywhere from 11- to 18-under-par has been a winning score), a stark contrast to other PGA Championship tests. But Valhalla has without a doubt provided an accurate and closely contested challenge for the best players in the world each time it has hosted a tournament.
In identifying proper winners, Valhalla has thus far checked all the boxes.
“Tiger Woods, probably the best player ever, came out on top at Valhalla. That says something,” says Davis Love III. “Look at Pebble Beach, Muirfield, all the great British Open venues. What do they produce? Tiger Woods. He wins there. The course is set up to judge the best players in the world. The course is set up to identify who is playing the best, and it produced Tiger and Rory and a U.S. Team win at the Ryder Cup.”
We can’t call Valhalla an iconic golf course, but we can confidently say it elicits iconic moments.
We can picture Woods running his putt into the cup on the first hole of the three-hole aggregate playoff against May. We look back fondly on McIlroy speed walking up the 18th fairway, en route to beating Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler in the dark. The Northern Irishman posed with his trophy and the backdrop was pitch black. Even the 1996 playoff between Mark Brooks and Kenny Perry provided a memorable thrill.
Those are the highlights — and the champions — that encapsulate Valhalla as a venue. Valhalla has always lent itself to drama. It has always provided the spark that a major championship Sunday deserves.
This year, there is no reason why the course won’t generate similarly indelible results. The set-up is a “bomber’s paradise” as Joe LaCava, Patrick Cantlay’s current caddie says, but it penalizes wayward shots when it needs to.
The PGA will set up some pins to be extremely gettable, and others, not so much. There aren’t many different strategies to choose from at Valhalla, Thomas said, especially off the tee. Most of the field will be approaching the green from the same spots, meaning a crowded leaderboard is a likely scenario for Sunday afternoon.
“You’re just grabbing a driver when you get to the tee and you’re just hoping you hit the fairway, and then you’re probably going to hit somewhere between a 5- and an 8-iron into the green,” Thomas said. “I think when you give all of us very similar places to play from, you have the opportunity for more bunched leaderboards or you don’t get maybe as much of a situation like last week.”
Such an attribute might not make Valhalla one of the greats in major championship venue history, but it should make the 2024 PGA a compelling viewing experience, especially as Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and defending champion Brooks Koepka enter the week all coming off wins in their last tournaments.
There is always a subset of fans who will judge a major test by the quality of the host venue and the character of the course. But the masses will remember a great championship for its Sunday afternoon theatrics and the eventual victor.
That’s how we’ll talk about Valhalla.
(Top photo: Brian Spurlock / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
