Mud Balls

“I feel like the grass is so good, there is no real advantage to cleaning your ball in the fairway, the course is completely tipped out,” Defending Champion Xander Schauffele said of playing the ball down. “It sucks that your kind of 50/50 once you hit the fairway.”

Both Schauffele and Scotti Scheffler were in the middle of the fairway on the difficult par 4 16^th hole, with mid-irons in their hands, and both had mud balls they couldn’t control and found the water and two double bogeys.

“I think everybody was surprised, feel like we just played two practice rounds, hitting our casual walk for two days, and then they said it was, it was just going to be playing the ball down,” Tommy Fleetwood said of the decision. “There was a few but it wasn't horrific to be fair.”

World No.1 Scheffler questioned the luck factor when the ball is played down in conditions that create abnormal mud balls.

“In golf, there's enough luck throughout a 72-hole tournament that I don't think the story should be whether or not the ball is played up or down,” Scheffler said. “When I look at golf tournaments, I want the purest, fairest test of golf, and in my opinion, maybe the ball today should have been played up.”

Clearly, with over 45 players shooting under par, the mud ball issue was not as critical, but Friday may be more acute.

“The mud balls are going to get worse; they're going to get worse as the plays dries up,” Schauffele said. “They're going to get in that perfect cake zone, to where it's kind of muddy underneath, and then picking up mud on the way through. I mean, you just keep -- I don't know, maybe it hit it a little bit lower off the tee, but then unfortunately the problem with hitting it low off the tee is the ball doesn't carry or roll anywhere, so then you sacrifice distance. It's a bit of a crapshoot.”