After a 61-year hiatus, the PGA Tour returns to Utah with the Black Desert Championship. Though the state has hosted the Korn Ferry Tour’s “Utah Championship” each year since 1990, the main Tour hasn’t been there since 1963 when Tommy Jacobs won the Utah Open Invitational.
Surrounded by horizons of red rock mountains and located amid an actual lava field in the arid desert of southern Utah, the Black Desert Resort was the last golf course that famed architect Tom Weiskopf was associated with before his death. The stunning layout was completed in 2023 by Weiskopf’s design partner, Phil Smith.
Brand new events are a rarity on the Tour but this week is an exception with the third event in the Tour’s “FedEx Cup Fall” which features players outside the top 50 jockeying for 2025 status.
The Field
Similar to last week’s Sanderson Farms Championship, the 132-player field sets up to be one of the weakest of the entire year. Chris Kirk is the only player ranked inside the top 50 of the OWGR at No. 41. Other players in attendance who are ranked in the top 75 include Nick Taylor, Stephan Jaeger, Lucas Glover, Erik van Rooyen, Kurt Kitayama, Ben Griffin, Harris English, and Emiliano Grillo. Last week’s winner, Kevin Yu is also in the field.
Eight players in the field have Utah ties, including six current and former BYU Cougars. Zac Blair, Patrick Fishburn, Peter Kuest, and Mike Weir are all BYU alums. The tournament features a $7.5 million purse with a $1.35 million first-place prize.
Course Features
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Black Desert’s golf course is part of a 650-acre resort located in Ivins, just about 40 miles away from Zion National Park. The course is a par-71 layout that measures at 7,371 yards. It was cut out of the black lava rock that is pervasive in this corner of southwest Utah. The front nine opened in November 2022 while the back nine opened in May 2023. From the green fairways and the blue lakes to the red rock mountains and the black lava, the course offers a visually stunning combination of landscapes.
The entrance to Snow Canyon is visible from nearly every hole and as you make your way back to the clubhouse on the back nine it’s as if you’re hitting right into the mouth of the canyon. Though appearing very tight on some tee boxes, the course is much more open and forgiving than you would expect for a course sitting on top of a lava field. As for dealing with the lava when building the course, Weiskopf saw it as a feature instead of a hindrance.
Said Ken Yates, Black Desert Resort’s superintendent, “The way they put the golf course all around the natural lava, it’s like it was meant to be there.” Creating the fairways by clearing the lava was one of the most difficult challenges the design team encountered. They had to dynamite every square inch of the routing, blasting away more than 100 acres of what would become turf. Then the routing was capped with three feet of sand, half a million cubic yards in total. It’s the depth of that sand capping that allows for such smooth fairways amid the lava, Smith said. The edges of each hole might be jagged, but the course itself is perfectly contoured. The sand also provides excellent drainage and the firm, bouncy conditions that are a hallmark of great courses.
Even though mountainous terrain surrounds the course, Black Desert plays relatively flat. With an elevation of 3,100 feet above sea level, golfers will get added distance off the tee. Some blind tee shots will also force players to take note of the proper sight lines during their pre-tournament practice rounds.
Knowing there would be lava in play, and that the winds can reach 40 mph on the Black Desert site, Weiskopf and Smith came up with routing that provided plenty of room to swing away. With it being a resort course, extra width provides strategic options for golfers to choose the best angle to the flag and also allows plenty of room to avoid the lava.
“Because we knew you’re pretty much dead outside of the turf, we wanted really wide fairways,” Smith said. “That’s why when you’re out there, you see those super wide fairways with just a nice band of rough around them.” For this week’s PGA event, however, fairways have been narrowed to around 30 yards wide to challenge players off the tee.
With the course being so new, there is not much information out there about how it will play. What is known is that there are a couple of risk-reward par 5s along with two driveable par 4s. The 320-yard 5th hole finishes at an elevated green protected by a bunker and numerous rock formations. The green of the 326-yard 14th hole sits in a bowl hidden behind a wall of lava rock on three sides. Layups on either hole can lead to chances at birdie, while the more aggressive players have the option of going for the green off the tee.
“We certainly designed it to challenge the best players in the world,” Smith said, noting that yardage has been added to a few holes at the Tour’s request. “That’s something Tom and I did throughout our careers together. We always designed golf courses with that possibility in mind. Think about TPC Scottsdale (also designed by the pair), where one week of the year it’s got to challenge the best players in the world but 99 percent of the time, it’s a resort course. So you’ve got to be playable. I’m sure there’s some guys that are going to shoot some low numbers, but I can’t wait to see it.”
Weiskopf, and fellow architect Phil Smith, play tricks with golfers in other ways, putting a bunker in the middle of the third green (a 196-yard par 3) and including a couple of holes with water danger on two of the longest par 4s (holes 11 and 13) to enhance shot-making demands. The par-5 7th winds through a compelling maze of black-rock formations. From the back tees the par 3s range from 151 yards to 202. The 151-yard 17th is Weiskopf’s “spin-off” of the famous Postage Stamp par 3 (no. 8) at Royal Troon, where he won The Open Championship in 1973.
The course features short Kentucky bluegrass rough (2″) along with bentgrass fairways and greens. The greens are undulating and quite large at an average of 7,000 square feet with speeds around 12 on the stimpmeter. Thanks to the size of the greens, numerous challenging pin positions can be utilized to test the Tour players this week.