Demanding your best: Taking a closer look at the brutish 18th at Muirfield Village Golf Club

The creek appears docile, with its mown banks and sleep-calming trickle, but as it winds down the left flank of the par-4 18th fairway at Muirfield Village Golf Club, particularly on a certain springtime Sunday afternoon, it has as much menace as a raging sea. Guarding against its serene waters, many TOUR pros push their drives right – where a black walnut tree, deep rough and deeper bunkers await...

The 72nd hole of the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday has provided countless climactic finishes, including in 2024 when Scottie Scheffler stepped up to the tee box with a one-shot lead after a bogey on No. 17. He and playing partner Collin Morikawa both hit approaches that bounced off the firm putting surface and into the rough, leaving deft chips. Scheffler got up-and-down to seal the tournament victory, but when he walked off the green to shake Nicklaus’ hand, he looked like a man who had spent the day running a marathon while solving calculus problems.

Muirfield Village has been both homage and laboratory to testing the game’s greatest players since Jack Nicklaus first opened the course in 1976. Long seen as his version of Augusta National Golf Club – and there’s no denying that course’s influence – Nicklaus has continued to tweak the design over the years to test the world’s best players at one of the PGA TOUR’s most beloved stops, asking them to think their way through the course.

In 2020, Nicklaus embarked on a major redesign of the course. He called the work on his masterpiece the “last bite of the apple,” and he wasted no time getting started, beginning construction as players made the turn to play the back nine of that year’s spectator-less tournament. Key features of that renovation included lengthening holes and recontouring many of the greens to offer more hole locations.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a tougher golf course,” Nicklaus said at the time, “but it’s going to be a better golf course.”

It would be hard to imagine the course any tougher. Most of the major changes occurred on the front nine, with many greens modified and bunkers moved to accommodate the changes in the modern game. On the back nine, Nicklaus carefully and selectively picked a few spots to tweak, in part because the tournament’s history of thrilling finishes didn’t seem to call for such drastic overhauls. The 18th remained mostly intact, but Nicklaus gently softened the green’s back-to-front pitch “so the ball doesn’t just go up and come back,” he said.

And when looking at past finishes from previous tournaments, it’s clear why the 18th needed only a scalpel and not a shovel to improve it.

The 480-yard par 4 demands much off the tee and in its approach. The hole doglegs right around the walnut tree and the bunkers, but it is the tree just short that pinches the fairway to about 30 yards wide between itself and the creek. Attempting to avoid the tree brings the water into play. If players choose to bend the ball around the tree by hitting a cut, “You’ve got to aim toward the water,” Matt Fitzpatrick said, “and that makes it difficult.”

At 275 yards from the tee box, the tree is an imposing factor for shorter hitters, and if a drive is blocked or sliced right, players must contend with more than just bunkers – in a series of rolling moguls that seem well-suited for the Winter X Games as much as they do one of the TOUR’s Signature Events. The moguls produce uneven lies and stances that cause players consternation and deep consideration from the tee, a further wrinkle to the hole’s mind-bending complexion.

Though the green was softened to allow for more hole locations, it’s now harder to hold, as evidenced by Scheffler and Morikawa’s shots in 2024. If you come up short, there’s a false front and two deep bunkers that make for a difficult up-and-down. The average score on No. 18 in 2024 was 4.32, ranking it as the hardest hole at Muirfield Village, yielding just 21 birdies over four rounds while extracting 70 bogeys and 10 double bogeys.

The pinch point requires players to make a choice on the elevated tee box: Lay up safely short of the point with a 3-wood, or carve a driver around the tree? The choice here is determined by many factors, including your position in the tournament. In addition to those two bunkers short, there are two more bunkers back-left and back-right that protect the kidney-shaped green. And though Nicklaus has softened the green, pitches from above the green (from either the rough or two back bunkers) have little chance of stopping. Plus, the rough – which is 4 inches high to start the week and surrounds every bunker, with no mown or shaved areas – makes for unpredictable lies and shot impact.

Although the 18th hole offers a sense of Muirfield’s mental – and mettle – test, it doesn’t seem unfair, just hard. Jack Nicklaus II says hole location is the critical decision-making element from the fairway on 18, as players must take all this trouble into account and make the safest choice, which seems impossible given the amount and severity of it.

“I like the uphill par 4 to finish,” Scheffler said. “With new golf-course design, that’s kind of rare.”

Since 2017, the 18th at Muirfield Village Golf Club has been the fifth most difficult hole on the PGA TOUR, reflective of the changes to the course over the years. In 2010, players found the fairway roughly 68 percent of the time off the tee. By the 2024 event, that had dropped to 55 percent, in part due to changes to the course and improvements in technology allowing players to hit the ball further and challenge the pinch point. Playing from the fairway always yields an advantage, but TOUR statistics further reveal that finding the fairway gives twice the advantage as being in either the left or right rough, with greens in regulation rising to 61 percent from the short grass.

In 2014, after dropping three shots on Nos. 16 and 17, Hideki Matsuyama stepped onto the 18th tee and hit a block headed straight for the tree. In disgust, he lightly slammed the driver into the ground and snapped the head off the club. But a big break ensued as the ball caromed off a tree branch to the middle of the fairway, allowing him to take dead aim at the flag, where the ball landed 5 feet from the hole. He made the putt and eventually won in a playoff.

When Viktor Hovland won in 2023, the 18th hole was twice a deciding factor. Runner-up Denny McCarthy had played a bogey-free round on a difficult day when the average score was just under 75. But he made his first bogey at No. 18 after a poor drive into the left rough led to a pitch out to the fairway, and he narrowly missed a 20-foot par putt. In the playoff with Hovland, he then drove into the right rough. After his approach rolled down the hill, he pitched up to 12 feet for a par, and the ball spun off the left edge for his second bogey on the same hole in 20 minutes, losing the tournament to Hovland, who made a 7-foot par putt to secure the win.

One of the most challenging parts of the 18th is what makes the tournament so hard to close out: Two-putts are not guaranteed as the greens get faster each round and the rough gets longer. Chips above the hole have minimal chance of stopping or staying on the putting surface, and putts from above the hole are more delicate than a teacup – a vantage point from which the hole looks like the size of a teaspoon. Of course, it is these exact features and the necessity of execution that make for such a remarkable finishing hole.

When the tournament is on the line come Sunday, few holes in the world ask as much from a player.