NEWSLETTER
LIV Nashville has the LIV tour firing right back up again after Pinehurst before taking a few weeks off ahead of their “European Swing” on both sides of The Open Championship. While not given the fanfare of Rory’s withdrawal, there were questions about both Jon Rahm (toe injury) and Bryson (victory lap) playing. It appears that both will tee it up at The Grove.
LIV Nashville Course: The Grove
Located in Nashville, Tennessee, The Grove is a Greg Norman design that’s been voted one of Tennessee’s top courses.
Par 71, 7,297 yards. It plays as a 72 for members (and previous KFT events); the second hole is being shortened by about 50 yards and converted from Par 5 to Par 4 for this event. Looking back at the KFT tournaments here, it was one of the easiest holes each year, so this makes sense.
Fairways: Zoysia. Appears to be fairway wide, and I don’t see a ton of elevation changes or sloping. A big complaint (I’m digging into like the Yelp reviews to try and find ANYTHING on this damn place) is that Tennesse has lots of rolling hills, but they decided to put this on the flat area near the creek and keep the hills and slopes for the housing lots surrounding the course.
Greens: Bermuda. It should be running pretty quick; estimates have it 12.5 to 13 on the stimp. I’ve only seen it played in the fall, so the hot summer conditions may play into that a bit.
Hazards: There are some man-made water hazards and a creek that flows through the course. There will be a few holes where golfers will want to aim away from the water and maybe be pushed toward bunkers, but again, the fairways seem fairway wide on most of the holes. A lot of the water runs alongside fairways, but there are two forced carries over ponds on the 3rd and 15th holes, both par 3s.
57 bunkers (counting by hand on satellite) around the course, split about evenly between greenside and fairway bunkers but with a couple early on in the round sitting right in the middle of the fairway (holes 2 and 4). There are some areas of tall grass near the water that are gnarly but not really near any landing areas.
From what I can tell, the rough doesn’t look very penal, but they may raise the mower decks a bit; who knows? Here’s a screencap of a YouTuber (Zac Radford) playing a 6 iron out of the rough from about 200 out. This video was posted in September 2019, but you can see how they kept that second cut. (watch him play the front 9 if you want)
Key Stats
With an easier course, LIV Nashville will probably just come down to ball striking and scoring in easy conditions. The KFT event last year finished with a winner of -17 (again, this was four rounds and with a par of 72, but with a much weaker field at the top, at least). So, I’m expecting similar scores to Houston, with a winner around -13 to -15 and a few guys having some rounds in the low 60s each day.
Weather
Hotter than Dutch love all weekend.
LIV Nashville Betting
In the same way that the birdie fests/putting contests on the PGA tour invite variance, I think we’ll see more of the same here. While Bryson is obviously on top of his game, and there are so many other good golfers near the top of the odds, I’ll be looking a little further down at some guys who have been held back a bit by their short game, their driving distance or everything except their length and bank on some good ball striking to carry them to enough easy chances to succeed here.
Dean Burmester +2500
Louis Oosthuizen +2500
Paul Casey +3500
Tee Times/How to Watch LIV Nashville
Friday, June 21-Sunday June 23. Shotgun start each day at 12:15 pm local (Central)
How to watch:
