2022 ZOZO Championship – Accordia Golf Narashino CC – Course Preview
Ron Klos
4 years ago
As the calendar season for the PGA Tour heads down the final stretch, 78 golfers will make the trip to the Accordia Golf Narashino Country Club for this no-cut event. Set just outside of Japan’s expansive capital city of Tokyo, the ZOZO Championship is currently the only PGA Tour event held in Asia.
The course plays as a shorter Par 70 and is a super-tight, heavily tree-lined course with six doglegs, five Par 3 holes, and smaller-than-average bentgrass greens. It is definitely a course unique to Japanese-style golf. This will be the third edition of the ZOZO Championship in Japan. The weather has affected both events here at this course. Back in 2019, the course played slightly under par but had to deal with the remnants of a monsoon and was inundated with six inches of rainfall. Then last year, cold and rainy conditions made play difficult and the course played a half-stroke over par.
This is the same course where Tiger Woods earned his 82nd PGA Tour victory in 2019 to tie Sam Snead’s record. Japan’s favorite son, and 2021 ZOZO Championship winner, Hideki Matsuyama returns home and headlines the field as he looks to defend his title from last year. Overall, seven of the top 20, and 20 of the top 60 ranked players in the world will be in attendance.
Tokyo Olympics gold medalist and fifth-ranked player in the world, Xander Schauffele is the highest-rated player in the field. He excels in no-cut events and has family roots in Japan. Other high-ranked players in the field include Collin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland, Cameron Young, and Sungjae Im. Also making the trip over to Asia is two-time PGA winner, Tom Kim, who just won the Shriners Open this past week. With the event being co-sanctioned by the Japan Golf Tour Organization, there will be more than a dozen golfers from that Tour in the field.
Course History
Opened in 1965 in Chiba, Japan, Narashino CC is a very traditional Japanese design. It has 3 full 18-hole courses. It was designed by Kinya Fujita, one of the premier course architects during the height of the Japanese golf boom in the decades following World War II.