The American Express at PGA West – 2025 Preview

With the “Aloha Swing” concluded, the PGA Tour returns to the mainland as players travel to the Coachella Valley desert in La Quinta, California for The American Express at PGA West. This is a very unique event for several reasons. First, this tournament is part of a Pro-Am where each pro tees off with an amateur for the first three rounds. Another difference is that three different courses will be in use instead of the typical single course. Finally, the cut will occur after 54 holes have been completed on Saturday, instead of the usual 36-hole cut on Friday. It will be the top 65 and ties who make it through to Sunday’s final round on the Stadium Course.

Along with the Pete Dye Stadium Course, the Nicklaus Tournament Course and La Quinta Country Club are the other venues in play for this week. The latter two courses are among the five easiest on Tour, which makes very low-scoring rounds the norm. Players will tee off on those two courses only one time. After more than 50 years of course changes, the current rotation of courses has been the same since 2016.

Each of the courses in the rotation shares many of the same characteristics. First, with mostly calm winds and clear skies in a desert environment, this tournament is as close to “dome golf” as players will experience all year, leading to each being among the top-10 easiest annual PGA courses. All three courses have four scoreable par-5s and measure under 7,200 yards. Each also has pure Poa trivialis greens and ryegrass fairways surrounded by non-penal dormant Bermuda rough.

The Stadium Course is the “most challenging” of the three and will be used for two of the four rounds. It is a Pete Dye design featuring difficult par 3s, plenty of unique bunkers, and seven holes with water danger with which to contend. Another reason the winning score usually ends up in the 25-under range is that all three are resort-style courses with pin placements made intentionally easy for the amateurs who are playing. It is a tournament where all different styles of players can thrive and those with the hottest flat stick in the inevitable putting contest are usually rewarded.

The Field

After last year’s American Express witnessed the strongest field to ever play this tournament, this year’s edition is not far off with nine of the top-25 ranked players in the world in attendance. Headliners include Xander Schauffele, Wyndham Clark, Patrick Cantlay, Sungjae Im, Sam Burns, Justin Thomas, Tony Finau, and Tom Kim. Other notables in La Quinta this week are Jason Day, Rickie Fowler, Brian Harman, Cameron Young, Will Zalatoris, and last week’s Sony Open winner, Nick Taylor. Last year, amateur Nick Dunlap stunned the golf world by winning this event. He returns this year to defend his crown. He will be joined by Si Woo Kim, Adam Long, Jason Dufner, Bill Haas, and Andrew Landry as former champions teeing it up this week.

Players will be paired with an “amateur” for the first three rounds. They could be celebrities, professional athletes, CEOs of companies, or someone you have never heard of who thought it would be a great idea to fork over $30,000 to participate in the event. While most PGA players love the conditions of the courses and the weather, they also despise the format and having to play most pro-ams in general. Rounds can approach six hours with the amateurs tagging along and hacking their way around the course.

Pete Dye Stadium – Course History

The Stadium Course at PGA West was designed by Pete Dye in 1986 and was created as a sequel to the TPC at Sawgrass. It was inspired by the Scottish links-style courses even though it shares relatively few characteristics with links courses.

Dye was given simple instructions when tasked when building the Stadium Course. “Build the hardest damn golf course in the world,” developers Ernie Vossler and Joe Walser told him. Dye indeed was up to the task as when it opened, its course rating of 77.1 was the highest ever given by the United States Golf Association.

Famous for its dramatic features, including railroad ties, penal hazards, cavernous bunkers, and long forced carries over water, the course is not for the faint-hearted. As Dye wrote in his autobiography, “Length alone would not be the ultimate test for the new course, but I believed strategic hazards, deep bunkers, difficult angles across fairways, slightly offset greens, parallel lakes, and desert plants, when combined with cross-current winds, could provide the type, of course, Joe and Ernie expected.”

When it opened, it was one of the first venues for the popular “Skins” game which was a televised 4-ball match where some of the best players competed against each other in 4-ball matches.

In 1987 the course made its PGA debut by hosting the annual Bob Hope Classic. In what had typically been an easy course setup, players were shocked to see an actual challenge in front of them. Players vociferously voiced their opinions on the course. Raymond Floyd called it “spiteful” and “hateful.” Tom Watson said he was “sick and tired” of Dye’s radical designs. “It requires you to execute shots that no sane golfer should be expected to play,” Watson added. Al Geiberger said that the Stadium Course was like “working through the stages of grief”.

Dye responded, “The professionals forget that the whole idea of a Pete Dye golf course is to require players to hit a wide variety of shots. I’ve always felt that a good player who’s playing well wants to play a difficult golf course because he knows the winner won’t be someone who can just out-putt him.” Dye wanted to truly challenge the best players in the world and give them a chance to display their amazing skills. As he once said about his style, “We’re just giving them the opportunities to hit great golf shots.”

The PGA Tour professionals were so adamant about how unfair the course was that they united together and signed a petition to get it removed as one of the host courses. Believe it or not, they were successful as the course was banned from Tour play until it returned to the rotation in 2016.

In the summer of 2022, the course underwent extensive renovations in which the greens were re-grassed to TifEagle Bermuda and changed back to their original sizes and contouring which had been lost over the years. Also, more than 200 trees from the interior of the course were removed, possibly changing some of the lines that golfers with previous history on the course are used to playing.

The 2025 version of the Pete Dye Stadium Course will feature new greens. The idea was simply to return the green complexes at the Stadium Course to the original plans by famed architect Dye in 1986. To make the changes, PGA West used Tim Liddy, an architect who worked closely with Dye in the 1980s when Dye was shocking the golf world with stadium-style courses featuring deep elongated bunkers, sloping greens, and plenty of water.

The main changes players will notice in The American Express will be the greens returning to their original and larger size at 7,000 square feet per average (up from 5,000 square feet). This will allow for new pin placements, and flat-bottomed bunkers around those greens rather than the concave shape the bunkers had acquired through four decades. Even though most of the Stadium Course’s greens saw four or five inches of built-up organic material scraped off, Liddy kept the original slopes and swales of the putting surfaces. Putting surfaces should be quite firm this year, making it tougher to get shots close on approach and increasing the overall difficulty of the course.

Finish Position and Strokes Gained Course History (2016-2024)

This includes average finish position and Strokes Gained per round in each category. Players are sorted by SG: Total.