Three 61s in Three Days. The Detroit Restoration Has Its Answer.

The number that settles it

Forget par. Par is what changed, so par is the one thing you can't compare across years.

Count strokes instead.

• 2025: Aldrich Potgieter led after 54 holes at 19-under on a par-72 course. That's 197 strokes.
• 2026: Davis Riley leads after 54 holes at 15-under on a par-70 course. That's 195 strokes.

The restored course, with its 91 bunkers and its deeper faces and its four par 4s over 500 yards and its extra fescue, has given up a 54-hole leading total two shots lower than the version everybody agreed was a pushover.

Riley is averaging 65.0 a round. Potgieter's winning total last year averaged 66.5.

There are caveats and they're real. Different players. Different weather. Different field, and this one is the strongest in the event's history. One year is one year. But there is no version of "the restoration made it harder" that survives a leader going round in fewer actual strokes than last year's leader did.

Three 61s. Count them.

Before the 2025 tournament, nobody had ever shot better than 63 at Detroit Golf Club. Jake Knapp broke that with a 61 in the second round last year and it stood as the mark.

This week:

• Peter Malnati, 61, Thursday. Out in 28, bogey-free, lowest opening round on Tour all season.
• Cameron Young, 61, Friday. Climbed 68 places on the leaderboard doing it.
• Rasmus Højgaard, 61, Saturday. Also bogey-free. Moved him to 12-under and a share of third.

Three rounds of 61 in three consecutive days on a golf course that was rebuilt, in part, to stop exactly that. Twenty-four months ago the number 61 did not exist here.

One of the wire headlines called Højgaard's round a "record day." It wasn't. It's the same raw score Knapp shot last year, just against a lower par. That kind of mistake is going to keep happening all week, because everyone is still doing the arithmetic against a scorecard that changed in June.

Malnati has clearly had enough of this

Here's the part that made me laugh. The AP copy describes Detroit Golf Club as a relatively easy course. In the same story, it quotes Malnati saying he doesn't think he took advantage of a super easy course, and that he played great.

He's got a point and he's also, unfortunately for him, arguing against the scoreboard.

But there's a version of what he's saying that's completely correct. The Detroit News noted that the 17th and 18th have been two of the hardest holes all week. Riley made birdie on both of them Saturday, holing from more than fifty feet at 17 and ten feet at 18, and that is what put him in the final group.

So the course has genuinely hard holes. It also has ten other holes where good players make birdie whenever they feel like it. Both things are true and "easy course" flattens them into a lazy summary that a player who just shot 61 is entitled to resent.

Why it's still soft, and what that means

The greens are twelve months old. That's the whole explanation and I keep coming back to it.

A restored Donald Ross course defends itself through firmness. Crowned greens reject approaches, false fronts feed balls away, and suddenly the angle of your second shot matters more than the length of your first. Grass planted last summer cannot do any of that. It holds whatever lands on it, and it's slow enough that players are rolling in 54-footers.

There's rain and storms in the Sunday forecast, which is going to make it softer, not firmer. The Tour has adjusted tee times, put everyone in threesomes and sent them off both the first and tenth. Whatever happens today, it will not be a test of firm-and-fast architecture.

The fair verdict on the restoration is this: it is probably a much better golf course now, and it will probably defend par properly in about three years. Those two things don't help the tournament that's leaving town this afternoon.

What a normal golfer should take from this

Relabelling holes doesn't defend a golf course. Members everywhere do this. Turn the two short par 5s into long par 4s, watch the winning score drop from 22-under to something respectable, declare victory. The golf is identical. The card is just meaner. If your club does it, your handicap will move and your ball-striking won't.

Firmness is the real defence, and it's the cheapest one. Detroit spent sixteen million on shape. What's actually stopping anybody right now is nothing, because the surfaces are young and wet. Any course that runs its greens firm and fast becomes dramatically harder without moving a cubic yard of dirt.

Riley's Saturday is the useful bit for your own game. Bogey-free, back-to-back. He made three bogeys on Thursday and none since. On a course where everybody is making birdies, the differentiator isn't making more of them, it's making no mistakes. That transfers to your Saturday medal exactly as written.

FAQ

Who leads the 2026 Rocket Classic?
Davis Riley, at 15-under 195 through 54 holes after a bogey-free 63, one clear of Michael Brennan and three ahead of Rickie Fowler's group.

Did the Detroit Golf Club renovation make the course harder?
The evidence says no, at least this year. The 54-hole leader has taken 195 strokes; last year's 54-hole leader took 197 on the shorter par-72 layout. Three players have shot 61 this week. The greens are only a year old and still soft, which is the most likely explanation.

How many rounds of 61 have been shot at Detroit Golf Club this week?
Three. Peter Malnati on Thursday, Cameron Young on Friday, Rasmus Højgaard on Saturday. Before 2025 the course record was 63.

What's at stake for Davis Riley?
A $1.8 million winner's cheque from a $10 million purse, his third career win, and a serious move toward the FedExCup Playoffs. He's 146th in points with ten missed cuts this year, and the top 70 after next week's Wyndham advance.

Why do the tee times look strange on Sunday?
Rain and storms are forecast. Players go off in threesomes from both the first and tenth tees to get the round finished.

GOLFRAW's Take

I want to be careful here, because there's an easy sneer available and it isn't the right one. Detroit Golf Club did not waste sixteen million dollars. The members got their Donald Ross back. Bigger greens with real contour, bunkers that make you think about which side of the fairway you want, a pond gone that was never in the original drawing. That course is going to be a joy to play for fifty years and none of that depended on the PGA Tour showing up. But the thing the tournament wanted, a scorecard that didn't embarrass everyone on television, they tried to buy with a pen instead of a bulldozer. Cut par by two, and the winning number goes from 22-under to something that looks serious. Except the players still went out and shot 61 three days running, and the actual strokes are lower than last year, and the whole exercise ends up proving that par was never the problem.