During a resounding American victory at the Ryder Cup, Bryson DeChambeau hinted there was more coming between him and Brooks Koepka, but didn’t let on to what that might be.
Now we know.
The fifth edition of The Match, the made-for-TV series presented by Turner Sports, will take place the day after Thanksgiving and will set new buddies Koepka and DeChambeau in a mano a mano competition in Las Vegas.
According to a report, the event will take place at the Wynn Golf Club, which sits just a few big swings from the strip. The pair will face off in a 12-hole showdown with the usual cast of Turner characters — Ernie Johnson and Charles Barkley — handling the telecast.
This brings the event full-circle — the first-ever Match pitted Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in Las Vegas back in 2018 at Shadow Creek.
As for the course, Steve Wynn purchased the resort in 2000, and the Tom Fazio-designed Wynn Golf Club opened in 2005. But that layout was shuttered in 2017 as the operators of the adjacent Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino considered other uses for the ridiculously valuable land on which the course sits, and the resort lost millions of dollars in revenue from green fees and other golf-attributable casino earnings.
After scrapping plans to build a lagoon on the site with new hotel rooms and restaurants, Fazio and his son, Logan, were called to breathe fresh life into the abandoned track. Wynn Golf Club reopened in October of 2019 with eight new and 10 refurbished holes, playing to a par of 70 at 6,722 yards.
“I think the emotion for the Wynn Golf Club is, it is a very distinct, unique, one-of-a-kind place,” Tom Fazio said. The hotels and casinos and general Las Vegas buzz are ”part of the experience. So I think the Wynn Golf Club … is something that maybe can’t be reproduced.”
The layout ranked ninth in Golfweek’s Best list of casino courses in 2017 before its closure.
