Tournament host Marc Farry believes the field in the seventh edition of the MCB Tour Championship will face a different test than in previous years after the Legend Course was given a facelift over the summer.
The Frenchman is largely responsible for bringing the Senior Tour to the holiday island of Mauritius and is attached to the Constance Hotel Group, whose luxury Belle Mare Plage resort has hosted this week’s €420,000 event since its inauguration in 2009.
Farry has featured in every staging, securing top ten finishes in 2012 and 2013, but the two-time Senior Tour champion feels that, due to the recent renovation project, past experience will count for little as the 53 players in the field will have to complete their coursework all over again.
He said: “It’s like a new course this year. A few trees and a lot of bushes have been removed, so it really looks and feels totally different. It’s probably a little less intimidating than it has been in previous years, but there’s still lot of danger lurking so it’s not going to be easy.
“The reason behind it was two-fold, we thought there were probably too many trees encroaching onto the course, but it was also a strategy decision. We have to consider the amateur golfer as well as the professional golfer, and it was probably getting a bit too tough for them.
“Golf is meant to be a fun game, but if after five or six holes you’ve lost a dozen balls, that takes the fun out of it! So it was a common sense approach, but in this part of the world with all the sunshine things also grow much quicker, so we also had to take that into account.”
As well as the visual and structural changes to some holes, the elite field will also have new greens to contend with this year after extensive work was carried out on a number of the putting surfaces.
Farry said: “The new greenkeeper has done a great job over the past six months, particularly with the greens themselves, which are a lot softer than they used to be. The difficulty in the past has been reading the greens because of the grain, but I think this year they’ll be a bit easier to putt on. I certainly hope that’s the case for me anyway!”
