Hogan. Snead. Watson. Nelson. Mickelson. Couples. Faldo. Els. Scott. The list goes on.
The George C. Thomas design is one of golf’s great cathedrals. It has hosted U.S. Opens and PGA Championships. Since 1973, it has played host to the PGA Tour’s LA Open, now the Genesis Invitational. It is a place where great players win. It is a course where legends want to etch their name into history.
And it’s also a place where the best players of their generations — Jack, Tiger and Rory — have been unable to get it over the line. You can blame it on the bumpy Poa annua greens or some unexplained Riviera voodoo. But three golfing legends haven’t found ultimate success at a place that, in theory, should play to their strengths. The course has a well-documented correlation to Augusta National and asks players to control their spin and trajectory while attacking small, tricky greens.
“It makes absolutely no sense,” Max Homa said in 2023, about Woods being unable to win at Riviera. “It’s a second-shot golf course, and he’s the greatest iron player of all time. It truly makes no sense.”
“He’s a really great iron player and you have to be a good iron player to play well here,” Adam Scott said then of Woods. “That may just be an anomaly and the only one in his whole career maybe. It’s a little bit inexplicable.”
Woods has made 15 starts at Riviera, including his PGA Tour debut as a 16-year-old amateur in 1992. He has made 10 cuts but just three top 10s, including a runner-up finish to Ernie Els in 1999. Woods has chalked it up to a matter of the stars not aligning and the unpredictability of Poa greens.
“It is frustrating in the sense that this is a golf course that has been to me been very comfortable visually,” Woods said in 2024. “As I said, it’s a fader’s delight from the tee shots and I have, as I said, been a pretty good iron player, but for some reason I just haven’t put it together at this event other than one time with a chance. For some reason it just hasn’t happened.”
Nicklaus had two runner-up finishes at Riviera but never won. McIlroy’s T2 Sunday was his best finish in Pacific Palisades.
While the sample size isn’t as large as the others just yet, the haunted greats of the Riviera club could add another member if things don’t change.
World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler arrived at Riviera with a checkered history of his own. He missed the match-play cut at the 2017 U.S. Amateur and missed the cut as an amateur at the Genesis Open in 2018. He entered the week with four top-20s as a pro at Riviera but had never finished within six shots of the lead. He arrived riding a streak of 18 consecutive top 10s (which is now over).
Even after slow starts at the WM Phoenix Open and Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Scheffler made a run at the trophy before coming up just short. That didn’t happen at Riv, where he opened with a three-over 74 and found himself walking the cutline.
“I don’t know, this place and I have like a weird relationship,” Scheffler said after holing a par putt on 18 on Friday to make the cut. “I feel like I can play so well out here and I just haven’t yet.”
Scheffler made a valiant charge up the leaderboard on the weekend — he said he benefitted from early tee times and less chewed-up greens — but finished in a tie for 12th at a place that has confounded the game’s greats.
Like Woods and McIlroy, Scheffler had no explanation for why Riviera — a ball-striker’s course — hasn’t meshed with him. He faced difficult conditions on Thursday and got the benefit of earlier weekend tee times to rise up the leaderboard. In his career at Riviera, Scheffler has had good weeks off the tee and around the greens. His putting has been average, but he has only finished in the top 10 in approach once, which came in 2022 when he tied for 7th. This past week, he ranked 36th in Strokes Gained: Approach, losing 0.739 shots per round.
“When you look at this golf course and you look at it on paper, it seems kind of easy,” Scheffler said pre-tournament. “Then you start playing it, and you’re like, hit a ball in the rough on 2 and you’re like, Man this hole is kind of hard. Then you don’t hit the fairway on 3 and you’re like, Oh, shoot, I don’t know how I am going to hit the ball on the green here, and then the golf course just eats away at you over time.”
As Scheffler’s reign over professional golf has grown, he has continuously found his name in the same sentence as Woods. The story repeated itself at Riviera as Scheffler, like Woods, searched for ways to solve the famed Southern California track. Even on a day when he posted a low number, the answers alluded him.
“Maybe a little bit,” Scheffler said after his third-round 66 when asked if he felt better about the course. “But then at times it still felt weird.”
On Sunday night, Woods, the tournament host, greeted winner Jacob Bridgeman on the hill. The 15-time major winner joked that Bridgeman, who beat McIlroy by one, now had something Woods doesn’t.
The answer to a puzzle that Woods, McIlroy and now Scheffler are still trying to solve.
