Quail Hollow's Greens Not So Green, High Profile WD's Ensue

It's hardly a surprise that Ian Poulter WD'd from this week's Wells Fargo Championship for "personal reasons" since he telegraphed the move on Twitter last week after hearing about the spotty putting surfaces. Dustin Johnson cited a "sore wrist" in his WD.

And about those greens, Doug Ferguson describes them this way in his weekly notes column:

Due mainly to an unusually cool spring, the home of the Wells Fargo Championship has struggled so mightily with its greens that two of them (Nos. 8 and 10) have had to be resodded in recent weeks, and tournament officials have asked players to hit only one shot into Nos. 12 and 13 during practice rounds.

The rest of the greens are spotty at best, most with several patches of brown. And it's not just looks. Some players say the greens are running at different speeds.

''It's tough to see,'' said Webb Simpson, the U.S. Open champion who lives at Quail Hollow. ''I think their biggest challenge is going to try to get it to be the same firmness and speed of the other greens.''