The Riviera Riddle: Why Golf’s Greatest Can’t Crack the Code at Genesis Invitational

I’ve been walking the grounds at Riviera Country Club for over three decades, and I still can’t quite wrap my head around it. Here’s a course nestled in Pacific Palisades that’s hosted everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Frank Sinatra in its clubhouse, yet when it comes to golf’s absolute elite, something mysteriously goes wrong. The venue has hosted the Genesis Invitational (originally the Los Angeles Open) for 60 of its 100-year history, and what I find most fascinating isn’t who has won here—it’s who hasn’t.

Jack Nicklaus never won at Riviera. Tiger Woods never won at Riviera. And now, as we head into this week’s tournament, it’s looking like Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy might be following the same peculiar script.

When the GOAT Debate Gets Complicated

This is where my four decades around professional golf make me sit back and think differently than most casual observers. We’re not talking about good players who struggle with difficult venues. We’re talking about the two greatest golfers in history—men who could pick apart any course in the world—yet somehow Riviera has remained unconquered by both.

The irony cuts even deeper when you consider that Riviera holds sentimental significance for both. Nicklaus made his professional debut here in 1962 (pocketing all of $33, I might add), while a 16-year-old Tiger Woods made his PGA Tour debut as an amateur at this very course in 1992. You’d think such history would breed success, not failure.

In 12 Genesis Invitational starts plus two PGA Championships at Riviera, Nicklaus finished second twice but never claimed the trophy. Woods fared similarly—two second-place finishes across 16 attempts. For context, that’s 28 combined competitive rounds from golf’s two greatest players, and neither could seal the deal. When I caddied for Tom Lehman back in the day, we used to joke about the courses that got under your skin differently. Riviera, it seems, is golf’s great equalizer.

The Anatomy of a Mysterious Beast

So what makes Riviera so wonderfully perplexing? The course doesn’t yield to raw dominance the way most championship venues do. Instead, it demands a surgical approach across every aspect of your game.

The course structure favors slightly longer hitters off the tee—which might explain why Bubba Watson has three wins here, Phil Mickelson two, and JB Holmes landed a victory. But length alone won’t get you across the finish line. What strikes me about Riviera is that it requires what Jordan Spieth calls a complete game:

“It just requires all parts of the game and a variety of ball-striking. And then once you’re on the greens, you’ve got to have great speed control. It’s an all-around fantastic golf course that you don’t get away with poor shots at all.”

Add to this the tricky green complexes with their quirky shaping, the preference for a left-to-right ball flight with the long game, and—here’s the kicker—the Poa Annua grass on the greens. That grass produces a gnarly, unpredictable surface that even the world’s best struggle to read consistently. It’s the kind of detail that separates champions from almost-champions.

The Left-Hander Connection

Here’s where I think the narrative gets really interesting. Multiple Riviera winners—Mickelson, Watson, and two-time champion Mike Weir—share something peculiar: they’re all left-handers. Both Mickelson and Watson have become multiple Masters champions, and Weir won Augusta too. There’s a connection between Riviera’s demands and Augusta’s demands, as Spieth himself noted.

“It’s why Bubba likes it so much, because of the shotmaking ability that he has and it just brings the feel out in his game.”

Yet here’s where the mystery deepens: Nicklaus and Woods, despite being absolute maestros at Augusta National, couldn’t translate that success to Riviera. Both dominated the Masters. Both proved themselves at other Poa Annua venues like Torrey Pines and Pebble Beach. The logical mind says they should have conquered this place. Instead, Nicklaus simply shrugged in 1994:

“I’ve had some pretty good rounds here but never four that were good enough to win.”

Woods echoed that sentiment decades later: “I know the golf course. I also know I haven’t a lot of success here.” From the two greatest players ever, that’s almost an admission of defeat by a course.

The Current Generation’s Challenge

What concerns me slightly—and I don’t mean this as criticism, just observation—is that Scheffler and McIlroy appear headed down the same path. Scheffler has never finished better than seventh here and has never seriously contended, never coming within eight shots of the 54-hole lead. McIlroy’s done marginally better with a fourth-place finish in 2019, but in his last three visits, he hasn’t cracked within nine shots of the lead.

In my experience, when the game’s best players struggle at one venue while dominating everywhere else, it’s rarely a lack of talent. It’s usually a mismatch between what the course demands and what a player’s natural game provides. That’s not a flaw—that’s just golf.

Riviera doesn’t punish aggression so much as it requires intelligence. And sometimes, intelligence paired with a different skill set simply reads the puzzle differently than others. That’s what makes this week’s Genesis Invitational worth watching—not because we’re guaranteed to see history, but because we might see it stay the same.