PGA Tour: The Fifth Major, #Alternative Facts: Notes from the Ballwasher

First topic message reminder :

Technical problems here at Ballwasher Controls so will post what I can and may return later:

1).Only saw the final hour of last weekend's Wells Fargo play from Eagle Point, but an exciting finish and the course looked terrific - the golfers seemed to enjoy it and they may get to return in 2021 when the Presidents Cup is staged at Quail Hollow. Super win for Brian Harman, almost a local lad, (as he also will be this week) and not much rust on DJ's game.

2).Disappointed to see the Team Europe challenge fizzle, but promising work from Molinari and Noren, while McDowell seems to be running into form. Rahm is relentless, this just in, but possibly not this week.
Another good experience too for Seamus Power - hopefully he can capitalise on his good play by stitching together four good rounds instead of two or three, perhaps at the Byron Nelson as he'll be sitting it out this week.

3).I like The Players Championship and I've grown to enjoy the course, especially the Par-5's. We'll see some changes this week, with Par-4's #6 and #7 being modified and the Par-4 12th shortened to be driveable - that's the intention anyway but reports from practice rounds suggests that player strategy will be dictated largely by the pin positions (and wind obviously). It always seemed to be a sleeper of a hole, fall asleep and bogey awaits, but the Tour clearly wanted a driveable Par-4 and now it has one, though it all looks a bit contrived to me.

4).TPC Sawgrass is a Pete Dye creation of course, the third in five weeks, and demands at least as much precision as pure power which makes wins by Woods and Jason Day all the more impressive. I still like course specialists here and McDowell (100/1 ish) & Molinari (50/1) are two who are worth looking at. And Sergio excels, with two runners up finishes as well as his 2008 win.

5).The Tour announced yesterday that the FedEx Cup sponsorship contract would be renewed for another ten years; and also announced that there are no immediate plans to revert The Players to March. Even if the key word there is "immediate", I still like this May date, though the Tour's March schedule continues to be questionable.

6).Bizarre caddie/player goings on with Willett and Tweeter Murray both changing their partnerships, in seemingly abrupt fashion. Danny Willett certainly needs something to turbo-charge his season which has been a bit of a waste so far - he's going to find it increasingly difficult to stop a rankings free-fall.

7).A couple of Major Championship qualifying dates to take note of:
US Open: owgr Top 60 as at May 22nd qualify. There's a second bite at that cherry on June 12th.
Open Championship: owgr Top 50 on May 29th.

8).The weather looks reasonably good for the week, there's extensive TV coverage, the fridge is full of brewskis, what's not to like about this week?

This week, the PGATour is playing the Byron Nelson

the current OWGR ranking of the 2013, 2014, 2015 Byron Nelson winners are

944th (Sang Moon Bae)
975th (Brendon Todd)
713th (Steven Bowditch)

Look out Sergio!!

Diggers,
JACKPOT!! Berdych is the man.


GPB,
Good shout there!

kwinigolfer wrote:he was quoted as saying he'd be spending a lot of the summer "in the UK";

That's only two weeks then?

Pedro - Still better than Minnesota (where I used to live and truly enjoyed it). We always said summer was two weeks of bad ice skating.

pedro wrote:

kwinigolfer wrote:he was quoted as saying he'd be spending a lot of the summer "in the UK";

That's only two weeks then?

Sadly, probably true.

Glad to read Rory's "back issue" is a reoccurance of his earlier rib injury and not a spine/disc issue!

He's most likely going to have to take more time out for recovery, wonder how thats going to impact his schedule...

With our PGA up next, it's at a minimum going to impact his prep for that. Could even rule him out altogether.