ATLANTA, Georgia – This is a good week not to bet on golf. Professional golf, that is. Go ahead and give your buddy three a side and play for paychecks, by all means.
This is the Tour Championship. It’s not the biggest tournament of the year or the most important. It’s just the most lucrative, sporting a $100-million purse. Not even Gucci can match that in the purse department.
The Tour Championship winner gets $25 million. (No booing from the LIV seats, please!) So there may be a few tight collars among those in the field who aren’t already half-a-billionaires. Or maybe not. Even the 12th-place finisher scores just over $1 mil.
The money is really good. Make it to East Lake this week and the least you go home with for finishing DFL—that’s Dead you-know-what Last—is $550,000. (How about a little somethin’ for the effort, Lama? Well, there it is. Keep the change, my son.)
The PGA Tour has cobbled together a unique system of playoffs that aren’t really playoffs as a grand finale to its season in order to avoid getting its butt kicked in the TV ratings by football. There are some good things about the finale of the only-partially-accurately-named FedEx Cup playoffs. Besides the money.
But there are multiple reasons not to place a professional wager this week. There’s just too many UF’s—Unknown Factors.
The level of nerves. (Did I mention the cash level is serious, as in World Poker serious?)
The gas tank check. As in, who’s mentally worn out from a couple of weeks in Europe for the Open and the Olympics and then The Sauna known as FedEx Cup stops in Memphis and Atlanta in August. It will be humid and hot this week, in the low- to mid-90s and locals will tell you it could’ve been worse. Anyone who arrives a little fatigued is not going to find this week as refreshing as a Febreze plug-in.
Welcome to West Lake. Huh? Yeah, the players were comfortably secure in their knowledge of the storied East Lake Golf Club, home of Bobby Jones (who was very nearly as good at golf as that gent in that “Bagger Vance” documentary about a Mr. Rannulph Junah who looked suspiciously like Matt Damon).
The course was “renovated,” which is a fancy way to say tweaked, refined and toughened-up to handle the PGA Tour’s best. “It’s like playing a new course,” said Open champion Xander Schauffele, whose last seven finishes at East Lake were 2, 4, 5, 2, 2, 7 and 1. You are correct if you presume he seemed less than enthused after his practice round Tuesday. It probably seemed like West Lake or North Lake or any other lake but East Lake to him.
Viktor Hovland said he almost didn’t recognize the course after the substantial tree removal that made some of East Lake’s narrower fairways less claustrophobic.
The starting strokes. Honest, that’s the official designation of the Tour Championship’s staggered start. In order to eliminate the complex points system that hampers the FedEx Cup’s first two legs, the top players get a head start. That actually might be a better name for this setup—The Head Start Program. That’s not already taken, right.
This is the format in which Scottie Scheffler, the world No. 1 who racked up six wins and won an Olympic gold medal, begins the week with a two-stroke edge over Xander Schauffele; three over Hideki Matsuyama; four over Keegan Bradley; five over Ludwig Aberg; six over the next five players (including Rory McIlroy) all the way down to ten strokes over the last five players in the field. And good luck to those gentlemen spotting 10 and 8 shots, respectively, to Scheffler and double-major winner Schauffele.
Combine these UF’s (or variables if you’d prefer common English words) and you have a situation where the savvy bettor should say, I have no idea. Or possibly revive that PGA Tour slogan from the 1990s, “Anything’s Possible.”
Scheffler has started from the pole the last two years here and didn’t win. If playing with the lead isn’t always easy, this week means starting with the lead. Few have ever experienced that. That’s just one more factor possibly working against Scheffler.
Schauffele says he played several new courses this year and did pretty well. A new course, however, might be easier to learn than an old course that got new hips and a knee replacement. Older players have seen the same thing at the Masters after the greens were revised. In this situation, memories lie. Sure, that putt at 15 always goes left… or, well, it did. Knowing East Lake might prove to be detrimental when playing the new course jokingly referred to here as West Lake.
One thing the modern PGA Tour schedule does is basically force the top players to try to be in top form every month for six months. That does lead to fatigue.
“There’s not really places in the schedule to take large breaks,” Scheffler said. “You’re king of getting warmed up in a sense at the beginning of the year Then March, you have The Players; April, Masters; May, PGA; June, U.S. Open; July, the Open Championship; and then you come to August and you’ve got the FedEx Cup playoffs. It definitely is a bit of a sprint. But I didn’t play all year to just get tired at East Lake and throw in the towel. It’s good competition this week.”
All hail his competitive spirit. Scheffler played well all year, no question, and one thing the FedEx Cup playoffs hopes to have in common with team sports playoffs are that it’s about how you’re playing now, not what you did in July.
“It’s like the Cowboys have had great regular seasons the last few years and left me heartbroken in the playoffs,” Scheffler said. “The Golden State Warriors, best regular season ever and they lose in the Finals. It happens. In a lot of other major sports, the best team doesn’t always win.”
But golf is a different sport. Is it that different? Hideki Matsuyama was the hottest player in golf two weeks ago. OK, not just because he was in Memphis. He was pulling away from the field the last day until some glitches on the back nine. Then he clutched up, birdied the last two holes and snagged a glorious victory. Ignore him at your own peril although here’s another darned UF—Matsuyama bagged last week’s FedEx Cup event at Castle Pines because of a back flareup. Is he fit to go 72 more?
Exhibit B is the last man to get into the 50-man field at Castle Pines, Keegan Bradley, who validated his Ryder Cup selection as captain, maybe, while also putting himself in line to possibly be picked for the Presidents Cup team next month, with a grinding, emotional victory. Bradley has never looked better. But that had to be incredibly draining, physically and mentally. Can he bounce back this week? Or did he just make his year with that effort?
“At the end of the day, it’s fun, it’s exciting,” Scheffler said of the playoff format and the starting strokes. “Keegan is a great example of what the playoffs are where you can have somebody who has not had their best year and all of a sudden, he turns it into what could be one of his best years.”
There’s more, of course, but it comes back to how closely matched these top players are in ability. And that golf is a stupid game often decided by a bounce. Bryson DeChambeau could have lost the U.S. Open at Pinehurst after his drive on the 72nd hole caromed off a volunteer marshal in the left rough and went farther into the rough. He could have ended up without a swing. But he got lucky enough that he could advance it to the front bunker, where he hit the shot of his lifetime—so far—to win the Open with a short par putt.
You can’t predict stuff like this. If you could, it wouldn’t be called gambling. It would be called Free Money.
Today’s message is this: Take a week off from golf wagering. The Tour Championship looks like a good bet to produce great golf and because of the variables, an even better bet to lose your money.
https://www.pgatour.com/tournaments/2024/tour-championship/R2024060/leaderboard
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