Best bets
2pts each-way Wyndham Clark @ 28/1
1pt each-way Billy Horschel @ 33/1
1pt each -way Viktor Hovland @ 18/1
1pt each-way Patrick Cantlay @ 18/1
0.5pt each-way Hideki Matsuyama @ 16/1
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It’s not a misprint – Castle Pines, the Colorado course being played by the 50 survivors in the FedEx Cup race, DOES measure 8130 yards (if they play the BMW Championship from the tips) but this is not cruelty-to-golfers week.
The normal ration of birdies can be confidently predicted as the second leg of the FedEx Playoffs hits new heights at the rarefied altitude of 6300 feet – that’s a mile high and more – south of Denver at Castle Rock. For the caddies a degree in advanced mathematics wouldn’t come amiss as they grapple with working out the right club to hand their paymasters.
As a rough rule-of-thumb, a 300-yard driver can expect the ball to travel 332 yards and for the “real” length of the course you can deduct somewhere between ten and 15 per cent, bringing the yardage down to approx 7350, pretty standard for a par 72 these days.
Jason Day is the only one of the 50 to have played at Castle Pines in 2006, in the final edition of The International, the last time the course figured on the PGA schedule, but at just 7619 yards then it was a pussycat..
This is the PGA Tour’s first visit to Colorado since Billy Horschel won the BMW at Cherry Hills ten years ago, a course with a lesser elevation average of 5300 feet. Billy went on to FedEx Cup glory but that won’t be happening this year as, barring a miracle, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele, have it between them with Scottie 1485 points ahead. A record $25m FedEx bonus awaits the Cup-winner.
‘He’s had this homecoming in mind for quite a while as his build-up to it could hardly have been more encouraging.’
Yet the revived Horschel, runner-up at our Open, back in the winner’s enclosure this year after a lean period and on a roll in following Troon with top-tens at Wyndham and St Jude, is very much a contender in a week where the thin air will be a bigger challenge than the extreme length of this quirky, undulating Jack Nicklaus layout.
By finishing joint second to Hideki Matsuyama in a nerve-shredding finish to the St Jude that had backers of the 25/1 winner going greyer by the minute as the Japanese star squandered a huge lead but somehow found pressure-filled birdies at the final two holes, Schauffele closed the gap to improve his FedEx chances.
There are 2000 points up for grabs here and at East Lake but in all probability Schauffele needs a Scheffler collapse and the world No. 1, fourth at St Jude where he showed rare flashes of temperament when putts failed to fall, doesn’t do anything like that, does he? Maybe the elevation changes will unsettle his remarkable distance control more than most.
We saw the worst of Rory McIlroy last week and by finishing 26 shots and 68 places behind Matsuyama, he effectively ruled himself out of the FedEx picture, a competition he has won three times. His mind seemed a million miles away.
Tee to green Tommy Fleetwood was as good as anybody but his putting was dire and Ludvig Aberg played tired golf so if there is to be a European winner last year’s FedEx champion Viktor Hovland who showed a welcome return to form in sharing second place with Schauffele at St Jude looks to be the one. Thank goodness new coach Grant Waite has sorted him out. It’s been a year Hovland will want to forget. Victory here would improve it immeasurably.
The Norwegian won this tournament when it was staged at Olympia Fields last year and will be fancying himself for a repeat after last week’s confidence restorer. But my main bet this week will be last year’s US Open champion Wyndham Clark for whom this is almost a home game as he was born in Denver and won the state championship three times before moving away.
In his youth he used to watch the stars play in The International and knows Castle Pines intimately, a big plus for an unusual course that takes a bit of knowing.
Cast aside his disastrous showing in the Majors – three missed cuts and a 56th – and it’s been an excellent year for Clark who shot a final-round 60 to steal the weather-shortened Pebble Beach pro-am, went on to finish second at Sawgrass and I think he’s had this homecoming in mind for quite a while as his build-up to it could hardly have been more encouraging.
After a shocking start, he put three cracking rounds together for 14th at the Olympics, he was tenth in the Scottish Open, ninth at the Travelers and seventh on Sunday at St Jude. And he’s world No. 5.
Matsuyama hauled himself up to third spot on the FedEx ladder and has had such a good season, winning early doors at Riviera too, that a quick follow-up can’t be ruled out while I give Patrick Cantlay, double BMW winner in 2021-22 and T12 on Sunday after a poor start, every chance.
He has a good record on Nicklaus courses and must be one of the freshest in the field not having chased the mighty dollar as much as some. And he hates his great chum Schauffele beating him all the time!
True, he’s winless this year but that makes him all the hungrier and he arrives on the back of a brace of weekend 66s at Southwind with a game that looks fit for purpose.
There’s no cut this week but only the top 30 on the FedEx ladder come Sunday afternoon will be going through to the Tour Championship at East Lake, Georgia, next week. They will have to put their raingear on to get there with thunderstorms forecast for the first two days … and possibly more to come on Sunday.
Best bets
2.5pts each-way Nicolai Hojgaard @ 12/1
1.5pts each-way Thorbjorn Olesen @ 16/1
0.5pt each-way David Ravetto @ 80/1
0.5pt each-way Brandon Robinson Thompson @ 60/1
Identical twins Nicolai and Rasmus Hojgaard make history this week when they tee off in their national championship as joint favourites. At 12/1 Fitzdares cannot split the 23-year-olds but Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald did last year when he picked Nicolai for his team and left Rasmus out.
Although Nicolai wasn’t one of the stars in Europe’s crushing defeat of the Americans, being part of the squad inspired him so much that only a few weeks later he followed second place to class act Max Homa in the Nedbank Challenge with by far his biggest success, holding off Viktor Hovland and Tommy Fleetwood to claim the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai.
He started 2024 in similar vein by taking second place in the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in January, hitting the ball unbelievable distances, and to bring his story up to date a seventh place in Paris at the Olympics featured a round in 62. Le Golf National is not used to being treated like that.
‘I’m in no doubt Nicolai should be clear favourite.’
In 2021 the twins created their own piece of history by winning on consecutive weeks on the DP World Tour, Rasmus sinking a birdie putt to win the European Masters, Nicolai answering back by sinking a birdie putt to clinch his first victory at the Italian Open.
Yet when they started out on tour it was Rasmus, the steadier, less powerful one, who made the bigger impression, running up three victories before Nikolai got off the mark.
The score still stands 4-3 in favour of Rasmus whose injury problems have curtailed his progress and while a Hojgaard one-two might be too much of a fairytale, there are no giants of the game in this average field to hinder it if both play their best.
I’m in no doubt Nicolai should be clear favourite – the world rankings, Nicolai 47th, Rasmus 101st, tell you that – but Rasmus has not been able to play as much or at Nicolas’s level for much of the year. He tees off as defending champion having beaten Nacho Elvira in a playoff at Himmerland 12 months ago.
Another Dane, Thorbjorn Olesen, could well be the Hojgaard party pooper. A prolific winner over the years, he has played Ryder Cup, knows how to win and on courses that fit his eye is hard to beat. An early-year winner in Ras Al Khaimah, he wasn’t far behind teammate Nicolai when 14th at the Olympics.
The Danes like to show off different courses every year and with the Lubker Resort, a 7026-yard par 71 near Aarhus, new to the rota this is a tough call for punters. On the short side these days, it still has two holes over 600 yards but short-hole specialists will be in their element on the five par threes.
Opened in 2008, the Trent Jones Jr layout is billed as “Scandinavia’s answer to Valderrama” which suggests there are plenty of tricks for the unwary. Fast, heavily contoured greens await as well as generous fairways.
It sounds right up Olesen’s alley but those in the shake-up in Prague deserve to be considered as current form is often the best guide.
That didn’t work out on a new course in Prague last week when Frenchman David Ravetto sprang a 200/1 upset. Now that he’s got his nose in front once, and he did it without a trace of nerves, there’s no reason why this fine striker can’t do it again. He looks value at 80/1 while joint sixths Brandon Robinson Thompson and Austria’s experienced Bernd Wiesberger, a prolific winner in his prime, should also be considered.
A few years back Wiesberger would be favourite for this but there’s something missing since he came back from LIV asking for reinstatement after deciding it wasn’t for him. For someone as short as 16/1 I’d want someone with a more convincing putting stroke. and was more taken with Robinson Thompson, the Challenge Tour winner from the previous week who gave us a great run for a 60/1 shot.
Two late bogeys dropped him from third to T6 but we had seen enough by then to put him in the proverbial notebook. A good learning experience for the late-blooming 31-year-old from the Isle of Wight – he’s worth another chance and the odds are the same.
Tom McKibbin and Richard Mansell also come into the conversation but Nicolai is the man to beat even on a course that won’t pander to his immense power. He has much more to offer than that. Good news: it’s going to be dry for the finish. Bad news: three days of rain come first.
Best bets
1.5pts each-way Rose Zhang @ 28/1
1pt each-way Ruoning Yin @ 28/1
1pt each-way Laura Coughlin @ 22/1
1pt each-way Ayaka Furue @ 12/1
0.5pt each-way Georgia Hall @ 60/1
0.5pt each-way Lydia Ko @ 25/1
Olympic golf viewing figures exceeded all expectations and to have two modern greats in Scottie Scheffler and the much-loved Lydia Ko as gold medalists was as good an advert as the game could have.
Adding gold to the silver and bronze from the two previous Olympics cemented Ko’s place in golf’s Hall of Fame but there are still a gap or two on her CV before the 27-year-old New Zealander calls time on a long career which began with her beating the pros as a 15-year-old amateur at the 2012 Canadian Open.
One of those gaps is the Women’s British Open which we now have to call the AIG Women’s Open in return for the sponsors backing the final Major of the year until 2025.
To me, it diminishes the championship not calling it the ‘British’ but money talks. Whatever the title, and my goodness it’s had a fair few sponsors in its time. But ‘British’ was always in the title when Pretty Polly, Hitachi, Burberry, Weetabix and Ricoh put up the cash.
The secret is the amount of cash: it’s been $9m the past two years under AIG, twice what it was when they took over five years ago. The players aren’t complaining, only the traditionalists!
‘The mystique of St Andrews takes many prisoners and great patience will be required.’
Ko’s record in the AIG is as slim as she is – her only top-tens coming with a third at Turnberry in 2015 and seventh at Muirfield in 2022. Her one brush with St Andrews, a T42, when Stacy Lewis won there in 2013 hardly counts as she was still an amateur.
This will probably be her last chance to compete at the Home of Golf as she married 20 months ago and wants to do other things with her life than hitting a little white ball around a field.
It’s been all go for short-game magician Lydia since she won gold in Paris as she was back on the golfing treadmill last week getting soaked and blown away at Dundonald, a modern-day Scottish links that serves as ideal prep for this week’s supreme test on the other side of the country.
Ko’s T9 in the Scottish Open goes down as excellent effort as does the second place of Olympic silver medalist, Esther Henseleit, the tall German who was bridesmaid for the second week running.
Of the Olympians taking part, those two, along with Charley Hull’s fifth and Georgia Hall’s 12th, were tip-top efforts considering there was so little breathing space after all the excitement of Paris. Victory at Dundonald went to a 31-year-old Virginian who wasn’t at the Olympics.
Laura Coughlin was winning for the second time in three weeks after not having won anywhere in more than a hundred starts. Third and fourth in two Majors this year, she is on quite a roll and it would be foolish to rule out this debutante even on a course like the Old at St Andrews that takes a bit of knowing.
That said, it is arguably the easiest on the links on the rota, though the winning scores of the great Lorena Ochoa (five under) and Lewis (eight under) say otherwise.
The mystique of St Andrews takes many prisoners and great patience will be required. Seven giant double greens (the 2nd twinned with the 16th, the 3rd with 15, the 4th with 14, the 5th with 13, the 6th with 12: the 7th with 11 and the eighth with 10) inevitably slow play down and then there are the blind shots and the weather.
Some never feel comfortable there – Laura Davies for one – and not all visiting Americans will relish its raw charms, particularly if the rain teems down as forecast for the first 36 holes.
First-timers will want to tick it off their bucket list and one who won’t be fazed is exciting youngster Rose Zhang. The 21-year-old Californian, a former world No. 1 amateur and a pro only for 15 months, has already won twice, the first on her pro debut, and acquitted herself well at the Olympics, finishing eighth, well ahead of her US teammates, the disappointing Nelly Korda (22nd) and Lilia Vu (36th).
Korda has been automatic favourite for everything after winning six of her first seven this year but is finding it hard living up to such an electric start and has been deposed by Japan’s in-form Ayaka Furue as Fitzdares’ 12/1 market leader for this Major.
Furue is on a hot run in Europe having won the last Major, the Evian, and third in the Scottish Open. In fact, she’s been in cracking form since the spring and isn’t the only serious challenger from Japan as Miyu Yamashita, an 11-time winner on her home circuit who just missed out on a medal at the Olympics. She looked a class act.
Defending champion Vu, so impressive when running away with the British at Walton Heath last year, has had her campaign interrupted by injury and has lost a bit of confidence. True, she has won since coming back but nothing in her two latest performances (36th and 25th) suggests she’s in the zone.
The Chinese have a thrilling player in Ruoning Yin, not yet 22 but already a Major champion and, for a short time last year, ranked No. 1 in the world. Although crashing on the final day, she caught my eye with her impressive ball-striking at the Olympics and will be a danger to all.
So will Thai Atthaya Thitikul, a Major win in waiting if ever there was one and Yin’s partner when they won the Dow pairs at event in June.
As a past Open winner on links (Royal Lytham 2018), Hall looks Britain’s best bet. She’s hitting form at the right time after an underwhelming first half of the year.
Do give it a look – these girls are good!
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