Best bets
5pts win Xander Schauffele @ 9/4
1pt each-way Patrick Cantlay @ 28/1
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It’s not every week Fitzdares will offer you 250/1 about world-class golfers like Justin Thomas and Bob MacIntyre or even 125/1 about Tommy Fleetwood but it’s not every week we have a golf tournament as daft as the Tour Championship.
This is the end-of-term bonanza at East Lake, Georgia, where a record $100m bonus pool will be shared out between the elite 30 who have made it to the final leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs.
This year $25m will go to the winner, $7m more than Viktor Hovland wheelbarrowed away as last year’s supreme champion. As if they needed it.
Sounds great but some bright spark decided to make it an inverse handicap tournament where the players who have done best throughout the year receive rather than concede strokes start to those who have done less well.
So Scottie Scheffler who has won everything bar the Boat Race – seven tournaments if you count Olympic Gold, the Masters among them – starts nine ahead of Fleetwood, a last-gasp qualifier thanks to a neat T5 at Castle Pines on Sunday.
‘It’s not every week we have a golf tournament as daft as the Tour Championship.’
That’s why Scottie is odds-on this crazy week and no-chance Tommy is 125/1. Not only is he nine behind the world No. 1, he starts seven adrift of the second man, Xander Schauffele, winner of the PGA Championship and the Open. In other words, he virtually can’t win but there’s much gold for fighting your way up the leaderboard and even if he flops, there’s $550,000 for ending up plumb last. Nice work if you can get it!
In horse racing it’s the direct opposite. There the best horses have to concede weight to the slow coaches so the race should, in theory, end in a multiple dead-heat (but never does). Here the PGA Tour seems to be going all out to make it as easy as possible for the outstanding golfer of the year to collect the main prize.
Yet, surprisingly, for the last two years the plan hasn’t worked. Scheffler cocked it up in 2022, losing a big lead to the fast-finishing Rory McIlroy, and last year he was never sighted as Hovland, on the crest of the wave after winning the BMW, closed with a 61 to swamp everyone.
It’s pretty clear Scheffler doesn’t care for the format, the idea of receiving strokes from rivals is anathema to him, and it has shown in his ragged play and tetchy mood in the first two Playoffs. At Castle Pines he even shouted out “What the f**k – that’s impossible!” when an approach shot airmailed a green. It was a side of the usually unflappable Scheffler we are not used to. Nor are we used to him finishing 33rd.
“I think it’s silly,” he says. “You can’t call it a season-long race based on one tournament.” Is this a show of weakness which will make him vulnerable this week? Could he be heading for a hat-trick of FedEx Cup defeats? Has he had enough and got enough for the year? All will be revealed but I do think Schauffele will take him down.
With only two shots to make up on his near-namesake, that’s nothing over 72 holes given the authority with which Schauffele is currently exhibiting. True he wasn’t great last week on the greens either but in sharing fifth place still finished a long way ahead of his arch-rival whom he already leads 3-1 for Tour Championship finishes.
Given Schauffele’s stellar East Lake record (first in 2017, T7 in 2018, second in 2019, second in 2020, T5 in 2021, fourth in 2022, second in 2023) on top of exceptional summer form, the bet has to be this course specialist at 9/4.
Third-in Hideki Matsuyama, off 7, is injury prone and has to be treated with caution after pulling out with back trouble following an excellent first round last week. He, BMW winner Keegan Bradley (off 6) and runner-up Ludwig Aberg (off 5) are close enough if good enough but I doubt they are, although Ryder Cup captain Bradley opened with a 63 last year and is better handicapped this time.
McIlroy, off 4 as he was when springing a surprise three years ago, is the one who came from furthest back to win, spotting Scheffler a six start and, with a bit of help, getting home by one. Yet from what I saw from his wayward driving and attitude last week, I’m far from convinced he can work the oracle again. Tossing his driver into the lake in disgust after one offline tee shot and then fishing it out was not a good image.
Of those on the same mark, Wyndham Clark, third last year and hitting form at the right time, and Patrick Cantlay, almost as much of a course specialist as Schauffele after finishing first, seventh and fifth in the three latest editions, are preferred for an each-way punt. With only three places on offer and two probably already accounted for, options are limited but a little at 28/1 on Cantlay, a decent 12th at the BMW, wouldn’t be the worst bet.
Whether course form is totally relevant we shall have to wait and see as East Lake isn’t the same East Lake of past Tour Championships. More than a century after the great Donald Ross redesigned it, the Atlanta course has been given a massive multi-million-dollar overhaul to echo the layout played by the legendary Bobby Jones, giving it back the feel of the 1940s.
Andrew Green, golf’s hottest new architect, was tasked with reshaping bunkers, removing trees and rebounding greens to reflect the characteristics of a bygone era. At 7490 yards par 71 even its length and par are changed.
Reports are favourable and it’s hard to imagine the alterations fazing the likes of Scheffler and Schauffele, but you just never know. What we do know: temperatures will be well into the nineties (33-34C). Hot golf but not a cool tournament. Wouldn’t a matchplay championship for the top 16, similar to the one we used to have at Wentworth back in the good old days, make for a more sensible and entertaining finale to the season?
Best bets
3pts each-way Tyrrell Hatton @ 13/2
1.5pts each-way Laurie Canter @ 28/1
1pt each-way Frederic LaCroix @ 28/1
0.5pt each-way Richie Ramsay @ 60/1
0.5pt each-way Andy Sullivan @ 33/1
0.5pt each-way Thorbjorn Olesen @ 20/1
A great, historic title boasting great past winners like Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle and Lee Trevino and a great course, four-times Ryder Cup venue The Belfry, the British Masters deserves a great field – but what do we have? Sadly, nothing to write home about.
Just one current Ryder Cup player, Tyrrell Hatton, and he’s long since departed the DP World Tour for richer pastures. Fair enough, nine of the European elite are involved in the FedEx Cup finale in Atlanta this week – good luck to them, they’ll need it – but even so a less-than-stellar turnout for “the Betfred British Masters hosted by Sir Nick Faldo”, to give the tournament its full title, is nothing new these days.
‘I celebrated well into the night too after winning my weight in Hennessy VSOP…’
Last year obscure New Zealander Daniel Hillier beat obscure American Gunner Wiebe and half-forgotten OliverWilson but couldn’t Ryder Cup heroes Justin Rose (4th last year) and Nicolai Hojgaard, both out of the Tour Championship picture, have lent their support? It would have been nice to see Ryan Fox too.
But it is what it is, and the course, near Sutton Coldfield, is still the one Peter Alliss and David Thomas created half a century ago. The risk-reward short par-four ninth in front of the sumptuous clubhouse is still as teasing as ever and the daunting dogleg 18th, across two tracts of water to a split-level green, is still the 497-yard par four card-wrecker it always was.
It was there in 1985 that Sam Torrance sank the birdie putt that brought the Cup home for the first time since Europe replaced GB & Ireland as USA’s opponents, a massive moment in sport. The celebrations lasted well into the night.
Seven years earlier I celebrated well into the night too after winning my weight in Hennessy VSOP in the pro-am preceding the cognac company’s British Isles v Europe match. It was the absurdly generous nearest-the-pin prize at the 182-yard seventh and as I weighed two stone more than today, 57 bottles came my way. With the retail value far exceeding the amateur limit I was reluctantly compelled to hand over 38 of them to amateur partners I had never met before. We had quite a party!
This week’s star turn Hatton knows how to celebrate too and he looks a class above the rest. LIV signings keep winning when they are allowed to venture away – Richard Bland won two Champions Tour Majors, Bryson De Chambeau won the US Open, Laurie Canter won the European Open and only last week one of their lesser lights Jinichiro Kazuma won on the Japan Tour.
Hatton has been just about LIV’s best player over the past couple of months, winning in Nashville, finishing second at Valderrama and third at LIV UK when the breakaway league came over to the JCB club near Uttoxeter.
He should have won the English leg or at least been in a playoff with Jon Rahm but faltered over the last two holes. There’s nobody of Rahm’s calibre at The Belfry, a 7336-yard par 72 that rewards precise positional play rather than brute strength which is Hatton’s forte.
His biggest danger could be Canter who lost his LIV ticket in December but remains a reserve. Meanwhile he’s been keeping a foot in both camps and the 34 year-old from Bath finally got the monkey off his back of being a serial loser when he opened his DP World Tour account in Hamburg in May after copious near misses. A decent 25th in the Open at Troon the last time we saw him, he has always had the talent. Now with confidence from a victory behind him, maybe the nerve to match it has finally arrived.
You can’t beat current form at this time of year when others are jaded and there’s no arguing with Frenchman Frederic LaCroix who followed a third in Prague by opening his account in Denmark on Sunday, looking cool and in the end winning emphatically. This breakthrough has been on the cards for a while and there may be more to come.
Course form is important too and I like the chances of craggy Aberdonian Richie Ramsay, T3 in 2022, Andy Sullivan, sixth in 2021 and Glaswegian Ewen Ferguson, T4 last year. Sullivan who comes from nearby Nuneaton will have a big fan club following him and he’s been playing some decent golf.
Thorbjorn Olesen won this two years ago but a disappointing T42 in his home Open last week tempers enthusiasm a little and the same goes for his young compatriot Rasmus Hojgaard who looked in control for 27 holes last week then tumbled down the leaderboard as if something was wrong with him. Olesen did win in Ras Al Khaimah in January and, at this level, you rule out an eight-time tour champion at your peril.
Matt Wallace has not been playing well enough in the States to merit an investment but it’s good to have him and ISCO winner Harry Hall, another Brit who makes his living in the US, over here to beef up the field.
The highly-touted Tom McKibbin is high in the betting but is finding it hard living up to expectations while Japanese star Keita Nakajima, although a DP World Tour winner in his first year, had his ego bruised by missing the cut by a long way at Troon after exiting early at the Scottish Open. At their best, both are dangerous.
Hooray for the sponsor and spectators, it’s going to be a sunny weekend. We get few enough tournaments in England so let’s see some big crowds in the West Midlands.
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