Best bets
4pts win Scottie Scheffler @ 9/2
2pts each-way Justin Thomas @ 9/1
0.5pt each-way Kevin Yu @ 80/1
0.5pt each-way Matt Fitzpatrick @ 28/1
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Scottie Scheffler, the world’s No. 1 golfer, will be attempting to do what only six others have done before – win the same tournament for the third year in a row and he’ll have to do it in front of the year’s noisiest, beeriest crowd at the Phoenix Open.
It may not be one of the elite Signature tournaments where the norm is a $20m pot with $3.6m of it to the winner – it was for Phoenix last year but the tournament has been downgraded – but for atmosphere, especially around the ‘Coliseum’, the famed short 16th where a temporary 20,000-seater grandstand is built every year, the four days at TPC Scottsdale in the Arizona desert are hard to beat.
Players who miss the green there expect to be booed but it’s all done in good spirit and the interplay between golfer and audience with shared high fives is huge when a tee shot ends up close to the flag. The din when Tiger Woods aced it as a 21-year-old in 1997 just a couple of months before landing his first Masters almost lifted the roof off.
And then, after an early finish on Sunday, many well oiled on Budweisers and Coors, will sup a good few more watching Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas. What odds a few sickies when it comes to working on Monday?
Not since the legendary Arnold Palmer won three Phoenix Opens in 1961-62-63 (not on this week’s Stadium course that wasn’t there until 1988) has anyone done the Phoenix hat-trick but it’s not the strongest field in the world Scheffler has to beat and little wonder he’s as short as 9/2.
To do so, the Dallas man will have to up his greens game. After a brilliant flat-stick display to rout a star field at the Hero World Challenge in December, his putting in three tournaments this year has been an eyesore and he languishes in 117th place on the strokes-gained-in-putting stats. Despite that, finishes of fifth at The Sentry, 17th at AmEx and sixth at the weather-wrecked Pebble Beach Pro Am, where he still had a chance of catching leader Wyndham Clark when the rain-gods intervened, indicate there’s precious little else amiss with his game.
It’s hugely significant that Scheffler’s putting stats at Scottsdale in the two years he’s won there – first by draining a 25ft birdie putt to beat Patrick Cantlay in a playoff, then easing home by two over Nick Taylor last year with big names Jon Rahm and Justin Thomas well beaten off in third and fourth – were tip-top. Second in 2022 on the greens stats when he averaged 58th overall on the year and 13th in 2023 when he tumbled right down to 161st on the ratings, he should be arriving with buckets of positivity.
So the likelihood is that the smooth Scottsdale dance-floors will bring the best out of Scottie’s errant putter and he will become the first since Steve Stricker at the John Deere Classic in 2009-10-11 to do the magical treble. And if you need further convincing, Scheff led the field in par-four scoring both in 2022 and 2023 and by a long way in one year. Just think – if he wins, he’ll be taking a massive pay cut, the $1.584m top prize is more than $2m down on last year’s. Life is so tough for these golfing gods.
His biggest threat could be Ryder Cup teammate Thomas who has a fine Scottsdale record (4th, 8th, 13th and 3rd the past four renewals) on this 7261-yard par 71 created by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish where Phil Mickelson somehow compiled a 28-under-par 258 in 2013. Heavy rain on Thursday and a bit more on Friday will take some of the sting out of the course but, even so, we can safely say that 28-under freak will not be beaten. None of the ten winners since has even got to 20 under.
Thomas seems to have conquered his own putting woes which scarred his 2023. There was only the odd blip in JT’s hot start to the current campaign, 40 under par for just seven rounds at Kapalua and Pebble in finishing third and sixth. That birdie count will soar this week as he’s 53 under for his last four Phoenixes.
If US Open champ Clark putts like he did when shooting a 60 at Pebble Beach on Saturday, he’ll be unbeatable but his golf at the Ryder Cup was ordinary and until Pebble had not strung together anything close to what he accomplished in that heady US Open week in June.
That’s why as big as 80/1 was available for Pebble last week and I’m fairly convinced second-placed Ludvig Aberg would have overhauled him. This is an opportunity for Clark to prove me entirely wrong.
Max Homa (sixth in 2020 and a far superior operator these days) rates a bigger threat and Britain has a serious runner in Matt Fitzpatrick who keeps getting upset with himself when not every putt goes in and needs to lighten up a bit. He was tenth at Scottsdale two years ago but is probably only an each-way shout.
Great putters like Fitz, JT Poston (11th in 2021) and Min Woo Lee will always have a chance and if there’s going to be an upset of anywhere the scale of the craziness of the past five weeks, look no further than Taiwanese prospect Kevin Yu, a Scottsdale resident who is going places judging from his eyecatching start to the year, third at the AmexEx (unlucky to miss out on a playoff) and sixth at Pebble Beach. The 25-year-old is not the most consistent but showed promise last year when sixth at the John Deere and seventh at Pebble and has stepped up his game.
Best bets
2pts each-way Tyrrell Hatton @ 14/1
1pt each-way Talor Gooch @ 18/1
1pt each-way Brooks Koepka @ 14/1
LIV 2024 is off to a headline-grabbing start and there are 13 more of them to come, teeing off this week in Las Vegas where the same cast will do it all over again for another $25m of Saudi cash. It’s not golf as traditionalists know it but we’d better get used to it.
The washout at Pebble Beach in flood-lashed Califormia on the PGA Tour meant golf punters had nothing to watch on Sunday evening other than LIV Mayakoba and undoubtedly got the rebel tour a bigger TV audience but what an epic show LIV+ subscribers were treated to – it’s free – with $400m star signing Jon Rahm’s two closing bogeys throwing it away and a marathon playoff between Joaquin Niemann and Sergio Garcia that ended in the dark.
It was only justice that Niemann, a 14/1 selection here last week, should eventually win it with a fourth extra-hole birdie. It wouldn’t have needed to go deep into the evening without the two-shot penalty slapped on Niemann for a wrong-drop rules infringement the previous day but the crowd got an hour more than their money’s worth and were not complaining.
The penalty turned a runaway victory for the Chilean after his mind-boggling 59 in round one into a roller-coaster final session with Niemann, stunned by the bad news that had greeted him in the first tee, struggling to stay composed enough to keep Garcia, Rahm and Dean Burmester at bay.
To clinch a first LIV victory after such an upsetting start to the day says much for the Australian Open champion’s resolve but he looked shattered by the end of it and may struggle to repeat at the Las Vegas Country Club where they are starting on Thursday, a day earlier than usual, to avoid a clash with one of America’s great sporting institutions. Super Bowl LVIII kicks off in front of 70,000 nearby at Las Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium on Sunday afternoon and you don’t want to get in the way of that juggernaut!
LIV commissioner Greg Norman was a course winner at this week’s venue, the Las Vegas Country Club, where sporting legends Joe DiMaggio and Andre Agassi played their golf and Frank Sinatra was often a visitor. It hosted the LV Invitational from 1983 to 1991 and in 1984 it became the first to offer in excess of $1m in prize money. Funny to think that the $162,000 first prize Denis Watson won that year was less than Ian Poulter got for T28 in Mexico on Sunday.
A look at past winners on the 7089-yard par 70 (only two par fives) confirms that accuracy off the tee is the key, Scott Hoch, Curtis Strange, Fuzzy Zoeller and Watson all being the type of straight-shooters and flat-stick experts we should be looking for. That’s going to be the problem for Rahm at the majority of LIV courses – they are not necessarily going to be difficult enough to showcase his special gifts.
He didn’t bring his best to Mayakoba and couldn’t buy a putt yet still almost won and he will have been nervous too, trying to live up to that obscene price tag.
I think the have-a-beer personality of his livewire Ryder Cup partner Tyrrell Hatton will be better suited to the quickfire 54-hole shotgun-start format and the Sunday 64 the Englishman shot to spearhead the victory charge of Rahm’s Legion XIII squad, giving him a top-ten finish into the bargain, was encouraging enough to suggest an investment at 14/1. He’ll see this as one big laugh while still being able to play his best game. Rahm doesn’t do that.
The even more eccentric Bryson DeChambeau has his moments but the only other one really in Rahm’s class currently is five-time Major winner Brooks Koepka whose good final day lifted him to a share of fifth at Mayakoba. He is seen as a serious threat and for the style of player best equipped for this particular assignment, last year’s LIV player of the year Talor Gooch fits the bill. He is not spectacular but very steady. Cam Smith does it differently, less reliable off the tee but a magical scrambler, but ends up with much the same score.
Garcia? Not too sure. That’s the second LIV playoff he’s lost and at 44 Rahm’s old buddy will find the competition getting ever fiercer.
Here’s hoping one tradition of the old Invitational isn’t forgotten – the showgirls who adorn the prizegiving ceremony. Viva Las Vegas!
Best bets
2pts each-way Frederic Lacroix @ 28/1
1.5pts each-way Zander Lombard @ 18/1
1pt each-way Harrison Endycott @ 60/1
1pt each-way Scott Jamieson @ 60/1
0.5pt each-way Nacho Elvira @ 80/1
Another difficult week for most golf punters ended with 150/1 Bahrain hero Dylan Frittelli winning for the first time since 2017 and Wyndham Clark’s third-round 60 before Pebble Beach turned into a swamp allowing backers to collect without the sweat of worrying who might catch the US Open champion as round four was abandoned.
For those like me who were looking forward to second-placed Ludvig Aberg overhauling the hitherto out-of-form Clark on Sunday it was a frustration that the weather gods decreed otherwise.
But there’s no point crying over spilt milk because a) Clark might still have won and b) these things level themselves out and I remember my first 100/1 winner (a very long time ago and not repeated often enough since) benefited from a similar weather situation and a tournament reduced to 54 holes.
This week’s Qatar Masters, the fifth and final leg of the Desert Swing before the DP World Tour heads to Africa, has produced plenty of big-priced winners and might well do so again. The field is much as it has been in these Gulf tournaments since Adrian Meronk jumped ship with Rasmus Hojgaard again installed favourite after following a second at Ras Al Khaimah with a never-in-contention T8 in Bahrain. This will be his fifth straight start and no surprise he was starting to look jaded at the weekend. Even 22-year-olds don’t have unlimited reserves.
The Dane will probably dot up now that he’s not saddled with my tip but I’ll take him on with Frederic Lacroix, a Frenchman who has been inspired by the success on both main tours of compatriot Matthieu Pavon and continues to impress. Fourth in Bahrain after a T3 in Ras Al Khaimah more than matches Hojgaard’s 2-8 in the same tournaments yet he is triple the odds.
Fifth in the South African Open on his final 2023 start, this 29-year-old who operated at Challenge Tour level until quite recently seems to be arriving on the improve for his Doha debut. As he has already shown a liking for golf in this part of the world, Lacroix is worth chancing in spite of a lack of course experience. now that Pavon has shown him the way. In making him believe “I could do that”. Pavon was no more than a journeyman until this late-blooming spurt. Lacroix could be heading the same way.
South Africans were calling the tune in Bahrain with Frittelli winning, Zander Lombard T2 and Ockie Strydom T4. No Frittelli this week but Lombard is a larger-than-life presence who has been threatening to nab that elusive first W. His desert record this year (6-16-13-2) shows a newly-discovered consistency and a solid 13th on the last Peter Harradine layout he played, Ras Al Khaimah, was a good omen.
Admittedly he could have done better at Doha in the past. Lack of positive course form on this 7475-yard par 72 is a tiny worry but I’m convinced he’s currently playing the best golf of his life.
Compatriot Thriston Lawrence, past winner Ewen Ferguson and the ever-consistent Yannik Paul have solid claims but to complete the staking plan I’m going for the jackpot with bigger-priced trio Harrison Endycott, Scott Jamieson and Nacho Elvira.
I thought Sydneyite Endycott was going to justify support for a long while in Bahrain and while he didn’t quite see it through for an each-way return he played well enough to stick with. He was the impressive winner of PGA Tour Q-School before Christmas.
Veterans Jamieson and Elvira shared third place in Qatar last year when the tournament was staged at the end of October. Jamieson, standing in 119th place on the money list going into Qatar and needing a top-five finish to keep his card, was on the verge of being a yesterday’s man.
It was the last counting tournament and he kept having “extreme thoughts like ‘am I going to be able to afford the house I’m living in?’” But for once a guy not exactly renowned for getting the job done when push came to shove answered the call. It’s a story with a happy ending but an even happier one would be if this stoic 40-year-old could win a ‘proper’ tournament on what will be his 354th try. He’s down as having won the 2012 Nelson Mandela Championship but that was a freak week.
The South African tournament had to be reduced to 36 holes because of a huge downpour and the course shortened (so short that Scott shot a 57) because much of it was unplayable.
Some of his best golf has come in the desert: apart from the T3 here, one of only two top-tens in 2023, Jamieson has posted high everywhere else too, right up to last week’s T16 in Bahrain, a big finish there spoilt a little by a last-day 74. Scotty is every bit as talented as 95 per cent of the field but he has to make himself believe it.
Elvira can range from brilliant to crazy but having his kid brother around as competition for the first time has seen the swashbuckling Spaniard work on his game and his 16th at Ras Al Khaimah suggests he still had some decent stuff left in the locker.
The typical desert course has eight lakes as protection as well as a 639-yard par five and plenty of long fours but 18 under should get it done in warm, clear conditions, although a 15mph wind is forecast for round one.
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