Best bets
Who will be your golfer of the year – Rory McIlroy or Scottie Scheffler? The score stands at 3-3 in tournaments won and 1-1 in Majors won. And while the next two fabulous weeks with the Genesis Scottish Open typically leading into The Open won’t conclusively answer that question, they will be inevitably have a big say.
At the modern links of the Renaissance Club in the golfing heartland of North Berwick, golf’s two biggest guns will provide a giant-sized hors d’oeuvres to next week’s main event across the Irish Sea at Royal Portrush. Wouldn’t it be sensational for the game itself if those two came striding down the last hole locked together and neck and neck either this Sunday or next? Or both!
Sadly, golf rarely pans out the way you want it to and there are plenty of “interlopers” itching to spoil everybody’s fun. Next week, of course, we’ve got everybody including the giants of LIV, headed by Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau but with $20m on the table and an elite event on both tours, the Scottish has more than enough to whet the appetite of all golf lovers.
Apart from Scottie, there’s Open champion Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, Sam Burns and current US Open champion JJ Spaun among the American raiders while Rory will be supported by the pride of Scotland Bob MacIntyre, Ludvig Aberg, Tommy Fleetwood, Viktor Hovland, Sepp Straka, Justin Rose, Nicolai Hojgaard and Matt Fitzpatrick from the last winning Ryder Cup squad.
And what if the winner hasn’t been mentioned yet? Hard to imagine, yet past Renaissance winner Aaron Rai and last year’s runner-up, silky veteran Adam Scott, Ryan Fox, Canadian crackers Corey Conners and Taylor Pendrith and South Africa’s exciting new kid on the block, bomber Aldrich Potgieter, aren’t in Scotland just to make up the numbers or to get some practice at links golf.
This is seriously competitive – and whoever wins, there’s likely to be a logjam coming down the stretch. We’ve had six Scottish Opens at the Renaissance, three have required playoffs and in the other three the winning margin was just one.
Everything is immaculate about the Renaissance Club, at 7282 yards a par 70 with enough bite to test the best and when it really turned awkward in 2022 Schauffele’s hard-earned seven under was enough to be crowned champion.
It also blew when Rai and Fleetwood dead-heated on 11 under but in more summery weather we’ve had scores of 15, 18, 18 and, in its first year, 22 under although the links has been tightened up since. This week we’re expecting perfect links weather, dry and cloudy with enough wind to keep players honest.
MacIntyre, the proudest of Scots, grows a foot playing on home ground as he has proved the last two years, deprived by outrageous late birdies by McIlroy two years ago, then taking his revenge last year, upstaging fourth-placed Rory with a passionate triumph to add to his Canadian Open victory a few weeks earlier when he had his father caddying.
‘Bobby Mac’ is improving all the time and it’s only a few weeks since he narrowly missed out in the US Open. Winning on both tours has given the 28-year-old from Oban a greater belief in himself and he will not hand over his title willingly. Maybe he’s not the best golfer in this elite field but he’s the most committed one. And the Scottish crowds love him.
This is Scheffler’s fourth visit with a T3 behind the two Macs in 2023 the pick of them. Although he arrives with impressive-looking figures from his six latest outings of 1-1-4-1-7-6 it has only occasionally been vintage Scheffler. If ever the man who has been No.1 in the world for 111 weeks can be described as mortal or beatable those have been the words for some of his rounds.
Since winning the Masters in April, McIlroy has struggled for concentration. That was always a possibility after achieving his dream of a career Slam although we hoped it would work the other way.
With both Masters and Slam monkeys off his back, there was high expectation he would play glorious carefree golf, win at least one more Major this year and it may yet happen. He has two weeks at home winding down but his post-Augusta form (7-47-MC-19-6) tells its own story. Who knows what sort of McIlroy comes out this week with beloved Royal Portrush on his mind?
Expect him to come out firing but not on all cylinders. For others, this will be their Open, not Rory. It’s the world for Rai, champion in 2020 when beating Tommy Fleetwood and Thomas Detry in extra-time and T4 alongside McIlroy and Aberg last year. It’s a pity he’s not in the form that took him to a US breakthrough at the Wyndham last August. He’s been steady rather a contender and I’m hoping that revisiting the scene of his prime European victory will give him the required lift.
The betting concentration on the Big Two means there are tastier prices about the rest and although this hasn’t been Matt Fitzpatrick’s best year by a very long way, he seems to have turned the corner. There’s been significant improvement with 17th at the Travelers and eighth in Detroit on his two latest outings. He was runner-up at Renaissance in 2021 and T3 the following year so the course suits his eye. Sharpness with the putter, once his main weapon, is required.
Adam Scott has had putting woes too but seems to have solved most of the problems. He loves links golf, should have won one Open, Muirfield 2013, from four ahead with four to play but that painfully got away from him and he was in prime position to win the US Open for 54 holes last month. The man who ran MacIntyre closest last year, beaten just by a shot, the 44-year-old Aussie rates decent each-way value.
The last time we heard of Viktor Hovland he was withdrawing from the Travelers after two holes of the final round because of a bad neck. As he’d shot 63 the previous day and finished third at the US Open the previous week, we can assume that was just a temporary blip. If so, the Norwegian will have a leading chance along with his Scandinavian chum Aberg who was T4 last year and looked very at home on the course all week.
I’m expecting a big week for Europe – and an even bigger one in Northern Ireland next week.
Best bets
It’s a bold shout by the LIV Tour to hit Europe the same week as Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are drawing massive crowds at the Scottish Open but they have some firecrackers of their own to parade and a great golf course too in Valderrama, the best in Spain for sure.
It was there in 1997 that Seve Ballesteros’s team pulled off a nerve-jangling Ryder Cup victory by the narrowest of margins – it came down to Colin Montgomerie getting a half in the final match out on the course – and Europeans, notably Sergio Garcia, have continued to thrive on this 7010-yard par 71 beauty often referred to as the ‘Augusta of Europe’.
Garcia had to rely on Indian star Anirban Lahiri missing a two-foot putt to give him the chance of a playoff and a fourth course victory on LIV’s second visit last year. Not a long course but a cunning and frustrating one, requiring great shot-making skills and a good mind. It’s often not good enough being on the fairway, you have to be on the right part of the fairway. It’s tight and the short holes are tough.
Garcia, winner of three Andalusian Masters titles there and three times runner-up too, understandably adores the place and if ever he needed a big performance as he prepares to play his first Open since 2022, Valderrama would be his first choice.
After a galloping start to the year with victory in Hong Kong, recent results have tailed away but Valderrama is a one-off, a real horses-for-courses week, and old Sergio, now 45, is back where he belongs.
Recent Dallas winner Patrick Reed also has the game for it as he’s proved with two top-fives there with LIV while Tyrrell Hatton, third to Garcia last year, is in scorching form, following his US Open fourth to JJ Spaun with fifth to Reed In Texas.
Much will be expected of local heroes Jon Rahm and David Puig but Valderrama has never been Rahm’s lucky course and Puig disappointed from a good halfway position in Munich.
At the prices, preference is for young Tom McKibbin, at 22 one of the few LIV signings with potential to improve. The Belfast lad’s fifth in Dallas was his best LIV finish to date and his third top-seven in nine starts since ignoring mentor McIlroy’s advice to stick with the DP World Tour.
McKibbin can hardly wait to tee it up at Royal Portrush next week as he’s been playing there since he was ten. He will be one of 19 LIV golfers taking part in The Open. Meanwhile he has business at Valderrama where the action starts at 12.05pm our time on Friday with the usual 54-hole, 54-player shotgun start format and a $4m first prize. Nice work if you can get it!
Best bets
It’s live on Sky Golf which is about the best you can say about the ISCO Championship where the highest-ranked performer is Argentinian veteran Emiliano Grillo, elevated from 144th to 92nd in the world courtesy of getting into a playoff for the John Deere Classic on Sunday.
To make it even tougher for punters they’ve moved this $4m Kentucky tournament from Keene Trace, where Cornishman Harry Hall won a five-man shootout last year, to a new-to-the-tour course, Hurstbourne Country Club, 11 miles east of Louisville.
Built in the 1960s and renovated with more testing bunkering in 2005, this 7056-yard par 70 is the subject of good reports, fast fairways, firm greens and a good mix of holes, and they have switched the nines so as not to finish on a par three.
Previously called the Barbasol to give gainful employment to those not travelling to Scotland, it offers 50 spots to DPWT players. The pick of them might well be the promising Spaniard Angel Ayora. Only 20 and with a swing to die for, he has not yet quite lived up to the hype, getting into good positions but finding difficulty in converting them, but his seventh two outings ago in the Italian Open was a step up and he has bags of time on his side.
On the American side, Patrick Koivun is a five-star amateur and even younger but has plenty of tools as we saw at the JDC last week with his best finish so far, 11th. He won’t be rushed. Only 20, he’ll heed advice from Jack Nicklaus: “Don’t jump the progression.”
And there’s brand-new pro Gordon Sargent, big-hitting former Walker Cup star and for a time world No. 1 amateur who earned a PGA Tour card via the University Acceleration system. He will heed the cautionary tale of Nick Dunlap, also from Alabama, who beat the pros while still an amateur, turned pro straight away, won again, and now can barely hit his backside with a banjo. It’s not a good watch. Ludvig Aberg has fared much better but he’s older.
So modest is the opposition that either could conceivably win but it’s unfair to saddle them with too much expectation. Instead, I’ll put up Kevin Roy, third in the John Deere just a shot behind playoff merchants Brian Campbell and Grillo, eighth the time before in Detroit and 18th before that at the Canadian Open. A late developer at 35, the big New Yorker is 48 under par for his last 12 rounds, all sub-par, and this could be his time.
Grillo hadn’t had a top-ten all year until losing Sunday’s playoff. He made such a hash of the first extra hole there must be some scar tissue, so I’ll side with long-hitting Cameron Champ, who can be very good (three-time winner) and can be awful. There’s been more consistency about his work in the last month or so with ninth in Canada his best effort.
Michael Thorbjornsen let us down last week but didn’t play badly. On his fourth in Detroit, he’s worth a second chance even if the case for him, another former amateur whizzkid, is less obvious than last week.
The Philippines don’t produce many good golfers and I’m not saying Rico , 29, is a good golfer. But he did make that ISCO playoff last year and does tend to shine in these minor events where there’s nobody to frighten him. A decent 11th at the JDC alongside young Koivun has set him up nicely to go one better than last year.
Seamus Power and Chan Kim are two more with each-way claims but there are too many of roughly the same ability to be dogmatic about anyone specific’s chances. I can be more dogmatic about and that’s the Louisville weather – hot (30C and up), sticky and wet with thunder promised for Saturday.
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