Best bets
4pts win Scottie Scheffler @ 11/2
1pt each-way Will Zalatoris @ 22/1
1pt each-way Min Woo Lee @ 40/1
1pt each-way Shane Lowry @ 33/1
1pt each-way Justin Thomas @ 20/1
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If you missed the wedding, don’t go to the funeral. In punting parlance, that’s a warning not to go charging in to back your fancy next time out just because it does the dirty on you and wins when you weren’t ‘on’.
Yet here I am urging you to lump on Scottie Scheffler in Florida for this week’s Players Championship on the fabled Stadium course at Sawgrass after his scintillating, no-arguments triumph in the Arnold Palmer Invitational on Sunday when we didn’t have a penny on the 13/2 favourite.
Why so bullish? Well, he was different gear to his rivals at Sawgrass last year romping home by five from Tyrrell Hatton on the Pete and Alice Dye course that doesn’t suit everyone, and he did a similar demolition job at Bay Hill last week with the same wide victory margin, this time over US Open champion Wyndham Clark, making a difficult course look relatively easy. And when the putter’s hot, the laid-back Texan is well nigh unbeatable.
As fourth-placed Will Zalatoris, who led him by six at one stage of round three, ruefully admitted after being swamped by the Scheffler masterclass: “There’s a reason why he’s the world No. 1.”
‘He was different gear to his rivals at Sawgrass last year.’
So from being mortified by the flat-stick frailty that had left him winless for 12 months (apart from the unofficial Hero World Challenge), rated 162nd on the strokes-gained putting stats for 2023 and still down at 144 despite incredible consistency in every other part of his game when he teed off at Bay Hill.
There, as if by magic, Scheffler topped the putting chart in his closing 66 and finished fifth over the full 72, mostly because of switching from conventional to mallet putter and, with it, a rediscovered confidence on the greens. He had finished T10 when using the mallet model for the first time at Riviera – on a tip from Rory McIlroy which the former world No.1 might come to regret – and had been fine-tuning with putting coach Phil Kenyon ever since.
Only a point shorter this week in an admittedly higher-class field, Scottie can win back-to-back Players just as he did back-to-back Phoenix Opens in 2022-23. It is a particularly significant that four of his seven victories have come in March, with the other three surrounding it in February and April.
And who’s going to beat him? With Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, 2022 winner Cameron Smith, last year’s runner-up Hatton, red-hot Joaquin Niemann and Dustin Johnson barred for the time being as this is not a Major (but would like to be) and McIlroy’s game in urgent need of an overhaul after his fourth successively mediocre US display (21st at Bay Hill with a 76 on Sunday to follow a 66th, 24th and 21st), the realistic options are limited.
Rory fans will point to his 2019 success at Sawgrass but the quality of those he edged out, the ancient Jim Furyk, Jonny Vegas and Eddie Pepperell, fell a long way short of Scheffler standard, and his three disappointing Players attempts since (two missed cuts and a 33rd) make him a hard sell at 12/1.
McIlroy wasn’t the only European letdown last week. Shane Lowry’s third place was the only Ryder Cup hero to place in the top 20 and in a tournament where only 11 of the 69 missed the cut, four of them were Matt Fitzpatrick, Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose and Nicolai Hojgaard.
So if anyone is going to lift the gloom it’s likely to be Lowry after his fourth at the Cognizant and third at Bay Hill, good on paper but he won’t think so as he had golden winning chances going into the last day of each and fluffed his lines. Even so, he will take heart from the Players finishing on St Patrick’s Day, as it did when his pal Rory won in 2019. Maybe the stars are aligning. The Guinness certainly is!
The good news for Lowry fans is that he likes the course and has a decent (if so far unthreatening) record on the Dye masterpiece which gives everybody, short hitters like past champions Smith, Webb Simpson, Fred Funk, Tim Clark) as well as long (McIlroy, Scheffler, Woods), a chance.
Narrow fairways, thick rough, long strips of waste bunkers, dozens of pot bunkers, craters, mounds, marshes all leading up to hard, fast greens – it’s a tough assignment, particularly when the wind gets up, but keep the ball on the fairway and there are plenty of birdie chances on what is a short par 72 these days at 7275 yards.
When first unveiled in 1980, Sawgrass got the thumbs-down from most of the pros, even the great Jack Nicklaus, when asked if it suited his style, responding caustically: “No, I’ve never been very good at stopping a 5-iron on the roof of a car.” By the following year after Dye had made the greens less severe and implemented a few other tweaks, peace reigned and the tournament has become one of the most eagerly-awaited on the rota.
Sadly, the absence of the barred LIV stars means the Players can no longer claim to have a better field than the Majors and with so many other big-money tournaments about, its status is somewhat diminished even if the winner’s cheque of $4.5m beats LIV and anything we have seen so far on the PGA Tour gravy train.
And it does have the most exciting and most televised short hole in world golf, the island-green 17th, only 137 yards and anything from a wedge to a six-iron depending on the north-east Florida wind at Ponte Vedra Beach. We’ve had scores of one to 12 on this card-wrecker, meaning the leaderboard can go crazy in a heartbeat. Bob Tway’s four balls in the water and a three-putt with his fifth in 2005 serves as a salutary lesson to the ever-present danger which the winner will have to avoid.
Will Zalatoris, Min Woo Lee and Justin Thomas complete my staking plan. With remarkable speed considering the length of his layoff and the extent of his back problem, Zalatoris has not only recovered his metronomically accurate tee-to-green game but has used the idle months to switch to the broomhandle putter, an awkward weapon but one that has already steered him into second place at Riviera and fourth at Bay Hill.
True, a tournament he led by five shots after 45 holes got away from him last week, errors crept in and the peerless Scheffler swept past but there was still much to like. Expect a big year from Zalatoris.
Although, like McIlroy, he can lose concentration and do the odd silly thing, Min Woo has an indefinable flair that separates him from his contemporaries. He marked his Sawgrass debut last year with an eyecatching sixth and it was less than two weeks ago that he chased home Austin Eckroat at the Cognizant.
This could be the year one or both of those young stars hit the Majors jackpot but the 2021 champion Thomas has already been there, done that twice (edging out Zalatoris in a playoff for his second PGA Championship), and got the T-shirt. Justin lost the plot completely last year so you ignore his Sawgrass flop of 12 months ago. Instead concentrate on the vast improvement shown in early 2024 sorties and he was right in the mix for second place on Sunday until Bay Hill’s back nine bit him hard.
If I had a sixth pick it would be Hideki Matsuyama, a winner this year and in contention for much of last week, who has plenty of form at Sawgrass, notably fifth last year, seventh in 2016 and eighth in 2019. But you can’t back them all!
6pts a hole in one @ 4/6
Thursday 3-balls
Noren (5/4) and Grillo (6/5) 2pts each and 1pt double
First-round leader 0.5pt each-way Min Woo Lee @ 50/1
It’s not often the value in the mass of special bets on offer with Fitzdares for the Players Championship is an odds-on chance but such has been the surge in hole-in-one activity over the past few years that 4/6 about a Sawgrass ace looks a serious betting proposition.
Remember there are 144 players taking part, at least until the halfway cut, and there are four short holes, most spectacularly the 137-yard island-green 17th, the most photographed hole in American golf, where almost unbelievably there were three holes in one last year.
That means you are going to get almost 1700 opportunities over the 72 holes to land your bet, 1152 over the first two days and around 550 more when the cut is made and the field reduced by 50-60 per cent depending on how many survive.
Of the total of 37 aces since the Players began in 1982, four have come at the 177-yard seventh, eight at the 237-yard eighth, 12 at the 181-yard 18th and 13 at the notorious 17th, a hole that can vary from a gap wedge to a 6-iron depending on the wind.
With the hole playing only at 122 yards last year, it was Arron Rai’s gap wedge that did the mighty deed, Hayden Buckley did it with a pitching wedge, Alex Smalley with a sand wedge. So three aces in three days out of 437 tee shots on a hole that hadn’t been aced since Fred Couples in 1997.
A freak one-off maybe but the incidence of aces has rocketed – Viktor Hovland bagged one at the eighth in 2022, Brendon Todd the year before and Shane Lowry had his Sawgrass moment at the 13th in 2022.
That’s six in the last three years and eight in five if you add in Sean Power’s at the third and Sungjae Im’s at the 13th in 2019. So more than 20 per cent of Sawgrass holes in one in a 41-year span have come in the last five years. Whether that’s down to more precise equipment or the weather or the pin positions or the random nature of the task at hand is anyone’s guess. After all, anybody can have a hole in one. Even a hacker like me had one back in 1971 so it can only be luck!
Fitzdares have priced up Thursday’s early threeballs (remember there’s live golf from Sky from 11.30am with a tasty McIlroy-Hovland-Spieth treat teeing off at 12.24) and my banker comes at 12.46 with the super-consistent Emiliano Grillo at 6/5 to see off Taylor Moore and Scott Stallings. Eight tournaments, eight cuts made with ease by the canny Argentinian, particularly impressive in top-tens at Waialae and Bay Hill, two courses which, like Sawgrass, require great positional skill from the tee.
Earlier, at 12.02, another famed for his accuracy, Alex Noren, may have the measure of the talented but accident-prone Thomas Detry and struggling Joseph Bramlett. Noren’s brain-over-brawn approach has resulted in decent performances at Sawgrass before and 5/4 is fair.
The first-round leader market is a lottery but you should get a good run at 50/1 from the flashy Aussie Min Woo Lee who showed a liking for Sawgrass when T6 on first acquaintance last year.
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