Best bets
2pts each-way Shane Lowry @ 18/1
1pt each-way Adam Scott @ 28/1
1pt each-way Adam Hadwin @ 33/1
1pt each-way Alex Noren @ 20/1
0.5pt each-way Tom Kim @ 33/1
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On a weekend when the golfing world was stunned by the suicide of troubled Sony Open winner Grayson Murray and titillated by the gossip that divorcing Rory McIlroy had found a new squeeze in CBS golf presenter Amanda Balionis, the fact that a 350/1 outsider, Davis Riley, had emptied the pockets of favourite backers yet again by thumping world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler at Colonial barely got a mention.
When he won in Hawaii in January, Murray, only 30, seemed to have turned his life around from a tortured life of alcohol addiction, depression “and always looking at myself as a failure, a waste of talent” but the old demons must have returned at Fort Worth for he quit the tournament with two holes left of his second round (having shot a 68 in the first) and was found dead the next morning.
Professional golf can be a lonely arena for the mentally fragile and the PGA Tour mourns a lost brother as it makes its annual trip over the border to Hamilton, Ontario, for the Canadian Open where the omens for a European success could hardly be more propitious, mainly because we are back on the course where in 2019 McIlroy won the first of his two Canadian Opens – and by seven fat shots.
More good news: There’s no sign of Scheffler or the red-hot new PGA champion Xander Schauffele in a line-up dotted with Euro-stars, not only Rory but Tommy Fleetwood (runner-up last year on a different course), Shane Lowry and Ryder Cup teammates Nicolai Hojgaard and Bob MacIntyre, not forgetting the in-form Alex Noren and dark horses like Aaron Rai, Matt Wallace, Victor Perez, Sami Valimaki and Seamus Power.
‘The omens for a European success could hardly be more propitious…’
And by winning the Senior PGA title in Michigan on his Champions Tour debut, England’s Richard Bland gave the Europeans the push they needed in a glorious start to the week.
How ironic that the journeyman who needed 478 starts before breaking his duck on the DP World Tour, needed just one to wallop Open champions like Ernie Els, Padraig Harrington, Darren Clarke and Stewart Cink. Now a LIV player (but yet to win on the breakaway circuit), he was able to get the week off as there was no clashing tournament. Last year there was. And he got LIV some great publicity!
Brand’s resting until LIV Houston next week, now who can follow him in? McIlroy has obvious claims on course and current form – wins at New Orleans and Quail Hollow before a somewhat anti-climactic T12 at the PGA Championship where he made too many unforced errors like hitting two wedges into the water on day one. It’s hard to win Majors with eight bogeys and a double (five more than the winner) but there were precious few mistakes when he blitzed the 7084-yard par 70 Hamilton Country Club course five years ago.
That was the last time the Canadian Open touched down on the old-fashioned (circa 2016) Harry Colt layout that’s been renovated since last time. Trees have been removed, all bunkers and greens rebuilt and made more severe. So it’s significantly not the course Rory knows and loves. And it’s not a course that needs 320-yard drives.
Short hitters Jim Furyk, Webb Simpson, Brad Faxon and Brandt Snedeker – all hot putters – have won or finished high there.
The odds won’t float your boat either – Fitzdares go 7/2, only half what Rory was for Quail Hollow pre the PGA Championship against a field not that much superior. And the media will be all over him even more than usual because of all the loved-up speculation and that could affect his performance.
He may well win but the only certainty is that at 7/2 he’s no bargain and if he blinks, Lowry and Adam Scott, plus a posse of Canadians headed by defending champion Nick Taylor, recent winner Taylor Pendrith, Corey Conners and Adam Hadwin, plus American raiders Cameron Young, Sahith Theegala and Sam Burns, will be there to pick up the pieces.
The fact that Lowry was T2 behind McIlroy in 2019 taken in conjunction with his T6 last time out at Valhalla, recovering from bogeying three of the first five holes to get into a winning position, pushes me towards making the bluff Irishman the main bet. He is having a good year and when he gets the putter going, as he did in round three at Valhalla, he can be very special.
Scott has impressed with his consistency all year and we had another example at the weekend with a T12 in Texas. This is the 43-year-old Australian’s 400th PGA Tour start (14 wins) and with his putter no longer a liability but his chief asset, he could well be celebrating No. 15 on Sunday, which is forecast to be the only wet day of an otherwise sunny week.
Hadwin was top Canadian in sixth place in 2019 – Hughes 14th, Taylor 27th – and the man from Moose Jaw has enough decent form this campaign (4th Riviera, 5th Valspar, 6th AmEx) to merit a financial interest.
Conners and Hughes are in top form too and it should be a good week for the home fans but nobody is playing with more consistency than Sweden’s Alex Noren whose 12th place at the PGA followed third at the Nelson and a raft of other high-class efforts. The trouble with Alex, a multiple winner in Europe, is that he’s spent donkey’s years trying to break through in the States without achieving that elusive W. Could it be 176th time lucky? He certainly deserves it.
Theegala, good at Valhalla and particularly anxious to do well as he’s an ambassador for sponsors RBC, and Maverick McNealy, whose game should be suited by the course, rate the pick of the Americans but Lowry, Scott, Hadwin, Noren and Tom Kim, at last approaching the form that made him a hit in 2022-23 and on a par 70 that won’t show up his lack of length, may have their measure.
And Rory, of course. But at that price we can let him go for the moment and catch him later in the week if we have to.
Best bets
1.5pts each-way Sam Bairstow @ 33/1
1.5pts each-way Jordan Smith @ 20/1
1.5pts each-way Richard Mansell @ 25/1
1pt each-way Laurie Canter @ 28/1
0.5pt each-way Manuel Elvira @ 80/1
The most exciting thing about the European Open is the length of the course – at 7882 yards the par-73 Green Eagle just outside Hamburg is an absolute monster with six par fives, five of them well over the 600 mark and the 16th one of the longest in Europe at 705 yards. Not just humungous but with copious hazards, watery and otherwise, a golf course for masochists and there are plenty of those trying to play golf.
If they play from the very tips (surely not?), the North course, designed by its owner Michael Blesch in 1997 and upgraded to DP World Tour standard in 2016, will be 427 yards longer than it was last year when Tom McKibbin’s nine-under total of 283 was enough to give the Northern Irish youngster his breakthrough victory on the DP World Tour. Only 19 out of the field of 156 finished under par on this German beast.
‘Green Eagle just outside Hamburg is an absolute monster’.
When the par was only 72 the previous year the scoring was relatively worse with Kalle Samooja’s six-under getting the Finn home thanks to a freak last round of 64, by three shots the lowest in the tournament’s history. Last year they increased the par to 73 by turning a long par four into what is now the only “easy” par five.
What happens now with the added length to a distinctly average field is anyone’s guess – sub-70 rounds will be even rarer – yet most of the winners to date aren’t known as bombers and 2018 champion Richard McEvoy who held bomber Bryson DeChambeau at bay was one of the shortest hitters in the line-up, an outcome hard to credit at the time and even harder now.
What happens is that five of the par fives are genuine three-shotters for the majority, so it’s the fairways-and-greens exponents with the cute wedge games who flourish.
But what five of the last six champions do have in common is that they were winning for the first time. Four have not won since either, while the fifth, Jordan Smith, has won again only once and that took him five years. The bottom line is that a slow slog of a course with an unusual configuration – five par threes, six par fives and seven par fours – has more often than not produced an unusual result.
With that thought in mind, I’ll put up three Englishmen who have yet to win, Sam Bairstow, Laurie Canter and Richard Mansell, and bracket them with a fourth, course. winner Smith, to rise to the occasion again on German soil. Brits after all have won five of the six Green Eagle editions so far.
Bairstow, the 25-year-old lefty from Sheffield who was an Amateur Championship finalist before turning pro, has hit the ground running and looks a winner waiting to happen. Last week’s T10 in Antwerp, only four behind 90/1 winner Nacho Elvira, was a sterling effort after shooting a 74 on day one and his T3 in Singapore was particularly eyecatching.
Big hitter Canter, 34, from Bath, has masses of talent without ever quite been able to turn that into a W. Playing as a reserve for the injured Martin Kaymer and Sam Horsfield on the lucrative LIV circuit, he has produced a number of tasty efforts and the money has been handy. Good enough to have finished 17th in the Open, he’s bang in form too after taking seventh spot in Belgium where he had no luck on the greens.
Mansell, from Lichfield, also shone last week. His 13th at Soudal followed a raft of solid performances in the Gulf and Singapore. He and Canter are close to the top on the bogey-avoidance chart, a great stat to have on a course where pars are worth much gold.
Smith, who arrives on the back of a sensational last-round 64 at Valhalla in the PGA Championship, has long been one of the most reliable tee-to-green players on tour and should have won far more tournaments. Too often he doesn’t produce on a Sunday when it counts. He likes a searching examination like this week’s and has finished sixth, tenth and 11th at Green Eagle since that breakthrough seven years ago.
Elvira’s win in Belgium will inspire the Spanish contingent, particularly his kid brother Manuel who has made a bright start in his rookie season (4th Kenya, 11th Japan) and his good amigo Sebastian Garcia (no relation to Sergio) who posted his first top-ten of the year at the weekend.
Two of the three Japanese winners this year, Keita Nakajima and Yuto Katsuragawa, clearly mean business but they won’t have seen too many golf courses like this one and more menace may come from the two Rasmusses, Hojgaard and Challenge Tour star Neergaard-Petersen, and Austrian ace Bernd Wiesberger. The putter has been holding Bernd back but the rest of his precision game is perfect for this severe test.
There’s no reason why classy McKibbin, still only 20, can’t do it again except that defending a title is always extra pressure. Maybe it’s somebody else’s turn to be a first-time winner. That’s what it says in the record book anyway.
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