Who’s feeling confident at the Safeway Open?

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W. Va. – To say Lanto Griffin was at a crossroads would have been an understatement. The year was 2014. Griffin had a mere $176 in his bank account. His credit cards were maxed out. He’d missed the cut in the last six mini-tour events he’d played. Several months before what is now known as A Military Tribute at The Greenbrier was to be played, though, Griffin had talked to his friend, Willy Wilcox. He suggested Wilcox go play in the tournament, he’d caddie and the two could stay at a cabin in the mountains owned by his surrogate mom and dad. “He was like, absolutely, let’s do it,â€� Griffin recalled. And as it turned out, the two were a pretty good team. Wilcox tied for fourth, which was his best finish of the year, seven strokes behind the winner, Angel Cabrera, and won just over $227,000. More importantly, he paid Griffin roughly $17,000 which enabled him to continue to chase his dream. “I was about done,â€� Griffin said. “I was about ready to give it up. I didn’t have any money left, so that kind of gave me a cushion.â€� Five years later, the well-traveled Griffin is back at The Greenbrier to begin his second season on the PGA TOUR. The lanky 31-year-old is in contention, too, just like Wilcox was in 2014. Griffin is tied at 8 under, just five strokes off the pace set by Scottie Scheffler and Joaquin Niemann. He followed up an opening 64 with a round of 2 under that included three straight birdies on the front and a lone bogey on the back. Griffin grew up in Blacksburg, Va., which is about an hour and 45 minutes from The Greenbrier. His father ran a health food store there and his mom was an organic gardener. He went to school at Virginia Commonwealth and is definitely among the favorites of the galleries at the resort this week. This week, Griffin is staying at that same cabin where he and Wilcox stayed five years ago. He’s got plenty of company with more than a dozen friends and family on hand. After hitting some balls on the range Friday afternoon, he planned to put the outdoor pizza oven to good work later that evening. “I will have plenty of distractions,â€� Griffin said. “I won’t be thinking about golf, which is great,â€� Griffin said he learned a lot being inside the ropes at The Old White TPC with Wilcox in 2014. He went on to caddie for Wilcox two times later in the year during what is now known as the Korn Ferry Tour Finals before Griffin headed off to play PGA TOUR LatinoAmerica. “it was fun being inside the ropes, watching somebody play really well,â€� Griffin said. “… I learned more that week caddying for him than I ever had playing in a week just because seeing it from a different perspective. “He didn’t over analyze anything, and he didn’t get to the course two hours early; we got here 45 minutes early and we left as soon as he was done. So, you know, it was one of those things where you learn, you don’t need to overdo it and, and you can hit bad shots and still be all right.â€� Bad shots have been few and far between this week at The Greenbrier. Griffin has made nine birdies, one eagle and just three bogeys. Through two rounds he’s hit 21 of 28 fairways, 27 of 36 greens in regulation and used just 56 putts. Griffin, who won the Robert Trent Jones Golf Championship on the Korn Ferry Tour last season on the way to regaining his TOUR card, is a long way from scraping it around on the mini-tours like the eGolf Tour and the Swing Thought Tour. “Those were good memories,â€� Griffin said. “It makes you appreciate free food and no entry fees and all that stuff. I think it kind of humbles you a little bit to look back on that and kind of appreciate where you are now.â€�

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KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. – Buckle up. This could be a wild ride. The PGA Championship returns to Kiawah Island this week but there’s one big difference from 2012. Nine years ago, this event was held in August. That means a much different challenge awaits this year’s field. RELATED: Nine things to know about Kiawah Island | Morikawa’s shot ‘heard round the world’ | Spieth eyes career Grand Slam When Rory McIlroy destroyed the field with his eight-shot win in 2012 he was aided by summer storms that softened up the Ocean Course significantly over the weekend. There was also a searing swampy heat well into the 90s that felt like triple digits. And the winds never blew at full strength. Weather forecasts are fickle, of course, but on the eve of this PGA Championship there is a 0% percent chance of rain, the temperatures are expected to be in the high 70s most of the week and the wind is due to sit around 15 mph with gusts towards the mid 20s. The wind will start the tournament out of the east and move to the northeast before flipping for the final round. The Ocean Course is laid out in two nine-hole loops like a figure-eight. The first four holes head east before turning back toward the clubhouse. On the back nine, Nos. 10-13 continue west before turning back toward the clubhouse for the final five holes. The par-3 fifth is the only hole that moves south. The forecast for the first three days predicts players will have a tough start and finish to their rounds. Nos. 1-4 and 14-18 play predominantly into the wind. The eight holes in the middle will be downwind. But that will flip around come Sunday. At 7,867 yards, the course is the longest in major history but it won’t play to that yardage. Each hole’s yardage can change dramatically from day to day. Because of the high winds and their changing direction, Pete Dye built a variety of tees on each hole. “It’ll totally depend on Mother Nature. We’ll make that decision each morning as we set it up. Hopefully, it’ll be fun and fair,” setup guru Kerry Haigh said. Current PLAYERS champion and 2017 PGA Championship winner Justin Thomas says there’s no chance they can see the yardage top out with the wind forecast. “I noticed it last week when someone sent me a scorecard and I saw that the back nine was 4,000 yards, and I think I actually laughed out loud when I saw it because I was looking at the numbers,” Thomas said. Because there is no prevailing wind at Kiawah Island, a downwind hole can play into the wind the next day. During a practice round, Thomas hit 8-iron for his second shot on the 590-yard, par-5 seventh hole when it played downwind. “The 590 yards can play 500 or 490 yards when you get that much wind,” Thomas said. “They can’t play 14, that par-3, from the back (tees) if you have this wind. … Guys are going to be literally hitting driver on that hole. Unless the PGA wants seven-hour rounds, I wouldn’t advise it.” Jon Rahm played a practice round with two-time major winner Zach Johnson and said the American pulled headcover for almost every approach shot that played into the wind. Rahm called Kiawah’s breezes a “heavy wind,” one that plays more severe than the speed might suggest. The par-3 17th, at 223 yards, is another brute if the wind is up. Cameron Champ, a known long-ball hitter, tried unsuccessfully to get his 4-iron and 3-hybrid to the green in Tuesday practice, instead ending up in water. He will look to add a 2-iron to his bag now. Dye’s design is, as usual, one that gives the player who figures out the optimum strategy, and is able to execute that strategy, the advantage. While length is always an advantage, much like Dye’s TPC Sawgrass, it isn’t the overriding factor. You have to miss in the right spots or face terror. “There’s plenty of room, it’s very fair, but the consequence of a miss is huge around here, especially when you get into these outer sandy areas where the lies are very unpredictable,” Adam Scott says. “Just getting it back in play, … sometimes you can’t even manage to do that. If the wind blows this way for the rest of the week, it’s going to be a battle to just get in the clubhouse.” The new date also will impact the paspalum grass and what players do face when they miss greens. Because of the wind, Dye built large greens at Kiawah Island but the field hit just 56% of them in 2012. They were the fifth-hardest greens to hit that season. “It’s not going to be as easy around the greens,” McIlroy said. “Last time in August it was hot, humid, the paspalum was … really strong and dense and lush. The ball would just sit right up on top and it was so easy to just get your lob wedge out, clip it, spin it. “This year they’re a little more bare, a touch links-y in places, especially with the wind and the dry weather. I don’t think it’s going to be quite as simple as it was around the greens like last time. That’s what I did so well. I chipped and putted so well that week. That’s what won me the tournament. I scrambled well, and if the wind keeps up like this again this week, that’s what you’re going to have do well.” Being beachside also means plenty of sand. The PGA of America had decided that all of those sandy areas at the Ocean Course are not being treated as bunkers. They are waste areas, instead, so players can take practice swings and ground their club. A day at the beach is normally a reason to smile. That may not be the case at Kiawah Island.

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In retrospect, maybe we should have anticipated Scottie Scheffler’s PGA TOUR Player of the Year season. After all, Scheffler backed up Korn Ferry Tour Player of the Year honors in 2019 with the PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year award the following season. He played well enough in 2021 to get a captain’s pick on the U.S. Ryder Cup team that beat Europe in the fall, even before his first PGA TOUR victory. He was clearly on an upward trajectory, but his four-month flurry of highlights still came as a shock. Let’s look back at Scheffler’s rapid rise – and analyze what’s changed about his performances since the early summer. Scottie’s spring ascent On the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, 2022, Scheffler was inarguably the best player in the world without a PGA TOUR win yet to his credit. At 15th in the Official World Golf Ranking, his WM Phoenix Open playoff victory over Patrick Cantlay that day made him the highest-ranked American player in OWGR history at the time of his first PGA TOUR title (a record broken later in the season by Will Zalatoris, ranked 14th). That win marked the beginning of one of the most dominant runs seen on TOUR in recent years. Not even one month after he won in Phoenix, Scheffler captured the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, and three weeks after winning at Bay Hill, Scheffler rose to number one in the World Ranking with his victory at the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play. The 42 days between Scheffler’s first win and his claim on the No. 1 ranking was by far the fastest ascent ever seen on the PGA TOUR or DP World Tour. The run hit its crescendo when he won the Masters Tournament two weeks later. Scheffler was excellent through the bag on the way to his first major win, ranking in the top 10 in the field in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee, Approach, and Around the Green. He was in the top 10 in Strokes Gained: Putting, too, until his four-putt on the final green. Scheffler now had four wins on the season, the first winner of the green jacket to reach that number on the PGA TOUR since Arnold Palmer in 1960. What fueled his rise Scheffler had been well above average in the 2020-21 PGA TOUR season, ranking 32nd in scoring average and 33rd in Strokes Gained: Total. His red-hot spring of ’22 owed to a few dramatic improvements. Scheffler ranked 45th in greens in regulation and 83rd in Strokes Gained: Approach per round in 2020-21. Solid, but not spectacular. By the end of May, he had vaulted to 13th in SG: Approach and a lofty 3rd in rate of greens hit. His improved wedge play was a significant change, as well. In 2020-21, Scheffler ranked 157th on the PGA TOUR in average proximity to the hole from 50-125 yards away. On June 1, he was up exactly 100 spots in that statistic – to 57th. The differential meant he went from being one foot farther away than the average PGA TOUR player’s approach from that range – to one foot closer. As if these improvements weren’t enough, he got better on the greens, too. In each of his first two full seasons on TOUR, Scheffler had hovered right around the statistical baseline for Strokes Gained: Putting among qualified players. He was at -0.05 strokes per round in 2020, and +0.02, in 2021. But in his 10 starts from February through May, Scheffler gained more than half-a-stroke on the field, per round, on the greens. In his victory in Phoenix, Scheffler ranked 2nd in Strokes Gained: Putting, one of just three times in his entire PGA TOUR career where he ranked in the top 10 in a tournament field in that statistic. The story since then Scheffler hasn’t maintained the pace he enjoyed in the spring, but still has recorded four top-10 finishes in his last 10 starts. And he’s improved in one big marker. From February through May, he averaged 1.32 Strokes Gained: Ball Striking per round and hit 70.9% of his greens in regulation. Since then, he’s averaged 1.70 strokes per round striking it and hit a sterling 74.1% of greens in regulation. That’s the good news. You can probably deduce what the bad will be at this point: His putting numbers have dropped off significantly. Since June 1, Scheffler is losing more than one-third of a stroke to the field per round on the greens, a rate that ranks 143rd of 180 qualified players in that span. Specifically, it’s been the shorter putts that just aren’t falling like they were in the spring. From February through May, Scheffler made 61.2% of his putts from 5-10 feet. Since then, he’s fallen off to 45% – well beneath the TOUR average make rate of 56.3% from that range. Things are looking up, though. After some typical autumn tinkering with his gear, Scheffler put the Scotty Cameron putter he used for all four of his wins last season back in the bag over the weekend at the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba. The result was the lowest final-round score of his PGA TOUR career (62) and his fewest putts per green in regulation for any single PGA TOUR event (1.60) in 17 months. At the Cadence Bank Houston Open last year Scheffler ranked 2nd in the field in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green in a runner-up finish. If he’s rediscovered his magic on the greens, it could be a very happy homecoming this week for the affable Texan.

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