Tiger Woods ranking: Two-time FedExCup champ virtually assured spot in 2018 Playoffs

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Seven years removed from his last major championship and nearly 18 months since his last win, it would be easy for Rory McIlroy to focus on the past. But the two-time FedExCup champion arrives at Augusta National – the final barrier standing between him and the career Grand Slam – with an eye toward the future. “I’m obviously focused on this week, but it’s bigger than that,” McIlroy said in his pre-tournament press conference Tuesday. “It’s a journey, right, and it’s a journey to try to get back to playing the game the way I know that I can play the game.” RELATED: Tee times | Roundtable: Predictions | Power Rankings McIlroy recently added swing coach Pete Cowen to his stable as he tries to break out of a slump brought on by his desire to emulate Bryson DeChambeau’s eye-popping distance. McIlroy has known Cowen since he was a teenager. Their familiarity was a big reason that McIlroy selected Cowen from the cadre of coaches who inhabit a PGA TOUR driving range on a weekly basis. McIlroy’s childhood coach, Michael Bannon, is still part of Team McIlroy, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for McIlroy to get face time with him. Cowen, meanwhile, has been in the United States for months. While there may be some concern that the Northern Irishman will get bogged down in mechanics under a new coach, McIlroy promises the opposite is true. “I’m actually getting away from a lot of technical thoughts. I’m actually going the other way,” he said. In an attempt to add distance, McIlroy said his swing got too flat and too long. Under Cowen, he wants to gain a better understanding of his swing so he can make quick fixes in the middle of rounds. “When you don’t understand why you’re hitting certain shots, you can become lost and you can start to think of all sorts of stuff. And I felt like every time I was going to the range, I was trying something different,” McIlroy said Tuesday. Cowen is helping McIlroy gain control of his wedge play, as well. His inconsistent distance control with his short irons has often led to squandered scoring opportunities. McIlroy expects to play more “flighted” shots, bringing down his trajectory to better control his ball, and playing more conservatively to eliminate the big number. “I think being a little bit more in control of what I do, … that’s the sort of golfer that I want to be going forward,” he said. The big number has plagued him several times at this tournament. He had a round of 77 or higher in six Masters appearances in a seven-year span (2010-14, ’16). A decade ago, he famously shot a final-round 80 after taking a four-shot lead into the final round. Last year, he rebounded from a first-round 75 to finish T5, shooting 14 under par in his final three rounds. He’s finished in the top 10 in all but one Masters since 2014. He arrives at Augusta National ranked 43rd in the FedExCup, with four top-10s in 11 starts. His recent play has been inconsistent, however. In his last four stroke-play starts, he sandwiched a pair of top-10s between two missed cuts, including a 79-75 showing in his title defense at THE PLAYERS. He did not advance out of his group in the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play. McIlroy, 31, hopes his recent past is just prologue to a new chapter in his career, though. “I’m just at the start of a journey here,” he said Tuesday, “that I know will get me back to where I want to be.”

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DUBLIN, Ohio – By the time he made a 12-foot birdie putt to close out Byeong Hun An in a playoff at the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide, Bryson DeChambeau had already checked the nitrogen levels in the Muirfield Village rough, verified the camber of the 18th green, and analyzed the glycemic load of Jack Nicklaus’ favorite milkshake. Or so you would believe, given DeChambeau’s mad-scientist reputation. “People always kind of scrutinize me saying I’m too technical and whatnot,â€� DeChambeau, 24, said after moving from 22nd to 4th in the FedExCup with his second PGA TOUR win. “It’s all just to aid my feel. I am a guy that goes off of feel still, to everybody’s surprise, probably.â€� By now it’s well known that the polymath DeChambeau has reimagined golf. He plays with a single-length set of irons, advocates a single-plane swing, and has done for the humble yardage book what Leonardo da Vinci did for anatomy. Good copy, as they say in the typing business. But it doesn’t really explain how this guy won the Memorial while hitting just 5 of 14 fairways in regulation play Sunday. How after missing 14 straight cuts last season, he now must be considered one of the 10 best American players. (He and other potential U.S. Ryder Cup Team members were fitted for uniforms at Muirfield Village earlier this week.) Yes, DeChambeau has reimagined the game, but he’s been even better at reinventing himself. “Other players go to the range,â€� said his caddie, Tim Tucker. “He goes to the range religiously.â€� Case in point: DeChambeau was the only one on the Muirfield driving range as the sun bled over the horizon Saturday night. What was he working on? No telling. He was improving his transdimensional aspect, closing the thorium loop, attenuating the dip slip. It doesn’t matter, and DeChambeau says he doesn’t like to give away his secrets, anyway. The important thing is he was working. “He’s happiest when he’s hitting balls,â€� Tucker said. With his active mind, DeChambeau is a perfect fit for golf, with its three-dimensionality and limitless variables. But that insatiable curiosity would mean nothing without the insatiable work ethic to go with it, the willingness and stamina to tear everything apart and start all over again. And again. And again. In a sport where even the big winners fail most of the time, self-reinvention is everything. Those 14 straight missed cuts, the last of which came at the U.S. Open last summer? Not unusual. Plenty of players could describe similarly bleak stretches before they turned into caddies (Paul Tesori, Lance Ten Broeck), and broadcasters (David Duval, Trevor Immelman). Not DeChambeau. Although he said it was “a tough pill to swallowâ€� and wondered if he was a TOUR quality player, he also settled in and sucked it up. It was time to have the Big Talk with the guy looking back at him in the mirror, because if he was going to survive, he had to adapt. “I went back to the drawing board,â€� he said, “kind of figured something out, and ultimately wound up winning the John Deere four weeks later because of that hard talk to myself.â€� But his reinvention wasn’t over, because he went straight from the Deere, where he thought he’d figured something out, to the Open Championship, where he shot 76-77 to miss the cut by eight shots. And he failed to make the TOUR Championship two months later. “So I went back to the drawing board again,â€� DeChambeau said, “… to be able to come out with something that has allowed me to be more consistent on TOUR, have less error in where I’m hitting it and be more confident in unique situations.â€� The second drawing board worked even better than the first one. He notched a top-20 finish at the Safeway Open, a top-10 at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open, a top-5 at the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Reinvention gave way to refinement, and he was second to Rory McIlroy at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, T3 at the RBC Heritage, and 4th at the Wells Fargo Championship. The mad scientist was closing in. DeChambeau led the field in scrambling (17/21) at the Memorial, and was ninth in Strokes Gained: Putting (+4.916). With only five fairways hit, the entire final round was a high-wire act. He three-putted the 72nd hole to fall into a playoff with Kyle Stanley (70) and An (69), and ripped off his white, Hogan-style cap and swatted his leg with it. “Let’s go win it,â€� caddie Tucker said. As sudden-death playoffs go, this one wasn’t very sudden. For the second time in 20 minutes, DeChambeau split the 18th fairway with a 3-wood, and he and An each missed the green before making deft par saves. Stanley, who had birdied four straight holes on the back nine to make the playoff, could barely get a club on the ball for his second shot and bogeyed to fall away. Again, DeChambeau went back to the 18th tee; again, he split the fairway with that 3-wood. This time his 9-iron approach shot rode the wind to within 12 feet of the pin. When the final putt fell, with An looking at another short putt to save par, the winner looked up and pumped his arms. He had found validation, again, and with something less than his A-game, grinding out the win the way tournament host Nicklaus had so often back in the day. “Sometimes that’s what you gotta do,â€� Nicklaus said. “If your driver’s not working, your putter better be working. And if your putter’s not working, everything else must be working. But he had the right club working today and that was his flat club. Nice going.â€� A Memorial victory, by the way, comes with a three-year exemption on TOUR, which is one more than most tournaments. DeChambeau may not need the extra year, but it’s nice to know it’s there. You know, just in case he ever has to go back to the drawing board.

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Hudson Swafford remembers when it really hit home. He was 12 years old. Maybe 13. But he distinctly remembers his father giving  his mother Jean a pendant with the number 10 spelled out in diamonds.   “And I was like, well, what’s that for?â€� Swafford recalls. His parents told him that the pendant symbolized Jean’s 10-year anniversary of being free from breast cancer. “And I was like, oh, that’s, that’s amazing,â€� Swafford says. “I mean, it was incredible. So that was big for me because I kind of understood.â€� Swafford knew what cancer was. Friends of his parents had died from the disease. But since he was just 2 years old when his mother was diagnosed, he didn’t remember the worst of times. Jean Swafford underwent radiation and chemotherapy. Her son says she lost her hair and it grew back even curlier than before. Fortunately, though, the cancer was caught early and she’s closing in on 30 years of survival. “I can’t really remember what diagnosis she had — but she also had melanoma when she was coming out of college,â€� Swafford says. “So she actually beat cancer twice, which is pretty incredible. “It’s definitely something, I’ll always be very grateful for. And she was kind of the one that pushed me to do anything that I wanted to do.â€� Like play golf. And Swafford is one of many men on TOUR with women in their lives who have had breast cancer. Wives, mothers, sisters, friends — all have battled the disease, and October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Swafford and his wife Katherine, who is president of the PGA TOUR Wives Association, support charities that help fund breast cancer research, as well as the cancer community as a whole. Katherine is on the Victory Board of the American Cancer Society in their home of St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, and is working on the organization’s 50th anniversary gala for next year. “It’s near and dear to our family,â€� Swafford explains. When he was a toddler, Swafford says, he made his mother’s life “even more miserable.â€� Of course, he didn’t know what she was going through and he was a kid. He wanted to play. “I would get out and run away from her and make her chase me around,â€� he remembers. “(I was) always wanting to throw the ball or just be outside and be active. I didn’t know why at the time, well, what was going on or know why she didn’t want to play. … “Later on life, obviously, it was explained to me and I could comprehend it. It’s definitely kind of eye-opening that she fought through it and, and it really hadn’t slowed her down, you know?â€� While the 31-year-old didn’t want to make his mother “relive those kind of miserable days,â€� Swafford says that once he got older he talked with her about her battle. “She was great about it. She’s a pretty happy-go-lucky person; (she) talks too much anyway,â€� he says, chuckling. “But no, she was great.  Told me all about her chemo, which she had to go through and how she was throwing up, trying to chase me around. “I’m just running out of energy and (she) just needed somebody to help her. It was tough at the time. But she said I was just kind of the one that kind of pushed her, helped push her through things.â€� So at the same time, having an active 2-year-old like Hudson may have helped Jean Swafford fight the disease.    “She always just said I was kind of her energy and would keep her moving,â€� Swafford says. And thirty years later, the 2017 CareerBuilder Challenge champion is still giving his mother plenty of support.  

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