Austria’s Matthias Schwab birdied the final hole to claim a one-shot lead at the halfway stage of the Turkish Open on Friday, with Justin Rose only two strokes behind in his chase for a third straight title. World number 104 Schwab is still waiting for a maiden European Tour title despite posting
Click here to read the full article…
| Winners always benefit from gambling bonuses. Check this guide on how to select the best casino bonuses to win! |
U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick is known for his dedication to detail. He enters intricate stats about every shot he strikes into a spreadsheet, so it should come as no surprise that it took 30 custom prototypes to find a putter that fit him perfectly. This is the story of how Fitzpatrick found his custom Bettinardi putter, one that’s based on a flatstick that hasn’t been available for a decade. This custom putter helped him to a win in this year’s U.S. Open and to his TOUR Championship debut. He is 15th in the FedExCup entering the season-ending TOUR Championship, and thus will start the week seven back of leader Scottie Scheffler. Fitzpatrick began using a Yes! Golf Tracy II when he was 16 years old. That putter was known for its unique C-Groove configuration. The C-Grooves, half-circle grooves facing downward, were said to produce a truer roll on the greens. U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen famously used a Yes! putter to win two U.S. Opens, and Fitzpatrick used his Tracy II to win another national championship in the United States, the 2013 U.S. Amateur. He continued to use the putter long after he turned professional and had no intentions of switching out the flatstick that brought him such success until he started running into a serious problem around 2016. He needed a reliable source for backup putters, but that became difficult after Yes! filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and was purchased by Adams Golf the next year. Without the option to purchase from Yes! Golf directly, Fitzpatrick began scouring eBay and exhausting his options to find a replacement. Around that time is when Sam Bettinardi, the current Vice President of Bettinardi Golf, stepped in with a lifeline. Bettinardi Golf is a putter manufacturer located in Tinley Park, Illinois – near Northwestern University, where Fitzpatrick played for a semester before turning pro — and the company has machining capabilities that would allow it to custom-make a putter to fit what Fitzpatrick was looking for. Bettinardi just needed a way to get in contact with Fitzpatrick to tell him about it. A mutual friend provided the crucial connection. “I approached his friend … (and) said, ‘Hey, I know you’ve played some golf with Fitzpatrick. … We would be the perfect company for him. We can make him all the putters he wants. We can dial it in,’’ Sam Bettinardi recently told GolfWRX. “And he goes, ‘You know what? That’s a good idea, Sam. The problem is Matt’s never going to switch. He’s been using the same putter since he was 16. But I’m happy to make an introduction to his father.’” And with that conversation, Sam had one foot in the door. When he finally got ahold of Fitzpatrick, it was clear Fitzpatrick didn’t want a new putter. He wanted a replica of his Yes! Golf original. “I started talking to Matt,” Bettinardi said, “and the premise of the conversation was, ‘If you can duplicate my (Yes! Golf Tracy II), I will use your putter. … I want it to be the exact same as what I have now. But I want to be able to go to somebody if I need tweaks, or I need backups, or I want to change anything. I want to go to a reliable company, … but you have to duplicate it.” What Sam Bettinardi didn’t know at the time was just how precise Fitzpatrick’s hands and eyes were. Fitzpatrick knew exactly what he wanted, and he wasn’t going to budge until he got it. “We took that Yes! Tracy II and made him six putters that were very similar,” Bettinardi said. “And that was in 2017. He goes, ‘You know what, you guys are close, but the feel is not there. Change this, change that.’ We made him six more, and he goes, ‘Hey, this is close, but the offset isn’t right. I need it to be this specific offset, and this specific weight.” Fitzpatrick’s challenge was proving more difficult than Sam Bettinardi and team originally thought. “Out of all the players I’ve dealt with and worked with – I’ve been working for Bettinardi Golf for 10 years — … Matt has to be up there in the top three most discriminating players. I’m not going not say picky. I’m going to say discriminating because he’s arguably a top-five putter in the world. He knows exactly what he wants. And if the offset was a slight tick off, or it was one gram different, he could tell.” Thirty prototype putters later, Fitzpatrick found an acceptable replacement. “It was a very, very tough project for us, but after about 30 putters, he finally found one where he was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to put it in play,’” Sam Bettinardi explained. “I believe he put it in play in 2018 for a short period of time. He then took it out and put it back into play again in 2021 for most of the season.” Fitzpatrick used his custom Bettinardi putter to win the biggest title of his career, the U.S. Open, earlier this year. Ironically enough, it was on the same course in Brookline where he used a Yes! Golf putter to win the 2013 U.S. Amateur nine years earlier. What is it that he loves about the C-Grooves? He explained Tuesday, saying, “If I just picked up a regular blade putter out any milling, it feels very fast off that putter. Mine feels a little bit softer. “Not only that, though, for me when I’ve hit putts with just a regular-faced putter I feel like it slides on the face a lot,” he added. “Like if I maybe don’t quite strike it perfectly, I feel like it slides off in a direction. With the C-groove that I have, I feel like it helps start it online much better.” Although it was a long and complicated process, Bettinardi Golf learned a bit along the way, including the secret behind the C-Grooves’ success, allowing the company to improve upon the earlier technology. “The (Yes! Golf) C-Groove has grooves that are milled at an angle, and after studying them, we learned they got the ball into a forward roll, or a true roll faster,” Sam Bettinardi told GolfWRX. “We took that and perfected it, and took it into our Roll Control face, which is what you see in our Inovai and Studio Stock line now. So we bettered that C-Groove for feel purposes, and got the grooves a little bit sharper with our precision machining techniques. … The best part for us was that the company was out of business and the patent on the C-Groove expired.” Now, Fitzpatrick continues to use the custom Bettinardi putter that’s made exactly for his preferences, which happen to be the exact same as they were when he was 16 years old using a Yes! Golf Tracy II putter. His former self would surely be proud of his recent accomplishments in 2022, but also of his custom flatstick.
2021 PGA Championship, Round 2 Top 10 win probabilities: 1. Louis Oosthuizen (T1, -5, 19.4%) 2. Brooks Koepka (3, -4, 11.2%) 3. Hideki Matsuyama (T4, -3, 9.9%) 4. Phil Mickelson (T1, -5, 8.0%) 5. Corey Conners (T7, -2, 4.9%) 6. Bryson DeChambeau (T12, -1, 4.7%) 7. Paul Casey (T7, -2, 3.9%) 8. Christiaan Bezuidenhout (T4, -3, 3.4%) 9. Sungjae Im (T7, -2, 3.4%) 10. Joaquin Niemann (T12, -1, 3.0%) Top Strokes-Gained Performers from Round 2: Putting: Brian Gay +4.1 Around the Green: Tyrrell Hatton +4.2 Approach the Green: Antoine Rozner +5.0 Off-the-tee: Joaquin Niemann +2.3 Total: Louis Oosthuizen +7.5 NOTE: These reports are based off of the live predictive model run by @DataGolf. The model provides live “Make Cut”, “Top 20”, “Top 5”, and “Win” probabilities every 5 minutes from the opening tee shot to the final putt of every PGA TOUR event. Briefly, the model takes account of the current form of each golfer as well as the difficulty of their remaining holes, and probabilities are calculated from 20K simulations. To follow live finish probabilities throughout the remainder of the PGA Championship, or to see how each golfer’s probabilities have evolved from the start of the event to the current time, click here for the model’s home page.
Dylan Frittelli (+260 for a Top 20) … Relative to the competition, this is not a reach despite the fact that he hasn’t cracked a top 20 since a T8 at the Valero Texas Open in early April or rested in five weeks. He cashed in 13 of his last 14 starts, including a T28 at The Open Championship where he led the field in putting and totaled only two three-putts on the massive greens. The South African also hasn’t missed an edition of the 3M Open where he’s 2-for-3 with a T18 in 2020. His scoring average in 10 rounds at TPC Twin Cities is 69. His only PGA TOUR victory occurred a few hundred miles south at TPC Deere Run, another Midwestern stop with bentgrass greens. Nate Lashley (+333 for a Top 20) … He’s veered into the same lane as Adam Long, who is in the Power Rankings. Like his fellow one-time PGA TOUR winner five years his junior, Lashley has been trading weekends off with top 20s and top 30s. It’s a heckuva way to make a keep one’s job at this level. Obviously, it requires confidence post-cut, and Lashley has that. He’s 14th in final-round scoring average. He’s also T3 in par-4 scoring and inside the top 50 in greens in regulation, converting those chances into par breakers and Strokes Gained: Putting. In lockstep with his recent trending, he’s looking for this first cut made in three tries at TPC Twin Cities. Michael Gligic … Where you can find it, a top 30 is a better play for the native Ontarian. In the last three months, he’s 8-for-9 with a trio of top 30s to surge to 145th in the FedExCup. He’s performed his best on easier tracks, so TPC Twin Cities should keep his rally rolling. He’s chasing his third payday in as many starts on the course and playing well enough right now to better a T26 in his debut in 2020. Averaging a couple of yards longer than TOUR average in distance of all drives at 291.0 (to rank T85), he’s not a short hitter by any judgment, but it’s still impressive that he’s T40 in par-5 scoring. That can matter more at TPC Twin Cities given its set of three par 5s has carved out a spot easily within the hardest half of all courses on the PGA TOUR. Justin Lower … Other PGA TOUR rookies are hogging the attention in 2021-22, but the 33-year-old from Ohio is putting together a nice season over on a side stage, so he’s worth checking out. He’s 13-for-21 with five top 20s, including a pair in the last two weeks to rise to 135th in the FedExCup. Currently inside the top 50 in both greens hit and proximity to the hole, but he’s also tightened up his putting on the average of almost one stroke per round within the last three months, and he’s showing zero signs of easing off that throttle. Cole Hammer … The decorated collegian at the University of Texas, where he contributed to his program’s national title a few weeks ago, is making already his fifth start as a professional and second on the PGA TOUR (MC, Travelers). Until he begins building in earnest, he presents merely as one to watch as he finished fifth in the Velocity Global Ranking for PGA TOUR University. That yields Korn Ferry Tour membership this summer and an exemption into the final stage of the KFT Qualifying Tournament. He arrives in Minnesota fresh off a T7 at the Memorial Health Championship presented by LRS where he co-led the field in par-3 scoring. Odds were sourced on Tuesday, July 19, 2022. For live odds, visit BetMGM.
