Huge interest in betting for 2020 Masters

FORT WORTH — Sam Burns waited a while to win his fourth PGA TOUR title. He shot 5-under 65 on Sunday, another warm and wind-whipped day at the Charles Schwab Challenge. Burns finished the final round at 9 under par. He thought he needed to be 10 under. He watched the 16 players ahead of him fight the rustling breezes and quickening greens at Colonial Country Club. None of them lasted. RELATED: What’s in Burns’ bag? Nearly two hours after his round had ended, Burns defeated Scottie Scheffler in a playoff on the first extra hole, No. 18 at Colonial CC. Burns holed a 38-foot putt from the fringe behind the green that veered right and fell on its last revolution. Scheffler had a putt of 37 feet and missed. It seemed like it was over before it started. “I’m pretty exhausted,” the new champion said in the equally new tartan jacket given to the winners at Colonial. “Mentally I was prepared to go as long as it took. I don’t know if I could have done it physically. But mentally I was ready. When coach calls your name, you’ve got to be ready to play, and I think we did a really good job of being ready.” Burns, 25, started the final round in a tie for 17th place. He said he never looked at a leaderboard. He was seven shots behind Scheffler when he hit his first shot. “Who would have ever thought that you’d have a chance seven back?” Burns said. He went out in 5-under 30. He made one birdie and one bogey on the back nine. He posted one of 12 scores in the 60s. He had lunch with his family and kept an eye on the leaderboard. Scheffler, who held a two-shot lead after three rounds, plodded through an uneven afternoon of no birdies but clutch putts to save par. Scott Stallings and Brendon Todd started the round right behind him. They too struggled. Nearly everyone did. Harold Varner III threatened. Then he played the back nine. Varner shot a 45 to go from a grasp of the lead to a tie for 27th after an 8-over 78. “I did not envy them,” said Burns, who finished at 3:47 p.m. local time. Five players completed the par-5 11th hole at 10-under or better. None of them could stay there. Davis Riley was 11 under at the tee at No. 12; he finished at 8 under. Scheffler shot 72. Todd shot 71. Stallings shot 73. The few players who did manage Colonial at par or better started the round too far from the lead. “I think both days on the weekend the back nine played exceptionally hard,” Todd said. “I gave myself a lot of looks,” said Scheffler. “I just didn’t have it today.” Colonial played to an average of 72.3 sturdy strokes Sunday — more than two shots over par. Gusts of 30 mph raked the grounds. The players learned to time them, making their swings in the lulls. On the 18th tee, Scheffler stepped into his shot at the precise moment one of them rose. “A tornado,” Scheffler quipped to his caddie. “It’s just a really hard golf course and a lot of wind,” Burns said. When Scheffler reached No. 16, he and Burns were the only players left at 9 under. Burns excused himself from lunch and went to the gym, where he stretched for 15 minutes. He laced his golf shoes, rolled a few putts and prepared for the possibility that he would play more golf. An hour later, Burns was holding the trophy. He and his caddie had talked earlier in the week about how to confront Colonial, a course that opened in 1936. Many players, including those who’ve won the tournament, argue that Colonial requires few drivers. Better to take shorter clubs and aim for the widest parts of the fairways, they say. “The data does not back that up,” Burns said. “You need to push it around this golf course.” Burns did just that. He led the field in driving distance, averaging 297 yards off the tee. But he also was pushing it with his putter. He ranked second in Strokes Gained: Putting (4.1) in the final round. The combination of sheer distance and touch on the greens made the difference. Burns earned 500 FedExCup points, vaulting his total to 2,101. Only Scheffler, at 3,142, has more. “I feel like I need to win a handful more times to catch Scottie,” Burns said. He’d like to have the chance. He and Scheffler, identical in age, are close friends, Burns said. They shared a close embrace after playoff. “It’s going to be a fun story that we get to have for the rest of our careers,” Burns said.

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NAPA, Calif. – Mack “Popsâ€� Champ never predicted it would come to this. Not when his oldest brother, Clyde, found a rod and bent it into an L shape before taping up the grip for their first golf club. Not when they hit balls in the open fields by the railroad tracks near their home outside Houston, the best they could do because they weren’t allowed on the course except as caddies. But it happened, his grandson Cameron winning the Safeway Open at Silverado on Sunday as the man who got him started, Mack, 78, watched on TV. He’s been in hospice care back in Sacramento, hasn’t eaten more than popsicles for three weeks, but he saw every minute. It was real, and there wasn’t a dry eye. Just an hour or so south of their hometown, Cameron won and sobbed onto the shoulder of his caddie, Kurt Kowaluk, as they embraced. “I think it was just kind of meant to be,â€� Cameron said afterward.  RELATED: How Champ’s grandfather paved the way | Final leaderboard Added his father, Jeff, his eyes welled with tears and voice breaking, “For this to happen before these last days that we’re going to have with my father here, it’s the man upstairs. It’s amazing.â€� With Mack on hospice and no one sure just how many days he has left, Champ wasn’t sure he was going to play this week. But he didn’t just play, he excelled. He blasted a 369-yard drive down the 18th fairway – the longest of the day by 33 yards – to set up his decisive birdie, and his final-round 69 left him at 17 under par, one shot better than Adam Hadwin (67).  Marc Leishman (65) finished third, three back. “No matter what,â€� Champ said, “even if I never win another tournament again or I win however many, this will definitely be the greatest moment of my golfing career.â€�  It was Champ’s second PGA TOUR win, and the second time in as many seasons he’s won in his second start. He moves to No. 2 in the FedExCup, and earns a spot in the Sentry Tournament of Champions and, for the first time, the Masters Tournament, among other select events. Mack couldn’t have predicted any of it, but he had an inkling. After all, it was Mack who bought the boy his first set of plastic golf clubs. And it was Mack, an Air Force man who got close to scratch while playing overseas, who knew what talent looked like. “First time I knew he had pretty good coordination,â€� Mack told the PGA TOUR earlier this year, “I don’t think he was 2 years old. I told him, I want you to take this long tee, you stay over here, and I’m going to go over and I want to see if you can hit it over the top of the house.â€� It was not a big house, single story. The Champs never had a lot. But Cameron hit it over that house; Mack, on the other side, watched the ball clear the roof and come down near his feet. “It took him about four or five hits,â€� he said, smiling, “but he said, ‘Grandpa! I hit it over the top of the house!’ I said, ‘I know! I’m over here, Cameron!’ (Laughs) And from that day on, when he came in, I’d have little putting dishes in the hallway. We just made games. Chipping over bushes. Chipping into coffee cans. You know. I never thought it would lead to this, back then, but I saw something in how he would just swing the club.â€�  Added Cameron at the Safeway, “We just hit them back and forth, whiffle balls, to each other. I think it just started from that.â€� He calls his grandfather, “The most loving man I know,â€� and Jeff points out that when Mack needed a kidney transplant in ’75, he got one against the odds. “Somebody wanted him to get that transplant,â€� Jeff said. It was toward the end of last season when Jeff told Cameron that Mack had cancer. After the season, Jeff revealed that it was Stage IV. Chemo gave Mack some time, but when he stopped being able to keep down food and water, he knew the end was coming. “One day he called me and said, ‘I’m ready,’â€� Jeff said. With his grandfather in hospice, Cameron missed the pro-am and didn’t play a practice round as the family shuttled back and forth between Sacramento and Napa. Somehow, though, he played mostly mistake-free at Silverado, where wrote “POPSâ€� on his shoes and golf balls and led the field in driving distance. In a sense, he said, the situation back in Sacramento might have calmed him, imbuing a sense of perspective that was lacking as he struggled for much of last season. “Obviously, golf, it’s my career,â€� Champ said. “I love doing it, but it made me realize it’s not the most important thing, that there’s a lot more to life.â€�   Although he lived through racial discrimination as he grew up in Columbus, Texas, about 75 miles west of Houston, Mack didn’t let it dim his outlook. “It’s not where you come from,â€� he said, “it’s where you’re going.â€� (Cameron had the words stamped on his wedges.) While he wasn’t allowed to play on the nine-hole course where he caddied for 75 cents a loop, he would take up golf in the Air Force, at courses and driving ranges in Germany and England. He taught himself the swing in part by reading “Sam Snead’s Natural Golf.â€� Although son Jeff was not a golfer but a minor-league baseball player – a catcher – Cameron most assuredly was. They not only hit whiffle balls over the house, Mack caddied for a teen-age Cameron at a First Tee event at Pebble Beach. It was only fitting that when Cameron won the Sanderson Farms Championship last season, Mack was brought into the celebration by iPhone. It happened again at the Safeway, Cameron and Jeff sharing a long embrace before Jeff handed his son the phone. Grandpa Mack was on the line, and they shared a brief conversation.  “For him to be able to see me make that putt on 18 on the 72nd hole to win,â€� Cameron said, “like I said, that will go down as the greatest moment ever in my golfing career.â€� The putt, by the way, was 3 feet, 8 inches long. “Focus,â€� Mack always stressed. Cameron did. Then came a long procession of hugs for the winner, starting with his parents – his mom, Lisa, had been with Mack but came to Silverado for the final round – and moving on to siblings and spouses of siblings, friends down from Sacramento, his agent, and others. “Who am I forgetting?â€� Champ said after running through the long list.  Finally, someone handed him a phone, and holding the wine-cask trophy for a victory selfie, Champ looked into the camera and said it all: “This one’s for you, Pops.â€� On this day, especially, no one was forgetting Mack Champ.

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