Comparing the putters of Hideki Matsuyama and his hero, Tiger Woods

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Dustin Johnson, the world’s top-ranked player, has made 10 starts at THE PLAYERS Championship. His best finish is a tie for 12th two years ago. It’s the only PGA TOUR event he’s played 10 times or more without a top-10 finish. “I don’t know – I struggle with everything,â€� Johnson said Wednesday in trying to explain a track record at TPC Sawgrass he calls “frustrating.â€� Justin Rose is the world’s second-ranked player. He’s made 15 PLAYERS starts with just one top-10 finish, a tie for fourth in 2014. Like Johnson, Rose’s results here are a career-low — it’s his most starts in a single TOUR event with so few top 10s. “I’m slightly bemused by why I haven’t done better,â€� Rose said. “… Doesn’t really make a lot of sense.â€� Indeed, it doesn’t – and yet those two aren’t alone. Some of the game’s most notable and successful players have come to TPC Sawgrass and made the kind of noise usually reserved for art galleries and libraries. Bubba Watson has 11 PLAYERS starts without a top 10; no other tournament has shut him out that many times. World No. 3 Brooks Koepka doesn’t have a top-10 in four starts. Combined, those two players have five major victories and 17 overall TOUR wins; each is also a native Floridian, but any “localâ€� knowledge obviously hasn’t translated here. Not that any of that should matter, insisted Koepka. “Course history isn’t what you guys make it up to be, I don’t think,â€� he said. Course history and past results, however, usually provide a starting point for contenders. Yet even the game’s two biggest names have consistently failed to stay in the mix at THE PLAYERS. Tiger Woods is the only player to win this event in both March and May but has just three top 10s in his other 16 starts at THE PLAYERS. In Tiger’s legendary career, he’s never made as many starts at a single event with so few top 10s. Phil Mickelson won THE PLAYERS in 2007 when it first moved to May but hasn’t had a top 10 since then. In 25 career starts, he has just three top 10s. The only other tournament in his career that comes close to matching that level of futility is the BMW Championship, in which he has two top 10s in 21 starts. Of course, that tournament rotates its host course each year. So what does all this tell us? Pretty much what we’ve known all along – that TPC Sawgrass favors no one and diffuses the horses-for-courses theory so prevalent at some other TOUR events. “It’s when Charles Howell goes to the Sony Open, he’s pretty much a stock standard top-10 guy or a win. I don’t know if there’s anyone out there that plays that well at this golf course – and that’s what’s so interesting about it,â€� said Jason Day, whose rollercoaster results at TPC Sawgrass include a win in 2016, two other top 10s and three missed cuts. One big reason why TPC Sawgrass doesn’t favor a particular style? It has avoided becoming a bomber’s paradise. At 7,189 yards, it’s not particularly long, and accuracy is at a premium – especially after THE PLAYERS moved to May with its firmer, faster conditions. Day, for instance, won two years ago basically hitting 2-iron off the tee instead of being able to bomb it. Most of the game’s best players are big hitters but not being able to overpower the Stadium Course has reduced their advantage. “All the notables in the game now are a reflection of what is going on in the game; they’re the bombers, they hit it forever,â€� said David Duval, the 1999 PLAYERS winner who is now a Golf Channel analyst. “That’s not a necessity here. It opens up the field that much more because of that. … there’s no soft spots among the 144 teeing it up. “The reality is that length is always an advantage. It doesn’t matter the golf course you play. But I think also at the same time as I talked about for a number of years about this golf course, a lot of the modern players and in a way seemingly like to bully a golf course into submission with length. This golf course doesn’t not allow that. You have to play the golf course as it was built and designed and you can get around that way.â€� Pete Dye’s course put a premium on precision, where shotmakers such as Fred Funk and Tim Clark can succeed, where the shorter hitters are on somewhat equal turf. “If this was a modern-style golf course where every carry was 300 [yards] and things widened out, it would be frustrating for 40 percent of the field,â€� Rose said. “I don’t think any one of the PGA TOUR players that are here this week is frustrated by this golf course. I think everybody gets here thinking, ‘I’ve got a good chance to win.’ “The best players in the world think they’ve got a better chance to win, which they do, but I think that it’s slightly condensed. I think the top players in the world these days are the guys who are hitting it generally a lot further than most, so you might run into six, seven, eight, nine venues a year where you’re playing against guys who just maybe can’t beat you based on their skill set versus yours. “This golf course allows everybody that chance to win, which is I think appropriate for THE PLAYERS Championship.â€� Adam Scott at TPC Sawgrass in just his third PLAYERS start in 2004 and has three top 10s and three other four other top 20s since then. That makes him one of the few players who can point to at least a modicum of consistency at this event. “I think probably there are certain courses that people love and, I wouldn’t say hate, but just they don’t agree with you,â€� Scott said. “Whether it’s visually or a particular hole or something – I mean, a lot of guys struggle putting at Riviera and I putt well there, which is weird. And this might be a course like that as well, where it’s just difficult to see the right shot, difficult to read the greens. “If you get on a bad run here, this course really can dent your confidence because the severity of penalty is very extreme, and that was part of the design from Pete Dye. You’re on the green, or three inches to the left, you’re in the water. It’s a big difference in a game of inches.â€� Johnson, fresh off his 20th career TOUR win at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship, has never played THE PLAYERS in March. But he thinks the schedule switch might play to his strength, with a more receptive course that doesn’t penalize his lengthy shots that run out into trouble. “Playing it how we did, where it was just straight Bermuda – it was always really firm and fast,â€� he said. “It kind of brought the whole into play, but that’s just how it was and how it played and the short Bermuda rough was really difficult to judge. Now the course plays completely different. It’s softer, it’s longer, the rough’s a little bit deeper but it’s still playable. … “It definitely sets up better for me like this.â€� That’s good news for DJ but perhaps bad news for the rest of the field. Don’t worry, though – if we’ve seen anything about TPC Sawgrass, the course will find a way to equalize the field.

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Brendan Steele knows all about a fast start to the season. What he’d like to avoid is the slow finish. Steele won the Safeway Open a year ago, and he felt he was on his way. He made the cut in his next 16 tournaments. He had three top 10s, including a tie for sixth in THE PLAYERS Championship. He made the cut in both majors he played during that stretch. He was 13th in the FedExCup, and the TOUR Championship looked like a sure thing. And then it wasn’t. “I really felt like at the end of the season through the summer, I definitely limited myself as to what I was trying to achieve,” Steele said. “I just wanted to make the TOUR Championship so bad, I was just trying to scratch and claw for every point I could. There was never going to be a week where I had a chance to win playing like that because you play to the level you’re thinking. “If you’re trying to make the cut, you’ll be right around the cut line,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to win. I wasn’t trying to play my best. I was just trying to get whatever points I could and I played right to that level.” He made only three cuts in his last seven events, and two of those tournaments didn’t even have cuts. Steele was at No. 27 going into the BMW Championship, closed with a 72-72 weekend and missed the top 30 — and the TOUR Championship — by two shots. Since the wraparound season began in October 2013, Steele became the first player to win the season-opening event and not make it to East Lake. He hopes he at least learned from last year. “I just started playing a little more cautiously and a little bit more afraid,” he said. “I don’t know if I got a little bit more tired or what happened, but I was just worried about the outcome and not the process of actually hitting good shots and playing good tournaments. … I’m going to try not to do that this year and just really move forward and try to win as many tournaments as I can, and get myself into contention in majors and do all the things that everybody wants to do out here.” He gets his first chance quickly. After his two-shot victory to repeat at the Safeway Open, he was on a flight to Malaysia to play the CIMB Classic. ___ CAREER MONEY EXEMPTIONS: Tim Clark is coming up on the two-year anniversary since he last played on the PGA TOUR at the 2016 CareerBuilder Challenge. Instead of taking a major medical extension, he is using a one-time exemption for being among the top 50 in career money (No. 47). Whether he plays depends on his health. Clark spent time this year working with Russell Henley on his wedge game. Also using a one-time exemption for top 50 in career money is two-time U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen, who is No. 26 in career money. Goosen, who turns 49 in February, narrowly kept his card for last season. Ernie Els (No. 5) and K.J. Choi (No. 25) are using one-time exemptions for top 25 on the career money list. Els, who turns 48 next week, can still use the one-time exemption for top 50. Bo Van Pelt also is on a career money exemption, but that has been carried over from 2015-16. Van Pelt hasn’t played since Pebble Beach in 2016 after having surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left arm. ___ BACK IN ITS PLACE: With a hurricane approaching, Justin Thomas took some of his most valued possessions to a sturdy safe at the home of his neighbor Rickie Fowler. That included the Wanamaker Trophy from the PGA Championship. And that’s where it stayed. Thomas headed for Chicago, then Atlanta for the TOUR Championship, followed by New York for the Presidents Cup. He headed over to Fowler’s to retrieve his major championship hardware, and then found the perfect spot for it. “It doesn’t quite fit in my office. I have a little bookcase, and it’s a little bigger than the other trophies I have,” Thomas said. “But it’s kind of a nice little ledge above the fireplace in my living room that it just fits perfect right when you walk in the front door. And I think I’m going to leave it there.” ___ THREE-PEATS: Justin Thomas is going for a third straight victory at the CIMB Classic in Malaysia, and that’s just the start. Over the next 12 months, Thomas will be among five players trying to win the same tournament three years in a row. Hideki Matsuyama has won the last two years at the Waste Management Phoenix Open at the start of February. Daniel Berger is a back-to-back winner at the FedEx St. Jude Classic. He’ll get his chance in June. Then, a little more than a month later, Jhonattan Vegas goes for three in a row at the RBC Canadian Open. And then it circles back to Brendan Steele, who on Sunday won the Safeway Open for the second straight year. The last player to win the same PGA TOUR event three straight times was Steve Stricker at the John Deere Classic in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Before that, it was Tiger Woods at two tournaments. He won three straight at a pair of World Golf Championships from 2005 through 2007. One was the Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone. The other was held over three courses — the American Express at Harding Park (2005), The Grove (2006) and Doral (2007). ___ DIVOTS: The Olympic Golf Course in Rio de Janeiro finally gets to host another tournament. The Brazil Open starts Thursday on the PGA TOUR Latinoamerica. … Atlanta-based Delta Airlines has become the third company to become an international partner of the Masters, joining Rolex and UPS. The Masters has only three global sponsors in AT&T, Mercedes-Benz and IBM. … The LPGA Teaching and Club Professional membership has announced one winner for the Ellen Griffin Rolex Award and the Nancy Lopez Golf Achievement Award — Sandy LaBauve, the founder of LPGA-USGA Girls Golf program. ___ STAT OF THE WEEK: The top 10 in the men’s and women’s world ranking each have players from six countries. The men are represented by the United States, Japan, Spain, Northern Ireland, Sweden and Australia. The women are represented by South Korea, the United States, Sweden, China, Thailand and New Zealand. ___ FINAL WORD: “I’m going to win. It’s a matter of time. I don’t know if it’s tomorrow, I don’t know if it’s in China, but it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen soon because I’m starting to play well enough to do it.” — Phil Mickelson after the third round of the Safeway Open.

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