Expert Picks: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Houston Open

Tiger Woods will make his highly anticipated return to action, teeing it up at the PNC Championship alongside son Charlie for the second time. This is the first time Woods will be competing since the 2020 PNC Championship and since he suffered a myriad of lower-body injuries in a February car crash. Justin Thomas and his father, long-time PGA of America professional Mike Thomas, will defend their title from last year. FIELD NOTES AND STORYLINES: Twenty golfers will tee it up for the two-round tournament in Orlando… Tiger and Charlie, who is now 12, finished seventh last year after back-to-back 62s… Thomas and his father, Mike, look to become the first back-to-back champions of the PNC Championship since Larry Nelson. Mike Thomas was an all-conference player at Morehead State in Kentucky before becoming a club professional… Olympic gold medalist Nelly Korda will tee it up with her father, tennis star Petr. Korda, the lone woman in the field, had a career-year on the LPGA Tour. She won four times, including her first major title, and captured the top spot at the Tokyo Games… Past FedExCup champions Jim Furyk (with son, Tanner), Vijay Singh (with son, Qass), and Henrik Stenson (with son, Karl) are all teeing it up. Woods and Thomas also are past winners of the PGA TOUR’s season-long points race… Thomas also is the reigning THE PLAYERS champion. Past PLAYERS champions also in the PNC field are Woods, David Duval, Henrik Stenson, Matt Kuchar and Nick Price… European Ryder Cup captain Padraig Harrington is in the field alongside his son, Paddy… The Harringtons aren’t the only similarly-named pair. John Daly and his son, John Daly II, are back in action. Daly II is now a freshman at Arkansas – his father’s alma mater… Along with Woods and Thomas, other former World No. 1s in the field include Tom Lehman, Nick Faldo, Duval, Price and Singh… Legendary multi-time major winners Faldo (son, Matthew), Tom Watson (son, Michael), Lee Trevino (son, Daniel), Price (son, Greg), and 85-year-old Gary Player (Grandson, Jordan), will be teeing it up at the PNC Championship along with two-time major winner Mark O’Meara (son, Shaun), two-time Masters winner Bubba Watson (father-in-law, Wayne Ball)… Rich Beem, who won the PGA Championship in 2002, slid into the field along with his son, Michael, as the second-to-last pair to commit (the Woods’ rounded out the field) after Retief Goosen and his son, Leo, withdrew. COURSE: Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, par 72, 7,106 yards. The Ritz-Carlton GC in Orlando, Florida has hosted the PNC Championship every year since 2002. The course boasts generous landing areas on wide fairways, strategically placed hazards, and subtly contoured greens while meandering through wetlands and natural marshes. 72-HOLE RECORD: 118, Davis Love III/Dru Love (2018) 18-HOLE RECORD: 56, Davis Love III/Dru Love (Second Round, 2018) LAST TIME: Making their tournament debut, former FedExCup Champion Justin Thomas and his father Mike Thomas topped Vijay Singh and his son Qass by one. The Thomas duo birdied the opening seven holes in Sunday’s finale and finished with a 15-under 57. The pair – Mike Thomas, a PGA of America professional from Kentucky, is the only coach son Justin has ever had – finished at 25-under for the tournament. Tiger Woods and son Charlie, another pair of tournament debutants, finished 7th, five shots back of the Thomas’. Charlie Woods, 11, and Tiger wore the traditional ‘Sunday Red’ shirts and finished 6-under for their closing six holes in the final round. HOW TO FOLLOW Television: Saturday, 1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m. ET (Golf Channel), 2:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m. (Golf Channel). Sunday, 12:30 p.m.-1 p.m. (Golf Channel), 1 p.m.-4:30 p.m. (NBC).

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Winning on the PGA TOUR as a rookie is always a tall task. Having to deal with a broken club on the driving range before the final round adds another level of difficulty to the situation — especially when the club happens to be the one that gives you an edge over the field. That was the dilemma Cameron Champ had to deal with on Sunday afternoon at the Sanderson Farms Championship, after the face on his PING G400 Max driver cracked as he was warming up. “I was on the range and actually had my headphones in at the time,” Champ said. “I hit the first drive and kind of fell out of the air. I was like, Oh, that’s kind of weird. Probably cracked there but didn’t crack on the top yet. Then I hit another one and it just split straight and a half. “Yeah, it was very unexpected. Then my backup is actually my old one I have that week. I didn’t bring a new new head. It was an older one from my previous driver. I know the weighting was just a little bit off, so just tried to hit as many balls as I could on the range with it just to get used to it a little bit.” Already dealing with what he called a mix of “nerves and adrenaline” as the 54-hole leader, Champ was forced to make do with his old driver during the final round. Although the driver was practically identical to his previous build, Champ struggled off the tee, hitting just five fairway (his lowest total for the week) and ranking 29th in Strokes Gained: Off-the-tee. He still managed to hit drives that topped 320 yards on four of the last six holes, setting the stage for a torrid finish to the tournament that saw Champ birdie five of his last six to win by four. Reed’s new wand: Patrick Reed rarely tinkers with the putter, which is part of the reason why his decision to go with something other than the trusty Odyssey White Hot Pro #3 took many by surprise at the WGC-HSBC Champions. Reed opted for a Scotty Cameron Timeless 2.5 GSS with a dark finish and a single strip of lead tape on the sole. According to Scotty Cameron Tour rep Johnny Delprete, the putter is a Timeless 2 GSS with a welded .5 neck. Cameron has done 2.5 retail versions in the past, including the Select Newport 2.5 that featured 3/4 shaft offset with a Newport 2 style head. Reed finished T7 in China with the new putter. Rory swaps putter: Rory McIlroy added a new putter to the rotation at the WGC-HSBC Champions in the form of a TaylorMade TP Black Copper Soto with a custom plumber’s neck.   Compared to his old TP Black Copper Soto, the custom Anser-style blade lacked TaylorMade’s red Pure Roll insert and slant neck, giving it a similar look and feel to the old Scotty Cameron Newport GSS putter McIlroy had success with in the past when he was a Titleist staffer. McIlroy struggled mightily with the putter over 72 holes, finishing the week T54 at 10 over. While it isn’t a direct indicator of struggles or success, he averaged 1.756 putts per green in regulation at Sheshan International Golf Club. DeChambeau’s electric driver: It took Bryson DeChambeau until the FedExCup Playoffs to put Cobra’s King F8+ driver in the bag. The switch to Cobra’s next driver might not take nearly as long. DeChambeau, who’s in the field this week at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open, posted a slow-mo video on his Instagram account of what appears to be Cobra’s 2019 driver offering. The club appears to have electric yellow paint around the back portion of the head (sole), which is a dead giveaway he’s no longer using F8+. It remains to be seen if he’s merely testing the club or plans to put it in the bag this week at TPC Summerlin. PGA TOUR SUPERSTORE: Buy equipment here

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SILVIS, Ill. – Zach Johnson, always the people’s choice in the Quad Cities, shot a 5-under 66 in the final round of the John Deere Classic at steamy TPC Deere Run on Sunday. That was good enough to get him to 10 under, but not good enough to win. So it’s gone lately for the 12-time PGA TOUR winner, who hoisted the trophy here in 2012 but whose last victory came at the 2015 Open Championship. At 43 and 140th in the FedExCup, he recently learned he’d fallen out of the top 100 in the world, too. He met with his team earlier this summer to take stock of where he was in his career and figure out where to go from here. “There’s been a lot of frustration for me in the 2019 season,â€� Johnson said, “because of the work I’ve put in and not seeing the results.â€� As a native of Iowa, Johnson is always especially visible during the week of the Deere. He helps run the tournament and heads up his Kids on Course charity pro-am, which helps the Cedar Rapids community and this year included 19 fellow TOUR pros. Another positive this week was that he shot 69-66 on the weekend after making the cut on the number. “It’s not where I want it right now,â€� he said, “but it’s on that trajectory.â€� After so much reassessing – taking a hard look at his mental game and making a recent caddie change, to cite two examples – he says it’s now time to start improving.  That means making his strengths stronger and shoring up his weaknesses. As usual, he was a paragon of driving accuracy at the Deere, hitting 48 of 56 fairways to rank in the top 10 in that category. He was also handy with his irons, leaving an average proximity to the hole of 27 feet, 7 inches, tops in the field with the leaders still on the course. Ironically, though, for a guy who made his name with clutch putting, Johnson will finish the Deere ranked near the bottom of those who made the cut in putting. His worst effort was a 32-putt performance Saturday, when he ranked 69th in Strokes Gained: Putting, but he wasn’t that great Thursday or Friday, either. He finally looked more like himself Sunday (27 putts). “It’s been me looking in the mirror,â€� he said, “and saying, ‘What are you doing? You still know how to play this game, so let’s get back to the basics.’ If I’m going to break it down, putting would be the priority at this point, and my practice in that regard has been unbelievable.â€� After the Deere, he wasn’t dwelling on his work on the greens but how he’d felt getting there. “I hit the ball on the middle of the clubface a lot today,â€� he said Sunday, “so that’s encouraging. … A couple lip-outs, a couple missed reads, but it could have been really low. “You go to any major, specifically (The Open Championship), good things can happen.â€� Johnson is not ready to say his best days are behind him. In fact, he said, the opposite is true. He feels like he’s better than he was when he was 25. He likes what he’s done with his coaches from a technical and mental standpoint, and is ready to start seeing some more low scores. “I’ve never really had my back up against the wall,â€� he said, “but every time I’ve kind of been in a position where I’ve had to step up, at some point it’s happened, and I don’t know why that won’t happen again.â€�

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