Fantasy Insider: Travelers Championship

Tiger Woods’ Masters win is sure to change the landscape of golf betting. Is there now value on the field? How many majors will Woods win this year? Our experts debate.

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Here are nine tidbits from the third round of the FedEx St. Jude Classic that gamers can use tomorrow, this weekend or down the road. TPC Southwind, located just outside Memphis, has been the host since 1990 and plays 7,244 yards to a Par-70.   KNOW THY ENEMY These were the top-10 selected golfers in the PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf game presented by SERVPRO. Moving Day saw the leaders separate themselves after 54 holes. Dustin Johnson (65) and Andrew Putnam (64) are five shots clear of third after posting 15-under-par 195. TPC Southwind played the easiest it has in the last four editions on Saturday as the warm weather and lack of wind helped players stay out of trouble. THE FINAL PAIR On paper it looks to be a mismatch. Luckily for Andrew Putnam, golf is not played on paper but rather on a course with sand, water and out-of-bounds. The other good news is Dustin Johnson has everything to play for on Sunday and the pressure is squarely on his very broad shoulders. A win takes him back to No. 1 in OWGR and will see him become the seventh player on TOUR this year with multiple victories (Sentry TOC). Putnam has won twice on the Web.com Tour but his best finish this season in T5 at an opposite-field event in the Dominican Republic. He leads the field in GIR and is T1 in fairways and only has made one bogey on the week. His 64 was the co-low round of the day in Round 3. It won’t hurt if he one-putts the more greens again Sunday! The bad news for Putnam is Johnson’s final round scoring average here is 66.50 including 63 his last time in 2016. IN CINK After reading about his battle against skin cancer, I’ll be honest, Stewart Cink hasn’t been on my radar. He faded even further away after he didn’t fire last week at Memorial, an event where he cashed in 20 of 21 weekends. After a pair of 68’s to open, Cink had it to seven-under for the day through 16 before a late bogey saw him sign for the co-low round of the day (64). The highlight of his day was an ace on No. 8 and that helped him move up 11 spots to solo third. WEREN THE MONEY Richy Werenski (T4) is looking for his first top-10 finish since losing a playoff to Chris Stroud at the Barracuda Championship last August. I should note his best two finishes of the spring have been on courses that are not described as “easy”. He was T11 at the AT&T Oaks Course at the Valero Texas Open and T23 at TPC Sawgrass. The Georgia Tech alum will be paired comfortably with another, Cink, in the penultimate group.  LAST MAN WITH A CHANCE Joining Werenski at T4 is Wesley Bryan — and those fellas find themselves six shots off the lead. If TPC Southwind continues the trend of playing easier every day, it will truly take something historic to even push the leaders. Bryan hasn’t had a top 10 or top 25-finish this season but long-term investors will be anxiously watching tomorrow as that streak will surely end. AMATEUR HOUR For the second year in a row, Ole Miss golfer Braden Thornberry has turned heads at TPC Southwind. Last year the rising junior posted 67-65 on the weekend to claim T4. His bogey-free round on Sunday was one of two with winner Daniel Berger claiming the other. This year the rising senior entered the week off a tough NCAA tournament and opened with 73. He’s played his last 36 holes with 11 birdies against only two bogeys and his 65 Saturday moved him up 30 spots to T10.  MOVING DAY If Billy Horschel is going to extend his streak of top-10 finishes to five events in a row, he’ll need to use the same game plan in the final round as he did in Round 3. Horschel moved up 29 spots to T29 on the back of his 67. Gamers please note this is normal as he closed with 65 last year and 64 in 2015 in his last two visits.  There was no mystery as to why Henrik Stenson couldn’t get going as he lost over four strokes putting during the first two rounds. He painted as many fairways today as yesterday and hit the same amount of GIR but he gained just over two shots on the greens. His 66 moved him up 21 spots to T19. MOVING DAY: WRONG WAY This was just the first round above par (73) for Phil Mickelson in his last 15 attempts. He dropped 35 spots to T49 as he only made two birdies in Round 3, including one from off the green. I’m sticking Lefty on the bench tomorrow as his thoughts are probably drifting to Shinnecock as I type this.  Ryan Blaum dropped 17 places after playing in the final group with Johnson and shooting 74. He made only one birdie and now begins Sunday T19.  Man, when it goes south for Charl Schwartzel, it goes south. His 78 was the worst round of the day by four shots on the easiest day of the event. Bizarre. STUDY HALL Round 1 scored 70.769 (+0.796) and was the easiest opening round in the last four editions. Round 2 saw the scores continue to plummet as the weather cooperated at 70.526 (+0.526). Round 3 became just the second round in the last four years to check in under-par as the average was 69.472 (-0.528). There were four bogey-free rounds as Putnam and Horschel joined Trey Mullinax (65; T7) and Zac Blair (69; T39). The winner of U.S. Open has never won the week prior on TOUR.  Cink’s ace on No. 8 was the fifth of his career. 

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NAPA, Calif. – Michael Kim and Max Homa, who will play together along with Cameron Champ in the first and second rounds of the Fortinet Championship at Silverado Resort & Spa, sometimes regard their college years with a pinch of nostalgia. The Cal teammates hit fairways, made birdies. It was a simpler time. They roomed together on the road, and when Kim, who moved to America from Korea when he was 12, spoke to his parents on the phone, Homa couldn’t catch a word of it. At other times, though, Kim would slow it way down as he dictated simple Korean phrases into his phone. “He’s going to be so mad I’m telling people this,” Homa said with a grin. “… He starts recording something on his phone and it would be like me saying like – ‘I drove my car to the store’ in Korean. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m in this Korean 101 class that I’m not supposed to know, I’m not supposed to be fluent in this.’” Ah, the college years. But what followed for Homa and Kim was no laughing matter. Each made it to the TOUR only to fall apart in his mid-20s, lose his TOUR card, and slog through a bewildering odyssey in the golfing wilderness. The game, once so simple, got complicated. Homa missed 15 cuts in 2015, played on the Korn Ferry Tour in ’16, and missed 15 cuts again in ’17, when he dropped to 244th in the FedExCup. “He’s way too good a player to lose his card,” Rory McIlroy said of Homa at the Wells Fargo Championship in May. True enough. Homa, the defending champion at the Fortinet, is still in the afterglow of a career-best two-win season and fifth-place finish in the FedExCup. Last week U.S. Presidents Cup Captain Davis Love III named him among his six picks to help round out the team that will take on the Internationals at Quail Hollow Club next week. Now it’s Kim’s turn to come back. He parted ways with longtime swing coach James Oh to go with John Tillery just three weeks before the 2018 John Deere Classic, which he then won by eight shots. It was a happy day, with Kim having shot 27 under to lap the field, but when asked in his press conference afterward about the recent coaching change he burst into tears. “You feel like you’ve gone to war with a guy for years,” Kim said Wednesday, “and I started seeing (Oh) when I was 15, and he’s the one who had really helped me get on TOUR. That was three weeks after I had told him, and it felt like 90 percent of the work we had done for that win was with James, and maybe the last 10 percent was with J.T., but it was going to be looked at as J.T. came in and fixed everything. I felt bad that people were going to look at it that way.” What’s more, as Kim sat there before the press, the trophy won and a life goal realized, he harbored a bizarre secret: Other than that one week at TPC Deere Run, he wasn’t playing well. “I was still struggling even that year,” he said. “I wasn’t playing great, I just got hot at the perfect moment and the stars aligned for me. I got caught up in the trendy thing in the golf swing and tried to quote, unquote take the hands out of it. Growing up, a lot of my feel was in my hands. Tiger Woods talks about his hands. I lost that.” Kim’s freefall was dizzying. He made it to the weekend just once in two years, at one point missing 25 consecutive cuts. He fell outside the top 1,000 in the world. By abandoning the right-to-left tee shot that found fairways and allowed for the fullest expression of his above-average wedges and short game, he became utterly, hopelessly lost. “It might have been a technical thing at first, but I think it became a mental thing,” said Michael Weaver, a Cal teammate who briefly played on the Korn Ferry Tour. “I was a fill-in caddie for him at the 3M Open in 2019, and he played with Smylie Kaufman and Austin Cook, and I felt bad for Austin because Smylie and Michael were hitting it all over the place.” Kaufman is now a golf broadcaster, and for a time it was anything but certain Kim would make his way out of the williwags. He parted with Tillery and tried his luck with various other coaches, including George Gankas, but nothing stuck. His friends tried to buck up his spirits, telling him they still believed in him even as the cuts piled up. “Every time I asked him, ‘Where are you playing next?’ I was prepared to hear, ‘I might not play for a while,’” Weaver said. “You work so hard to build up your confidence and then it all goes badly and you’re like, I used to be good at this and now I suck. I wouldn’t fault anyone for shutting it down; it’s a natural reaction to not being able to find your way out.” Kim saw flashes of form, but they could vanish even as he made the turn. “I was really dejected because on the front nine you have that hope,” he said, “and then it’s a crash all over again.” He got a slight reprieve from Covid, the pandemic extending his status a year and saving him from a return to Korn Ferry Tour Q School. After Monday-qualifying for the Fortinet last year, he tapped Weaver to caddie for him again. “He hit it in the condos on one,” Weaver said. It looked like the same old stuff, but just a few weeks earlier Kim had begun working with was Sean Foley, who diagnosed the problem: Kim had gotten away from his swing DNA and what made him great in the first place. “Sean said, ‘We needed to get you swinging a little more like you did as a kid, with similar feels and tweaks here and there,’” Kim said, “and that’s how we started. We were still making the transition last year. It was all very new.” Slowly, methodically, Kim clawed his way back. He started the 2022 Korn Ferry Tour season with a pair of missed cuts, but a T15 at The Panama Championship in February provided hope. He texted Foley: This was going to work. Kim racked up 12 top-25 finishes in 25 starts to regain his PGA TOUR card. He also shared the first-round lead at the Puerto Rico Open (T16) and finished seventh at the Barbasol Championship. Today, he feels like he has a new lease on life. “I mean obviously it would be great if I went to see Sean first,” he said. “I’ve come to believe it’s more about your fit with your instructor and does his swing philosophy fit with what you have.” Without the last four years, though, he added, he might not be the same player he is today. “I don’t think I’d be as excited and have a fresh perspective on playing the PGA TOUR,” he said. “You go through the ups and downs and you appreciate it more.” Homa could say the same. His eyes got a little teary Wednesday as he talked about the journey from his very first PGA TOUR start to making his first U.S. Presidents Cup Team, and the ups and downs along the way. For the two Cal Bears who will reunite at Silverado, the struggle makes it all the sweeter.

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