Featured Groups: CIMB Classic

Amy Bockerstette started taking golf lessons at 14 with the hope of playing with her family. She became the first person with Down syndrome to earn a college athletic scholarship.

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AUSTIN, Texas – Tiger Woods walked off Austin Country Club glad he did not have to record a stroke play score. The three-time champion returned to the World Golf Championships – Dell Technologies Match Play for the first time in six years as a winner… but it wasn’t exactly pretty. The 80-time PGA TOUR winner was far from crisp in his match against PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year Aaron Wise, but prevailed 3 and 1 in a scrappy affair. Despite having just four birdies in his 17 holes with four bogeys, Woods outlasted a wayward Wise. The 22-year-old had more birdies than his illustrious opponent with six, but also carded seven bogeys and a double bogey to fall to the three-time event champion. “The way we were playing today, we’re very thankful it’s not stroke play… I broke 80,â€� a relieved Woods joked afterward. “I won the match. It wasn’t exactly the best of golf out there from both of us. We gave a few holes away with bogeys and three-putts, and we won a few holes with some good birdies. It was an emotional round because there weren’t a lot of halved holes.â€� Wise admitted his first ever round with one of his idols had him a little nervous during the first couple of holes, but stopped short of saying it contributed to his wayward play. The former NCAA champion and winner of last season’s AT&T Byron Nelson actually turned an early two-hole deficit to a 1-up lead through 10 holes, but was unable to hold firm. Four bogeys in his last five holes sealed his fate. “(I was) a little bit (nervous). The first hole is always where I’m most nervous. I’m never kind of nervous coming down the stretch. I’m always nervous starting the round, because there’s a lot of uncertainties,â€� Wise said. “I got off to a really bad start but luckily in match play you’re still two down through 2, and I knew I could come back from that. It wasn’t like the world was over.” “I don’t think either of us played as good as we wanted to, but he played a little bit better than me and got the win.â€� While bummed with the loss Wise said he will take plenty away from the experience of going head to head with one of the greatest of all time. “It was pretty cool to get in his group today, be able to play him, especially in match play, where it’s me against him. It was a fun experience,â€� Wise said. “I really respect what he’s done in the game, and it was pretty cool to be able to watch him compete today and be alongside of him.â€� The 13th seeded Woods takes on 44th seed Brandt Snedeker on Thursday as he seeks to advance from the group. Snedeker halved his match with Patrick Cantlay thanks to a clutch birdie on the 18th hole.

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We are less than three weeks away from the PGA TOUR’s official return at the Charles Schwab Challenge. More than 90 days will have passed between the cancellation of THE PLAYERS and the TOUR’s resumption of play. When THE PLAYERS was canceled back in March, a cloud of uncertainty was hanging over golf and the world around it. Nobody knew when we would see the world’s best tee it up again, but both players and fans were certainly hoping it would be safe to do so sooner than later. We now have a clear schedule for the remainder of the year, with competition resuming 13 weeks after the THE PLAYERS was canceled. Let’s explore what impact this break might have on player performance. Needless to say, 13-week breaks are not common among PGA TOUR players. Overall, only around 2.7% of starts are made by players coming off a 13-week break. A lot can happen in that time. Back in 2000, Tiger went on a run of five wins, including three majors, in a 13-week stretch. Below is a chart showing the percentage of players in a given event, by weeks off entering the tournament. Fifty-two percent of a field played the week prior. As we might expect, there’s a clear relationship between performance and the number of weeks a player has been off. We can analyze how well players perform by comparing our estimate of their ability (how we would expect them to perform) to how they actually performed. Generally, players taking small breaks of two weeks or less are marginally better than expected, while longer breaks result in an average drop in performance of between 0.1 and 0.2 strokes per round. For context, a drop of 0.2 strokes per round is about the gap between 100th- and 135th-ranked players in the world. It’s a significant change, but not enormous. Additionally, the drop in performance after a 10-20 week gap is quite consistent across different levels of players. Top-50 players in the world are affected by a similar amount to those outside the top 50. The below bar chart shows how players performed against their expected performance after layoffs of varying lengths. Given how uncommon breaks of this length are, we can’t draw too many conclusions on who we might expect to perform well in the early weeks back. However, there are a few players who over the past five years have had multiple 10+ week gaps and performed better than expected on their return. Ryan Moore (+0.9 strokes per round) and Phil Mickelson (+0.6) top that list. The below table shows the players who have performed the best after long layoffs. Intuitively we might think that after an extended period without playing on tour that touch on the greens might be a little off, and putting would be the area to suffer. In reality, it appears to be the opposite. Taking a player’s performance in their ‘return’ event compared with their season average that year, putting is actually the only area that remains quite consistent, with the other areas all dropping by a similar amount.

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