Hit and hope: OWGR impact looms large for LIV Golf players at the Masters

Tiger Woods revisits the hometown venue that has proven the PGA TOUR’s toughest for him to crack – 10 visits without victory – for the second start in 2018. The strongest field yet in 2018 awaits, though, including five international standouts making their first U.S. starts of the year. Dustin Johnson is back to defend the title that launched him into last year’s sizzling spring, winning three consecutive starts leading into the Masters. Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas and Rory McIlroy give the lineup four of the top eight men in the Official World Golf Ranking. GENESIS OPEN: See the star-studded field FIELD NOTES: Thomas Pieters, who shared runner-up honors last year as a sponsor exemption, and 2017 Race to Dubai champion Tommy Fleetwood headline a dribble of European-based pros making their way across for the West Coast finale. … The list also includes China’s Haotong Li, fresh off a win in Dubai, along with Martin Kaymer. … All told, the Riviera roster features 14 of the top 25 in the OWGR. … Former Masters champ Charl Schwartzel also makes his first start on U.S. soil since last year’s FedExCup Playoffs. FEDEXCUP: Winner receives 500 points. STORYLINES: Woods ends an 11-year absence from Riviera, going back to a 2006 visit cut short by the flu bug. His best finish there was second in 1999, two shots behind Ernie Els. He also lost a 1998 playoff to Billy Mayfair, though that edition was held at Valencia CC. … Johnson hasn’t finished lower than fourth in his past four visits to Riviera. Prior to last year’s win, he lost a 2015 playoff and was runner-up again in 2014. … Bubba Watson, winner in 2014 and ’16, will seek a third straight Riviera win in even-numbered years. … Cameron Champ, the amateur who stood two shots off the lead after 36 holes of last summer’s U.S. Open, will play on the tournament’s Charlie Sifford Exemption to promote diversity. Champ turned pro after tying for 32nd at Erin Hills. … The top 50 in the OWGR after the Genesis Open can make plans for next month’s World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship. COURSE: Riviera Country Club, 7,322 yards, par 71. A star setting from its 1927 opening when Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin graced its fairways, Riviera hosted its first Los Angeles Open in 1929 and was site of the U.S. Open’s first West Coast venture (1948). Designer George Thomas studied 15 possible layouts before settling on one that now features some of the TOUR’s most iconic holes. The par-3 sixth is famed for its bunker in the middle of the green, and No. 10 is widely considered the best drivable par-4 in golf. Old-timers will remember Riviera as “Hogan’s Alley,â€� as Ben Hogan notched three wins in an 18-month span – the 1948 U.S. Open and two L.A. Opens that preceded it. Last summer, Doc Redman won the first U.S. Amateur held at Riviera. 72-HOLE RECORD: 264, Lanny Wadkins (1985). 18-HOLE RECORD: 61, George Archer (3rd round, 1983 at Rancho Park GC), Ted Tryba (3rd round, 1999 at Riviera CC). LAST YEAR: Johnson turned a marathon Sunday into a coronation, cruising to a five-stroke triumph that lifted him to No. 1 in the world rankings. Though three days of rain and fog forced Johnson and others to play 36 holes on the final day, he made the most of it with a third-round 64 that opened a five-shot margin on his nearest pursuers. The lead grew to nine at one point in the final round before he eased off the pedal. The win was Johnson’s fourth in a nine-month span beginning with the U.S. Open, vaulting him past Jason Day atop the rankings. He also joined Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as the only men to notch a win in each of their first 10 PGA TOUR seasons. Pieters, who closed with a 63, and Scott Brown (67) shared second. HOW TO FOLLOW TELEVISION: Thursday, 2-6 p.m. ET (Golf Channel). Friday, 3-7 p.m. Saturday, 2-3:30 p.m. (GC), 4-7 p.m. (CBS). Sunday, 1-2:45 p.m. (GC), 3-6:30 p.m. (CBS). PGA TOUR LIVE: Thursday-Friday, 9:30 a.m.-3 p.m. ET (featured groups), 3-6 p.m. (featured holes). Saturday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. (featured holes). Sunday, 10 a.m.-6:30 p.m. (featured holes). A free preview of Featured Group coverage will be streaming live on Twitter on Thursday and Friday during the first hour of coverage. Click here to watch PGA TOUR LIVE on Twitter. PGA TOUR RADIO: Thursday, noon-6 p.m. Friday, 1-7 p.m. Saturday, 2-7 p.m. Sunday, 1-6:30 p.m. (PGA TOUR Radio on SiriusXM and PGATOUR.com).

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Here are nine tidbits from the first round of the Quicken Loans National that gamers can use tomorrow, this weekend or down the road. TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm hosts for the second time and measures 7,107 yards (Par-70).   KNOW THY ENEMY These were the top-10 selected golfers in the PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf game presented by SERVPRO. Perfect scoring conditions greeted the morning wave as Andrew Landry tied the professional course record with his bogey-free 63. The afternoon side wasn’t bad either, as another 63 by J.J. Spaun gave us co-leaders after the opening round. The weather will just be hotter tomorrow and the winds relatively similar, so there won’t be a tactical advantage on tee times. The afternoon folks will need to be properly hydrated! PEOPLE’S CHOICE J.B. Holmes isn’t a name we’ve seen at the top of the list or even on the list in recent memory. Gamers are riding the wave of hot, albeit deliberate, play from the big hitter from Kentucky as he’s hit the podium in his last two events. He found 10 fairways and 10 GIR but could only get up-and-down on four of the eight he missed. The ones he did hit left him 117th out of 120 players in proximity. His best round in five here is 71 so gamers will have a decision whether or not to use the bench in Round 2. This was only his second round in the black in his last 17 rounds. RECORD DUO Landry and Spaun both used seven birdies without squaring a bogey to set the first round pace. Since his victory at the Valero Texas Open, another difficult track, Landry has played just two of six weekends and his best payday is T65. He MC last week 81-67 but that was a distant memory today. Spaun popped up at Trinity Forest where he opened with 64 and closed with 63 to share third. Gamers hoping to ride that wave were smacked with MC, MC and T47 in his last three outings. Spaun led the field in Round 1 in SG: off the tee as he split 12-of-14 fairways (T1). He fired 73-78 here last year to MC. HOST WITH THE MOST Tiger Woods finally gets a chance to play at his own tournament, and he looked to create some momentum with a new putter in the bag. Gamers remember that he blistered Memorial tee-to-green but made absolutely nothing. The putter didn’t solve all of his problems as he lost over one shot on the greens but his tee-to-green game wasn’t on point either. The greatest part of Woods’ game is his ability to grind. He wiped out a double with a pair of birdies and added 15 pars to sign for 70 (E). An early start on fresh greens should kick-start the putter in Round 2.  HOOK ‘EM That sound you hear every Thursday is Beau Hossler. For the 10th event running his Round 1 scorecard is in red figures. For the third event in a row it has been 66 or better has his six birdies and one bogey added up to 65 (T5) today. Finishing the job is the next step as he’s only hit the top 10 in one of those three events, T2 last week at TPC River Highlands. He hasn’t MC in this stretch either so this isn’t smoke or mirrors. CIAO! Francesco Molinari made his way into the top 10, and rightfully so as gamers are paying attention. He enters the week in an excellent form as his last three worldwide paychecks have been for a win, second and T25. If the main requirement this week is navigating this track tee-to-green it shouldn’t be any surprise he opened with 67. BRAKES PUMPED While 71 (+1) didn’t knock Kyle Stanley out of contention, it surely wasn’t the start gamers were expecting from the defending champion. Driving wasn’t the issue as he found 12-of-14 fairways but his approach play saw him check in at No. 98. The good news is he’s third on TOUR in GIR so this goes down as an aberration for me and I’m expecting normal service to resume tomorrow.  WALK THE LINE Jimmy Walker has played great for almost three months, and that’s why his 74 in Round 1 was surprising. Marc Leishman only hit three fairways and shot 67, so scoring here can happen. Walker found just seven fairways but checked in at No. 111 in SG: putting and only saved par in three of seven chances missing GIR. He opened on No. 10 with an unplayable and a water ball for double-bogey seven so it could have been worse! He’ll need to make more than one birdie in Round 2. STUDY HALL The Round 1 scoring average was 69.992 (-0.008) as opposed to 71.203 in the inaugural year last year. The 18-hole lead last year was 65. No wind helps! There were eight bogey-free rounds all of last year as this course was the most difficult (non-major) on TOUR. There were five on Friday as red-hot Andrew Putnam (64), Seamus Power (66) and Joel Dahmen (66) joined Landry on Spaun in the clean card club.  C.T. Pan (67) broke his driver on No. 14, but still found a way to birdie that hole and the next two. His eight birdies for the round led the field. He gets to put in a new driver on Friday.

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HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – Stewart Cink has seen a lot, but at 47 he doesn’t always remember it, something he readily jokes about on Twitter. At the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town, he shot the fur off the course (a favorite Cink-ism) with twin 63s and then hung on over the weekend. His final-round 70, on a day when no one got closer than three strokes, got him to 19 under par and left him four clear of runners-up Emiliano Grillo (68) and Harold Varner III (66). What made this, his eighth win, stand out? “The fact that it happened at my age,” he said. But also, he added, the friends and family who were there to celebrate with him. Cink, who is the second two-time winner on TOUR this season after Bryson DeChambeau and moves from 26th to third in the FedExCup standings, celebrated the win with wife Lisa and their sons, Connor and Reagan (also Cink’s caddie), plus Connor’s fiancé and several friends. “Everything in between the shots,” Reagan said, when asked what he will remember about the win—his second with his dad this season. “Walking down the fairways, hanging out. We talk and we plan the shots and we’ve got a good system, but it’s just like the time we get to spend joking around walking down the fairway, it’s awesome. It’s the best. It really is.” What’s gotten into Stewart Cink? He talks about the importance of his team, and attributes his comeback season partly to his new trainer Cornel Driessen. With Driessen’s help, the veteran pro — Cink won the 1997 Travelers Championship the year Collin Morikawa was born — has actually gained distance despite being on the doorstep of PGA TOUR Champions eligibility. Cink was 144th in the FedExCup and 300th in the world after he missed the cut at the Wyndham Championship to end last season. He made a few equipment changes, became more efficient, and with Driessen gained so much strength and mobility he began to adopt a whole new style of play. “I was able to really kind of change my game into a little bit more of a power game,” he said. But nowhere was the change to Cink’s team more evident than with the guy carrying his bag as he won the season-opening Fortinet Open in Napa last fall — his first win in over 11 years. “He and I have always just been on the same wavelength,” Cink said of his son. “We’re kind of from the same DNA, and I mean literally like we are the same person. We think about things – we think about jokes, we notice the same funny stuff, we just pick up on the same kind of little details about things in our immediate surroundings.” Despite all that their arrangement was supposed to be temporary; Reagan, 23, is a newly minted Georgia Tech graduate (industrial engineering) who has been working in the flight operations department for Delta Airlines. He’s a scratch handicap and has his own life to lead. “The traveling and living in a circus out here like I’ve done for my whole adult life is made tolerable by being a player,” Cink said at the Sanderson Farms Championship last fall, when he and Reagan agreed that it would take a top-five finish for them to keep going (Cink finished T12). “If you’re playing, you’re kind of the top level of the wedding cake out here.” Cink went back to his main caddie, Kip Henley, and opened with scores of 67-63 at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Las Vegas. “I was like, it doesn’t matter who caddies for me right now, I’m just killing it!” Cink said Sunday with a laugh. Then he shot 70-81 on the weekend. He reunited with Reagan at the Bermuda Championship, but not for obvious reasons. Cink said Bermuda was going to be hard to get to and gave Henley the week off — and then finished T4 with his son back on the bag. Stewart and Reagan now seemed like too good a team to break up. “Our flight out of Bermuda was on Monday afternoon at like 3 p.m. because there weren’t any flights at the time because of COVID, so we had a long time to sit around the hotel room,” said Cink, the second oldest Heritage winner (Hale Irwin, 48). “Lisa was there, Reagan was there, and that Monday in the morning while we were waiting for our flight, we had a big team pow wow.” Cink told Reagan he wanted him on the bag at the Masters. Then he reconsidered. “I said, ‘You know what, come to think of it, how would you just like to caddie for this season?’” Cink said. “He said, ‘I’m so glad you asked.’” Reagan was supposed to start work in two days but called his team. Stewart, though, went straight to the top, placing a call to Delta CEO Ed Bastian — a friend, as luck would have it. “I didn’t ask Ed to do anything,” Cink said. “I just said, ‘Ed, if you were me, what do you think you would do?’ And he’s got grown daughters and I’ve got sons, and he said, ‘Stewart, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.’ I don’t think Ed would mind me quoting him. He said, ‘We love Reagan. We think Reagan is going to work at Delta for 40 years. “We don’t think waiting one more year is going to hurt, so let him caddie.’” Reagan, who is engaged to be married July 31st, will caddie for his dad through the FedExCup Playoffs. “And then I’ll be back on the caddie market or maybe retire,” Stewart said with a laugh. Not that anyone would let him. The best comeback story of this season just keeps getting better.

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