Mickelson ready for first start with new caddie

The PGA TOUR travels to Memphis this week for the first World Golf Championships since the season restart, the World Golf Championships-FedEx St. Jude Invitational at TPC Southwind. The course will play as a par 70, measuring 7,283 yards, and the putting will take place on Bermuda greens. Set your DraftKings lineups here: PGA TOUR $1.75M Southwind Special [$500K to 1st] STRATEGY TPC Southwind had played host to the St. Jude Classic for three decades before it was converted into a WGC event last season. The defending champion, Brooks Koepka ($9,200), will be joined by most of the top 50 ranked golfers in the world as well as the two-time winner of the tournament’s previous iteration, Daniel Berger ($9,600), who won in back-to-back years when it was a non-WGC event. Both Berger and Koepka are fantastic ball-strikers, and that’s what we should be looking for this week. Both Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green and Off-the-Tee will be very important, with Off-the-Tee shouldering more weight than previous weeks. With only two par 5s on the card, this par 70 holds a lot of distance in long par 4s with six stepping off more than 450 yards. The past two winners at TPC Southwind, Dustin Johnson ($9,300) and Brooks Koepka, have finished inside the top 11 in driving distance at the end of the season. Last week, the 3M Open recorded one of the lowest percentages of successful lineups having all six golfers make the cut, coming in at less than 2%. All golfers who were above $10,000 last week didn’t play on the weekend except for Tony Finau ($9,100). There is no cut in WGC events, which means our strategy changes quite a bit from previous weeks. With most of the top 50 ranked golfers in attendance, there’s going to be talent and recognizable names in every salary range. Lineup construction can either be balanced by choosing golfers with an average salary above $8,300, or it can feature a couple of elite golfers in the $10,000 range mixed in with a couple in the $6,000 range. There isn’t going to be a strong preference over the other this week. The majority of lineups will use all their allotted salary to get the most “value” out of their team, and with most of the top golfers playing this week, it won’t be hard to construct a lineup of familiar names. While this is a viable strategy, it may not be the best this week. With the field size, a no-cut event and talent across the board, our approach should weigh heavily on “leaving salary on the table” to avoid duplicating lineups with other teams. Not using your entire salary cap is another way to differentiate your lineups other than rostering golfers who have a smaller projected ownership percentage. GOLFERS TO CONSIDER Bryson DeChambeau ($11,000) The ownership may be down on DeChambeau since coming back from the shutdown. His irons were bad at Muirfield Village, losing 6.2 strokes. People have varying opinions on DeChambeau, which shouldn’t get in the way of rostering one of the hottest golfers on the planet over the last two months. He leads the PGA TOUR in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee, and although the irons have been a little off recently, the putter has been one of his best assets, gaining an average of three strokes on the green over his last five tournaments. Webb Simpson ($9,900) We’ve seen a couple of blemishes from Webb since returning with two missed cuts, the most recent coming at The Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide, in which he lost 5.3 strokes with his irons. Missed cuts and faulty irons are uncharacteristic of Webb, who is routinely one of the best iron players on the PGA TOUR. We should chalk up the poor play as just a couple of bad days at the office, as he posted a win at the RBC Heritage and finished eighth at the Rocket Mortgage Classic. Webb gained an average of 5.1 strokes with the Approach in both Detroit and Hilton Head and returns to Memphis, where he finished second to Brooks Koepka ($9,200) last year. Webb has also been one of the best Bermuda putters on the PGA TOUR, ranking first over the last 50 rounds. Xander Schauffele ($9,800) Schauffele has been hitting his irons exceptionally well, ranking 12th in Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green in both tournaments at Muirfield Village. He’s been wildly inconsistent with his putter, gaining 5.8 strokes at the Workday Charity Open but losing five strokes the following week at the Memorial. Schauffele has a propensity to play fabulous at no-cut events, winning the Tournament of Champions, the TOUR Championship and the WGC-HSBC Champions in his short career. He is coming into this week with some elite ball-striking, and we should be OK with rostering him even at higher ownership we’ve been accustomed to seeing over the past few weeks. Matt Kuchar ($7,600) With a no-cut event and most of the top-ranked golfers in attendance, we have to get a little creative. Kuchar has flown under the radar, and with Paul Casey ($7,800) and Joaquin Niemann ($7,400) looking like they’re going to be the popular plays in this range, Kuchar’s low ownership becomes much more enticing. He’s made his last three cuts since returning and hasn’t gained too much with his ball-striking but has been very impressive on the greens, ranking sixth over the previous two months. Putting is hugely variant and can switch daily, so rostering Kuchar is a risk with his below-average ball-striking. Still, he tends to play a lot better on challenging tracks and historically putts well on Bermuda greens. Over his last 50 rounds under difficult tournaments in scoring relative to par, Kuchar ranks seventh in par-4 efficiency, third in birdies or better gained and second in par-4 scoring on holes 450-500 yards. The mid-to-high $7,000 range shouldn’t have too much collective ownership, which makes it a spot to find value. Other than Kuchar, Sungjae Im ($7,500) is another player who hasn’t had his best stuff recently but has shown he can win on a difficult course. With no cut, he’ll have all four days to figure it out if it’s not there early. I am a promoter at DraftKings and am also an avid fan and user (my username is reidtfowler) and may sometimes play on my personal account in the games that I offer advice on. Although I have expressed my personal view on the games and strategies above, they do not necessarily reflect the view(s) of DraftKings and I may also deploy different players and strategies than what I recommend above. I am not an employee of DraftKings and do not have access to any non-public information.

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Forget Disneyland. What does the Super Bowl MVP know, anyway? When Chesson Hadley was asked how he was going to celebrate after winning the Albertsons Boise Open in 2017 to lock up his PGA TOUR card, he knew exactly what to say. “We’re going to wine country,” Hadley told the interviewer from the Golf Channel, reiterating a promise he had made to his wife Amanda. Then he even named the vineyards he wanted to visit – Alpha Omega, Frank Family and Far Niente. Robin Baggett, an avid golfer who owns Alpha Omega with his wife Michelle, was watching on TV, and it wasn’t long before their phones started blowing up with text messages from people who had seen the shout out. And Michelle – “I’m a planner,” she says – leapt into action. She reached out to friends at the other two vineyards and then contacted Hadley on social media. Later, she sent him and Amanda a lengthy email with restaurant and hotel recommendations and set up visits to wineries when they came to Napa a week later. “They didn’t know us from Adam,” Amanda says. “… She’s like the most hospitable person I’ve ever met in my life. She basically planned our whole trip.” The two couples got together that week, and a fast friendship was formed. The Hadleys have spent time at the Baggett’s homes in Pebble Beach and Lake Tahoe, and they are staying with them this week in the Napa Valley while Hadley plays in the Fortinet Championship. “They’re awesome people,” Hadley says. “They have become great friends of ours.” “A great relationship formed,” Michelle Baggett agrees. “I mean, we both have the same faith and the same values, and we both are very philanthropic with children’s causes.” And when Hadley won the weekly Birdies Fore Love competition at the PGA TOUR’s season-opener at Silverado Resort last year, he suddenly had $50,000 to donate to charity thanks to RSM. The competition lasts throughout the fall and the overall winner receives $300,000 to give to the charity of his choice. “That’s just one thing that’s so cool about the PGA TOUR and some of our partners and sponsors is that there’s stuff like this that we can do to give back and impact people,” Hadley says. “It’s really cool that have the ability to do that.” He and Amanda decided to divide the donation. They knew they wanted to leave some of the money in the Napa Valley, a place they both love, the place where the tournament is played and a place that has suffered mightily in recent years from the raging wildfires in California. So again, they turned to Michelle, who is the executive director of the Alpha Omega Foundation. They told her they wanted to make a $20,000 donation to the winery’s charitable arm, but then they wanted the money to go to help young people. Michelle suggested the Hadleys look at the Napa Valley Community Foundation’s website and one program stood out – the Fruit of the Vine Scholarship. The Fruit of the Vine Scholarship program was established by a local grape grower who was able to graduate from UC Berkley back when tuition was just $100. With that cost having increased exponentially, though, he saw a need to help – particularly those students who might be the first in the family to attend college and those whose parents work in viticulture. Nearly 100 students have received scholarships, which generally run $4,000 each year, since the program was established in 2014. Students have attended or are attending 19 different institutions, all but one of which is a California land grant university or college. The Hadleys are among an estimated two dozen families who have made donations to the Fruit of the Vine Scholarship program. Terence Mulligan, the executive director of the Napa Valley Community Foundation, says their support “means a ton. “Round numbers, it means one kid’s going to be taken care of all the way through college,” he says. “A cool 20,000 is a really generous gift, and it means opportunity basically for these hard-working young people who are really the future of our community.” Michelle Baggett agrees, saying the Hadleys “hit the ball out of the park,” when they decided to donate to Fruit of the Vine. The agriculture, hospitality and wine industries need bright young minds to learn and return to the area for it to continue to prosper. “What a blessing for these kids to get a four-year paid scholarship for an undergraduate degree to hopefully come back to Napa and to continue the good work that we do out here,” she says. Chesson and Amanda used the rest of the money that Hadley won in the Birdies For Love competition to make a $20,000 donation to the Shriners Children’s Hospital and another of $10,00 to help fund a golf scholarship at Georgia Tech where he went to college. Those donations also had special meaning to the couple. “My cousin is an orthotist and prosthetist there at Shriners in Greenville, South Carolina,” Amanda says. “So, she molds the fake legs and the orthotics and stuff. They were shocked, absolutely shocked, and they sent us some neat little videos of kids whose lives had been changed from their visits to Shiners.” And Hadley says one of the reasons he’s playing the PGA TOUR right now is Georgia Tech coach Bruce Hepler. “He does a great job of raising professional golfers, but also turning us into a functioning human being that’s going to contribute to society,” he says. That’s exactly what Hadley did when he and his wife decided to leave some of the Birdies Fore Love money that he won in the Napa Valley which has been their “spot,” Amanda says, since the couple honeymooned there more than a decade ago. Not surprisingly, long before they boarded the plane for California on Monday, the Hadleys – no longer the 23-year-olds newlyweds who “knew nothing “– had been planning their activities in the wine country when Chesson isn’t playing in the TOUR’s kickoff event at Silverado. They have their special places like Model Bakery where they get the brick oven-baked English muffins with jam that are among Oprah Winfrey’s favorite things. They’ll go to Bouchon for the macaroons and Rutherford Grill for the kale salad with peanut dressing. “Obviously the wine’s incredible, but the food is every bit as good as the wine out there,” Hadley says. One of the highlights, though, was Tuesday’s check presentation at Alpha Omega, where Chesson and Amanda got to meet two Fruit of the Vine scholarship recipients. Seeing first-hand how their donation made quite an impact on Chesson and Amanda. “We are Christians, and we have a strong faith background, and this is what we are called to do,” Hadley says. “We believe that everything that we have, and we’ve been given is not really ours. Like God has given us these things — our talents, our house and obviously our income, and we’re just stewards of it. “And so, this is just what we’re supposed to do. It’s really cool that I was able to win this and be able to give back and keep some of the money in the Napa community. And you know, I would certainly love to be able to do that again this year.”

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Pine Valley and Augusta National. Two of the most prestigious clubs in the world, but with one big difference. Augusta National hosts one of the world’s biggest golf tournaments. Millions of people see the course every year. Many can recite its holes from memory. Pine Valley, on the other hand, is shrouded in secrecy. There is only one day per year that the public can get on the course. That’s for the final round of the Crump Cup, an annual amateur invitational. Related: Free historical content available on PGA TOUR LIVE | Golf world presents revised 2020 calendar Most golf fans have only seen photos of the famous course. Few can name the holes of George Crump’s masterpiece. Now, you can watch two World Golf Hall of Famers play Pine Valley. The 1962 Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf between Byron Nelson and Gene Littler is now available free on PGA TOUR LIVE. On a week when many of us would be glued to our couches to watch the Masters, it’s worth watching another classic course that offers a contrasting style. Where Augusta National is known for its immaculate manicuring, Pine Valley offers a rugged test. The aerials that kick off the broadcast alone make this must-see TV. They show Pine Valley’s large, unkempt wastelands of sand and thick forest that offer stiff penalties for players who stray from the wide fairways and large, severely-sloped greens. The fact that the match also includes two of the game’s sweetest swingers is a bonus. Littler won the 1961 U.S. Open, while Nelson had 52 wins, including his historic 1945 season, and five majors. Here’s a few other selections from PGA TOUR LIVE that are appropriate for Masters week: • Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf: Gene Sarazen vs. Henry Cotton: This is a rare opportunity to watch the man who hit the greatest shot in Masters history. Sarazen won the second Masters in 1935 with an albatross on the 15th hole in the final round. • Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf: Greg Norman vs. Nick Faldo: This match came two years before that fateful Sunday at Augusta National, when Norman lost a six-stroke lead to Faldo in the final round of the 1996 Masters. It offers an opportunity to watch two of the best players from the 1990s. • Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf: Jimmy Demaret vs. Sam Snead: This is an opportunity to watch two three-time Masters champions compete. • PGA TOUR Profiles: Sergio Garcia: Born to Be A Champion: Sergio Garcia had to wait a long time to win his first major at the 2017 Masters. This documentary details that journey. • PGA TOUR Profiles: Home Again: Bubba Watson is a two-time Masters champion. You can learn more about his journey from the Florida panhandle to major champion in this documentary. • PGA TOUR Profiles: Great Scott: A documentary on Adam Scott becoming the first Australian to win at Augusta National.

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