Morikawa wins PGA Championship in stunning fashion

PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf presented by SERVPRO In any other fantasy game, it would be harsh to judge investment profiles that resemble the ownership dispersion of the top 10 below, but in PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf presented by SERVPRO, it’s evident that many gamers don’t care about the influence of fractional fantasy scoring and that The Open Championship often requires more luck to succeed than usually minimally acceptable. I get that there are two schools of thought when ShotLink has the week off, but in Segment 4, we still have three no-cut tournaments and the PGA Championship among the remaining eight stops, all of which ShotLink will be there to document. More power to the gamers who navigate the land mines of Royal Birkdale, but if you don’t nab the winner or a couple of strong also-rans, here’s to at least hoping that you’ve blended in a couple of complements who you won’t miss when points are going to your opposition later. The slew of notables not grouped below includes Marc Leishman (16th, 8.1 percent), Justin Thomas (19th, 7.0 percent), Zach Johnson (21st, 4.7 percent), Jason Day (23rd, 4.2 percent) and Patrick Reed (30th, 2.9 percent). Bryson DeChambeau, who was the last man to qualify when he won the John Deere Classic, is 40th at 1.3 percent. NOTE: Rob’s Rating refers to where our Fantasy Insider slotted a golfer in his Power Rankings and other preview material. Golfers in the Power Rankings and outside the top 10 in most owned. PGA TOUR Fantasy One & Done presented by SERVPRO – The Open Championship Love seeing Sergio Garcia atop the ownership percentages for The Open Championship. That’s where he belongs. You can count the number of reliable talents at THE PLAYERS Championship on one hand and the number of reliable talents at the season’s third major on the other. Garcia would be on both. Bravo. There are other sensible and timely choices who populate the top 10 – Rose, Fowler, Scott, Casey – but the devotion to Southport, England’s own Tommy Fleetwood is a recipe of regret. Consider your interest if he wasn’t a local. That he opened with 6-over 76 is beside the point in principle. The 26-year-old simply isn’t One & Done-worthy. He made sense only as the tandem in two-man games. Notables outside the top 10 include Dustin Johnson (12th, 2.8 percent), defending champion Henrik Stenson (13th, 2.7 percent), Phil Mickelson (14th, 2.4 percent), Brooks Koepka (15th, 1.5 percent), Matt Kuchar (16th, 1.5 percent), Marc Leishman (17th, 1.4 percent) and Jason Day (20th, 1.2 percent). PGA TOUR Fantasy One & Done presented by SERVPRO – Barbasol Championship One of the reasons I was drawn to fantasy golf in the 1990s was that I needed to learn about the rank and file, at least if I was going to be good at it. The correlation I drew then still applies today; that is, while most fans couldn’t identify an unknown in a crowd of two, gamers in team sports are more likely to be aware of and possess working knowledge of reserve infielders in MLB, backup running backs in the NFL and defense specialists in the NBA. So, why not the fellas on the fringe of the PGA TOUR? Additional events like the Barbasol Championship in Alabama serve up the opportunity for us to learn all about them, well, at least those who committed. Another benefit to its timing is that it’s contested concurrently with The Open Championship because it’s the only game in town for the second half of the day due to the intercontinental time difference. All of that said, it’s still smart to enjoy that educational process separately. How we choose to invest in our various formats should align with what got you here. So, it comes as zero surprise that Jim Furyk headlines the crop at Grand National. With Chad Campbell and Daniel Summerhays, the household threesome commands over 40 percent of the picks. Love the attention given to Jonathan Byrd, who slots seventh. Easy guy for whom to root and has made 228 cuts in a career that started in 2002, but he’s in his second season without fully exempt status on TOUR. His Past Champion status would have granted entry into the Barbasol, anyway, but a T5 at the John Deere Classic lifted both his prospects of reaching the FedExCup Playoffs (he’s 165th in points) and our interest this week. Notables outside the top 10 include Boo Weekley (12th, 1.5 percent), Matt Jones (13th, 0.9 percent) and David Hearn (16th, 0.7 percent).

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The FedEx Cup ends with the Tour Championship, a staggered scoring start and one winner. The change has received a lot of attention. Now, we’ll find out if it was all worth it.

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At 7,643 yards, Torrey Pines was the longest course in major championship history when it hosted the 2008 U.S. Open. So what was Phil Mickelson’s plan of attack for the first major at his hometown muni? Eschew the driver. With firm summer conditions and thick rough lining the fairways, Mickelson decided to start the week without a driver in his bag. “I don’t really want to hit it past 300 yards on most of the par-4s because it starts running into the rough,” Mickelson said back then. “And I felt like with the fairways being firm like they were today, all I needed was 3-wood on the holes.” Mickelson may employ a similar strategy this week. He expects to hit a 2-wood on about half his tee shots this week. But Mickelson, who’s made no secret of his pursuit of extra clubhead speed in recent years, also will have his driver in the bag. “There’s a lot of holes where it kind of turns or tightens,” he said in his pre-tournament press conference. “That 2-wood, I’ll call it, seems to fit the right yardage on a lot of those holes for me.” Mickelson’s 5-degree driver, the Callaway Epic Speed Triple Diamond driver with a Fujikura Ventus Black shaft, also will be in the bag. It’s the same club that helped him hit big bombs in his win at last month’s PGA Championship. Most impressive was the 366-yard tee shot he hit to set up a crucial birdie on the tournament’s 69th hole. In 2008, Mickelson opted for a Callaway FT Tour 3-wood — a 13-degree version bent to 11.5 degrees and equipped with a 43-inch Mitsubishi Diamana White Board shaft – in lieu of his driver. However, over the opening two days of the tournament, Mickelson struggled off the tee. On the brutally challenging and lengthy California course, Mickelson found himself not just in the rough for most of Thursday and Friday, but short too. “When I made some terrible swings and hit in the rough it kind of defeats the game plan because now I’m short and crooked,” he said. Following rounds of 71 and 75, Mickelson abandoned the plan and put his FT-5 Tour driver (bent at 8.5 degrees) back in the bag for the weekend. Being 4 over par forced his hand. He needed to make birdies if he was going to contend at Torrey Pines. As he explained to media that week, being 4 over par forced his hand, and the need to have more short irons into holes to help him score was what brought the driver back into play. “Why did I put the driver in the bag today? … I needed to try to make some birdies and get a few shorter irons in,” he said. He was undone by a quadruple-bogey 9 on the par-5 13th, though, and shot 76 in the third round to end his chances. He closed with his low round of the week, a 3-under 68, to salvage a T18 finish. Since then, Lefty has won multiple majors and also experimented with going without driver again at Merion at the 2013 U.S. Open. Mickelson won the 2006 Masters with two drivers in the bag, an experiment he repeated at the 2019 Memorial Tournament presented by Workday. Two years ago at Muirfield Village, he reflected on his decision to start the 2008 U.S. Open without a driver. At the Memorial Tournament in 2019, Mickelson carried multiple drivers, where he also reflected on his 2018 driverless experiment at Torrey Pines. “That was a mistake, obviously. What a great idea that was,” he said. “I’m going to play with a 3-wood. And then I missed the fairways with the 3-wood. That was ridiculous. That didn’t work out.” Mickelson will have a different setup this week and hope for a different result. It would be a storybook victory for the World Golf Hall of Famer.

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