New name, focus at The Greenbrier

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — When Matt Jones won his first PGA TOUR title seven years ago, he needed a 45-foot birdie putt just to get into a playoff and then a 40-yard chip-in to take the victory. This win was far less dramatic, yet just as meaningful. RELATED: Final Leaderboard | Winner’s Bag: Matt Jones, The Honda Classic Jones won The Honda Classic by five shots Sunday, a final round of 2-under 68 good enough to finish the week at 12-under 268 at PGA National. The margin matched the largest in tournament history, tying the mark set by Jack Nicklaus in 1977 and matched by Camilo Villegas in 2010. “Pretty emotional,” Jones said moments after sealing the win, his voice cracking a bit. “Seven years.” The win moves him to 11th in the FedExCup and closer to making his first TOUR Championship. It also will get him into the Masters Tournament in April and THE PLAYERS Championship and Sentry Tournament of Champions in 2022. The 40-year-old Australian earned $1.26 million and, this time, he’ll have more than a day to prepare for the trip to Augusta National. His win at the Houston Open in 2014 — and his Masters invite — came just one day before he had to go to Augusta, so it was a mad scramble to get family and friends together to share in the experience. Jones started the week with a course-record-tying round of 9-under 61. He was three shots behind Aaron Wise after 36 holes after a second-round 70, and his round of 69 on Saturday was good enough to put him up by three entering Sunday. Brandon Hagy (66) finished 7 under and alone in second on his 30th birthday, his chance at winning doomed by a third-round 76. Chase Seiffert (64), Brendan Steele (65), C.T. Pan (70), Denny McCarthy (67) and Russell Henley (68) tied for third at 6 under. “There’s a lot of tough holes out there and there’s big stakes for sure, but I’ve been working on some good stuff and it’s nice to see some of that pan out,” Hagy said. The only stretch where Jones’ grip on the lead seemed in peril was midway through the round; Wise, who once led by six shots during the third round, had four birdies in a six-hole stretch on the front and got within one of the lead. Wise’s chances ended at the par-4 10th. He hit his second into a bunker, then four-putted from 25 feet for triple-bogey. Jones’ lead went to four, and he avoided trouble the rest of the way, while Wise finished with a 73 and tied for 13th at 4 under. J.B. Holmes was in the final group with Jones, three shots back to start the day, and his chances were gone very quickly. Holmes knocked his shot from a greenside bunker off the green and made bogey on the opening hole, then sent his tee shot way right on the par-4 second and needed about 10 minutes to find the ball — it was nestled among palm fronds — and decide how to proceed. He went on to make double bogey there, and when Jones birdied the par-5 third Holmes’ deficit had gone from three to eight shots in about 45 minutes. At that point, only a few had a realistic chance at catching Jones. Before long, the outcome was obvious. “You can’t get a tougher golf course to win on than this one, in these conditions,” Jones said. “To be able to do that on this golf course is amazing and something I can build on for the future, hopefully.”

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Jack Nicklaus is set to oversee a renovation next summer of Muirfield Village, home of the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide. All 18 greens will be re-done and length will be added to parts of the course. The scope of work could be increased as the 79-year-old World Golf Hall of Famer creates his final game plan. It is the first significant change at Muirfield Village since 2011 when the par-3 16th was re-designed ahead of the 2013 Presidents Cup. Related: Creating a Masterpiece: How Jack Nicklaus brought Muirfield Village to life Next year’s renovation will commence after the 2020 Memorial Tournament, which takes place the week of June 1-7. “Jack is going to touch up the golf course. He is going to redo all the greens starting July of 2020 and we will be ready to go for the 2021 Memorial Tournament,� said Nicholas LaRocca, the general manager who has been at Muirfield Village since 1997. “This fall we are adding three new back tees on the par-3 eighth, the par-5 11th and the par-5 15th which will add distance to the course ahead of the 2020 event. Jack might also do some light tweaks in other areas of the golf course, but he has not put pencil to paper on any of that yet … He will do so this fall.� LaRocca said there is still plenty of planning and decision-making to be done but expected the work to be completed quickly in 2020 before the Ohio winter hits full gear. “Right now we are developing a plan for all 18 greens that will be rebuilt. We are trying to work out what we will put on the bottom, if we are going to put any new systems underground and we haven’t determined which turf we will select to seed,� he added. “We will seed pretty quick July 2020 to be done by Aug. 15, the proper time to get things done in this region to have proper grow in.� Nicklaus opened his signature course in 1974 and has been hosting the Memorial Tournament since 1976 as one of the premier stops on the PGA TOUR. In 2014, the tournament was elevated in status (as was the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard), with the winner receiving a three-year exemption. The list of winners is an esteemed one where along with Nicklaus (twice) the likes of Tom Watson (twice), Hale Irwin (twice), Greg Norman (twice) and Tiger Woods (five times) are amongst those to have hoisted the Muirfield crystal. LaRocca says the membership is excited by the news, particularly as it could be the last set of changes Nicklaus himself will be extensively involved in on the property. The 18-time major winner will turn 80 in January. “The members here are awesome, they embrace this,� LaRocca said. “They love that Jack is here and doing it and they are all excited about the changes. It’s all very exciting for us. “Muirfield Village is like the Mona Lisa. It’s a masterpiece. It’s Jack masterpiece in the game of golf. How can you possibly improve on a masterpiece? And yet Jack and Barbara Nicklaus continually find ways of doing that. Every year there is something new, not because anything was wrong; just to make it better. Their commitment to excellence is amazing.� Earlier this year, Nicklaus talked about his philosophy on design at Muirfield Village. “Through the years I have made a lot of changes, some for the sake of the members, some to improve the spectator experience, and some simply to make the golf course a better and stronger test. Like any designer, I want the course to show well, and be able to hold up against the game’s best players, so I have tried to find ways to preserve shot values,� Nicklaus said. “I think all golf courses are in continual evolution. I do,� he added. “Muirfield Village has been that way. You see something that can make it better and you go do it. But Muirfield Village is intrinsically the same golf course. You could go through the golf course and compare what it was when it opened and where it is today and you’d think the difference was night and day. But done over time you don’t notice it.�

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Nate Lashley knew his life was about to change. He just didn’t know how much. “It was a little bit of a blur for me,” he said Tuesday. It played out in high-def for everybody watching at home, the unheralded Lashley’s surprising six-shot win at the inaugural Rocket Mortgage Classic at Detroit Golf Club last year. He was the last man in the field, ranked 353rd in the world, and no one else stood a chance. “Probably the job security,” he said of the biggest way his life changed, “and then getting into any tournament I can play, make any schedule pretty much that you want outside of a couple majors and some World Golf Championships.” Seven weeks and eight events remain before the start of the FedExCup Playoffs, and some, like Rickie Fowler (108th in the current standings) and Jason Day (96) come to Detroit needing to make a move. In just over two months the TOUR Championship will crown the FedExCup champion over Labor Day weekend. Should they be worried? Nah. Lashley is Exhibit A for how fast everything can change in golf, but then so are six of the seven players who have been No. 1 in the FedExCup this season and will play in Detroit. They hail from Chile (Joaquin Niemann, the first No. 1 of this season, for one week) and Colombia (Sebastián Muñoz, the second, for three weeks); South Korea (Sungjae Im, two weeks) and America (Lanto Griffin, Brendon Todd and current leader Webb Simpson). Start with Simpson, who has five top-10 finishes – including two wins – in seven starts this season. Last season he posted three runner-up finishes but no victories on the way to finishing 16th in the FedExCup. This season he’s turning those close calls into wins. “Justin Rose is kind of my inspiration,” he said after winning the RBC Heritage two weeks ago. “He seems like he’s always there every week. He works hard at his craft, and I just thought, you know, I have good weeks. I make it to the TOUR Championship. I’ve won a few times. But I really have a desire to be in that top 10 or 15 guys in the world ranking all the time and have chances to win, not just twice a year, but as many times as I can.” Most of the others who held down FedExCup No. 1 before him this season have their own stories of transformation. In many cases, they are rags-to-riches stories. “I’m trying to convince my family and my agent to let me buy something nice,” Joaquin Niemann said after winning A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier last September. He had been languishing outside the top 150 as of May 2019, but now he was FedExCup No. 1. Muñoz is the only player who has been in the top 10 for all 23 weeks of the season. He took the top spot after winning the Sanderson Farms Championship. “I just kept smiling to myself, reminding me, Oh, yeah, (the Sentry Tournament of Champions in) Hawaii is around the corner,” Muñoz said. “Oh, yeah, Masters. Like, Oh, yeah, I got job security for a couple years. It’s just like smile, then smile again.” Griffin, who assumed FedExCup pole position after he won the Houston Open, also sounded like a kid at Christmas when asked later about how his life had changed. Of course, that was partly because it was Christmas – or at least the Sentry Tournament of Champions. “So we got Mom the car around Christmas,” he said at Kapalua. “I wanted it to be a surprise, so she came down to my sister’s house, we did Christmas there, and we had it out in the back of her house with a bow on it, so she was — she loved it. She’s texted me four or five times since then, ‘I still can’t believe I have a Subaru.’ So that’s cool.” Todd was the next No. 1, and maybe the least likely. Currently down to FedExCup No. 6, he’s still up 201 spots compared to his position through week 23 last season. And he was 2,043rd in the Official World Golf Ranking in 2018 before embarking on a total reclamation of his game. On Sunday, Todd contended for his third TOUR victory this season (Bermuda Championship, Mayakoba Golf Classic) at the Travelers Championship before a freak bad round (75, T11). The Honda Classic winner Im was FedExCup No. 1 for the three month break necessitated by the pandemic. “There is a little bit of added pressure being the FedExCup leader and coming back to competitive play,” he said at the Charles Schwab Challenge, where he finished T10. He’s dropped off since then, with a MC at the RBC Heritage and T58 at the Travelers, but would anyone be surprised if he turned it around at the Rocket Mortgage? Jordan Spieth (59th in 2013) was the lowest ranked player with seven weeks left in the regular season to finish in the FedExCup top 10 (he finished eighth). As he knows all too well, as do Todd, Lashley and many others at the Rocket Mortgage, in golf it can all change in a flash.

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