Numbers that mattered: Houston Open

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The 16th of 24 contributing events for PGA TOUR Champions One & Done presented by SERVPRO is this week’s Senior Open Championship presented by Rolex. It begins at 2:00 a.m. ET on Thursday, which is 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday on the West Coast. Scroll for tournament notes, 22 notables and five wild cards from the field of 144 in Scotland. With The Open Championship in the books, we can focus on the last nine tournaments of 2017-18 as a singular frame. They present a sample size small enough for us to maintain thoughts about all of them in our heads at once – at least in theory – but let’s dissect it properly. Most of the usual suspects will be in our crosshairs for next week’s World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational and the following week’s PGA Championship. They will then reappear en masse for most of the four FedExCup Playoffs events. If you pencil in your favorites for each, you should have some morsels for this week’s RBC Canadian Open and the Wyndham Championship in three weeks. I’m holding my breath that Martin Laird commits to next week’s Barracuda Championship where golfers who qualify for the WGC cannot play because the Barracuda is contested concurrently. (Gary Woodland and Brendan Steele also would present strongly in Nevada, but both will be at Firestone.) The field of 156 at Glen Abbey includes cornerstones Dustin Johnson, Tony Finau, Charley Hoffman, Brandt Snedeker and Matt Kuchar. All reside inside the top eight of my Power Rankings. I wouldn’t talk you out of any assuming you’ve mapped out the remainder of the season accordingly. Only Snedeker remains available to me, but I’ve earmarked him as a possibility for the Wyndham. Brooks Koepka is back after a two-year hiatus since his close call as a debutant in 2015. He’ll have zero issues with the challenge, and he’s still on my board, but I’m saving him for one of the next two tournaments. Among the elite, he’s as electrifying as any on the biggest stages. This opens the door – finally – for Joaquin Niemann. After cementing his TOUR card for 2018-19 via the non-member route, he received a special invitation for the PGA Championship on Tuesday of this week. The 19-year-old from Chile has been as quick a study as Jon Rahm two years ago, but Niemann went about his craft competing in professional events in his homeland regularly as an amateur. His unintentional transition from attending and playing collegiately at USF to instant success at the highest level of professional golf is the kind of mythical twist reserved for legends. But for now at Glen Abbey, he’ll attack a vulnerable par 72 that has yielded the most eagles of any course in each of the last five seasons it’s hosted the tournament. I’m advising sitting out Kevin Kisner, Ian Poulter, Tommy Fleetwood and Bubba Watson in favor of spots in the last eight events. Two-time defending champion Jhonattan Vegas has course history on his side, naturally, but even those swinging for the fences are unlikely to connect, much less threaten the warning track. Two-man gamers should entertain Harold Varner III, Joel Dahmen, Chez Reavie, Stewart Cink and J.J. Spaun. FUTURE POSSIBILITIES NOTE: Select golfers committed to the tournament are listed alphabetically. Future tournaments are sorted chronologically and reflect previous success on the courses on which the tournaments will be held in 2017-18. The numerical values in parentheses represent the order of relative confidence of where to use each golfer if multiple sites are listed (e.g. 1 for strongest, 2 for next-strongest and so on). To present weighted confidence in real time, numerical values will not change all season no matter how many tournament remain listed for each golfer. All are pending golfer commitment. Tony Finau … Canadian (4) Sergio Garcia … TOUR Championship (4) Bill Haas … Wyndham (2) Charley Hoffman … Canadian (3) Billy Horschel … TOUR Championship (4) Dustin Johnson … Canadian (10); WGC-Bridgestone (14); PGA Championship (9); Dell Technologies (11); TOUR Championship (6) Kevin Kisner … Wyndham (6) Brooks Koepka … WGC-Bridgestone (6); PGA Championship (2) Matt Kuchar … Canadian (3); WGC-Bridgestone (7); THE NORTHERN TRUST (9) Martin Laird … Barracuda (1) Brandt Snedeker … Canadian (3); Wyndham (4) Jimmy Walker … Dell Technologies (7) Bubba Watson … WGC-Bridgestone (1); TOUR Championship (4) CHAMPIONS ONE & DONE Senior Open Championship presented by Rolex This is the fifth and final major on the PGA TOUR Champions in 2018. The field of 144 will be chasing total prize money of $2 million, lowest of the five majors. In fact, five of the remaining eight tournaments this season will feature richer purses. This week’s winner will clear a little over $300K. A cut of low 70 and ties will occur at the conclusion of 36 holes. It’s the last of the three cuts of the season. The Old Course at St. Andrews is the backdrop. It needs no introduction except for the fact it’s hosting this tournament for the first time, and that includes from 1987-2002 when the tournament was considered unofficial on the PGA TOUR Champions. St. Andrews will play to its customary par of 72 with just two par 3s and two par 5s, but at 7,216 yards, it’s slightly shorter than how it set up for recent Open Championships (2005, 2010, 2015) and for its annual slot in the rotation for the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. Bernhard Langer defends his third title in the tournament. His last two occurred at Royal Porthcawl (2014, 2017). He prevailed for the first time at Carnoustie in 2010. Not surprisingly, he’s the tournament’s all-time earnings leader. FUTURE POSSIBILITIES NOTE: Select golfers committed to the tournament are listed alphabetically. Future tournaments are sorted chronologically and reflect previous success on the courses on which the tournaments will be held in 2018. The numerical values in parentheses represent the order of relative confidence of where to use each golfer if multiple sites are listed (e.g. 1 for strongest, 2 for next-strongest and so on). To present weighted confidence in real time, numerical values will not change all season no matter how many tournament remain listed for each golfer. All are pending golfer commitment. Stephen Ames … Boeing (2); Shaw (7) Fred Couples … Usable everywhere. Joe Durant … 3M (6); DICK’S (12); Boeing (10); Shaw (11); PURE (3); SAS (13) David Frost … 3M (7); Boeing (5); Shaw (8); PURE (1) Paul Goydos … 3M (1; defending); DICK’S (3); SAS (5) Miguel Angel Jiménez … Senior Open Championship (4); 3M (9); Shaw (7); SAS (12) Brandt Jobe … 3M (5); Boeing (8) Jerry Kelly … Boeing (1; defending); Shaw (5); PURE (2); SAS (4) Bernhard Langer … Usable everywhere. Defending five titles. Tom Lehman … SAS (9) Jeff Maggert … Shaw (5) Billy Mayfair … Boeing (2); PURE (1) Scott McCarron … Senior Open Championship (10); DICK’S (4; defending); Shaw (5; defending); PURE (8) Colin Montgomerie … Senior Open Championship (10); Shaw (4); PURE (7); SAS (3; defending) Tom Pernice, Jr. … Shaw (3); SAS (5) Kenny Perry … 3M (1); DICK’S (11); SAS (2) Gene Sauers … Boeing (1) Vijay Singh … Shaw (5); SAS (1) Kevin Sutherland … Usable everywhere. David Toms … Boeing (2); SAS (4) Kirk Triplett … Shaw (4) Duffy Waldorf … Shaw (5) WILD CARDS (short list of golfers not included above but on the rise or still building portfolios after recently turning 50): Paul Broadhurst; Bob Estes; Steve Flesch; Scott Parel; Tim Petrovic

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David Feherty was announced Tuesday as the emcee of next month’s World Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremony for Tiger Woods, former PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem, four-time LPGA Tour major winner Susie Maxwell Berning, and trailblazing golf course designer Marion Hollins. The ceremony is set for March 9 — the eve of THE PLAYERS Championship — at PGA TOUR Headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Feherty spoke to PGATOUR.COM by phone from his farm, about 90 minutes south of Dallas, about his long career covering the headliner of the next WGHOF class, 82-time TOUR winner and 15-time major winner Woods. PGATOUR.COM: How much of your career did you spend covering Tiger? DAVID FEHERTY: Yeah, well, 20 years with CBS, and it’s been seven now with NBC. He turned pro and I became a broadcaster within a month of each other, and I was assigned his group, it seemed, every time he was on our air. It was the most amazing thing. He made me look like an idiot on several occasions, saying he had to punch out or whatever when he didn’t. I had a front-row seat for the greatest golfer in history. PGATOUR.COM: One of those times when he proved you wrong, he was in gnarly rough at the last at Firestone South, about 190 out, and you said he couldn’t reach the green. He took a mighty lash with a wedge and knocked it 10 or 15 feet from the pin. You’d left your mic open when Ernie Els, who was playing with him, said something that only later got bleeped out. What did he say? DAVID FEHERTY: He said, “F— me.” I campaigned for a long time that we don’t need to show Tiger’s reaction to these shots he hits. It’s the guy he’s playing with, that’s the relevant reaction. That was when Ernie was the second-best player in the world, so you can’t get a more relevant reaction than that. PGATOUR.COM: You once called Tiger a loser because he hadn’t won, and he went along with it and said he wasn’t even the first loser. At another tournament, this one he did win, you said he played the last three holes “like a $3 violin.” Did he appreciate that you gave him the needle because he was so feared that no one else would? DAVID FEHERTY: He appreciated when someone gave him the opportunity to be self-deprecating, because he was so much better than everybody else. I think it was difficult for him to talk about it at times because it’s like a broken record. He would make birdie, they would make bogey, the gap would just get wider. Hell, he won a U.S. Open by 15 shots. I remember writing somewhere that the last person to do that was Old Tom Morris and he was playing with a badger’s testicle stuffed with seagull feathers. PGATOUR.COM: Tiger was obviously great, but from the ground, you probably saw that he was even better than everybody thought. DAVID FEHERTY: That was often the hardest part of my job, giving the viewer a realistic sense of just how difficult it was, how impossible it would be for anybody to do it in that situation. He was the yardstick by which all others measured their inferiority. PGATOUR.COM: You guys did a set piece in which he was pretending to be annoyed by you, and you were dragged away by security hollering, “I crocheted you a headcover!” Did you have a knack for cracking him up over the years? DAVID FEHERTY: Yeah, I think so, especially in the early years when he wasn’t so serious. I think the media piled on him so much that as the years went by, he was liable to give less and less, until recently where he’s kind of started to soften again. When you’re that good and nobody else has been that good — people always talk about the comparison between Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. Jack Nicklaus told me nobody has ever played golf like Tiger Woods. The way I look at it is Tiger’s the best player who ever lived, Jack’s the greatest champion. PGATOUR.COM: What’s your plan for the induction ceremony? How are you going to sum up or contextualize the long celestial event that was Tiger Woods? DAVID FEHERTY: A lot of it is scripted, with gaps in it for me to tell stories. That’s the plan. I’ve written a couple of them already, things I’ve done before. In my standup act I do three or four Tiger stories, and one of them will be included. And there are three other recipients and I’ll have to have material on them, as well. PGATOUR.COM: You always wanted to have Tiger on your Golf Channel talk show. Did that ever happen? DAVID FEHERTY: No, I never asked him. He was never in the right place to do the show that I wanted to do with him, and, ironically, he’s probably in that place now. But yeah, I would’ve loved to have had him on the show, obviously. PGATOUR.COM: You mentioned that you started broadcasting at about the same time he started on the PGA TOUR. What was your first indication just how good he was? DAVID FEHERTY: I didn’t know a thing about him. When I first heard the name Tiger Woods, I thought, Is that a golf course in India? I didn’t have a clue. But from the minute I laid eyes on him and saw him play a couple holes I thought, That’s different. It was at Cog Hill, in Chicago. It was probably the Saturday; that was the first time I got assigned to his group. (Editor’s note: Feherty said he’s saving that story for March 9.) PGATOUR.COM: He hit some shots you didn’t think were possible, and you’d played against Jack and Arnold. Was he was showing off for you? Did he ever turn and throw you a wink? DAVID FEHERTY: There were a lot of, ‘Yeah, you called that one, didn’t you?’ He showed off for everybody. He just wanted to shoot as low as he possibly could and win by as many as he could every time he went out. I don’t think he’s changed. I expect him to win again and contend in majors. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he’s in the running at St. Andrews (the site of The Open Championship this July). PGATOUR.COM: You think there will ever be anyone like him? DAVID FEHERTY: My children won’t see it. Their children probably won’t see it. We evolve in sports; if you put a basketball team from the 60s against a team from today, they’d just get run over. The guys today are just bigger, stronger, faster. Golfers get better. But he was a huge peak on that bell curve, if you like, and I don’t think there’ll be anybody like him for many, many years to come.

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