The First Look: Genesis Scottish Open

Unique to the calendar is this week’s co-sanctioned World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions. It slots both in the fourth week of the 2018-19 PGA TOUR season and in the fourth-to-last week of the European Tour’s 2018 schedule. With no cut, dual-tour members are guaranteed to contribute points for the FedExCup and Race to Dubai. Among those in the field of 78 at Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai, China, who target multiple long-range goals are Americans Patrick Reed, Xander Schauffele and Pat Perez. As they work on their pursuit of the FedExCup, they also rank a respective third, 22nd and 84th in the Race to Dubai standings. Of the five winners of the WGC-HSBC Champions since it became an official PGA TOUR event in 2013-14, Dustin Johnson (2013), Russell Knox (2015), Hideki Matsuyama (2016) and Justin Rose (2017) also are committed to competing. Scroll beneath the expanded ranking for more on the course, how Rose prevailed and what Mother Nature intends to bring to the party. Tuesday’s Fantasy Insider will include Patrick Reed, Xander Schauffele, Alex Noren and 2015 champion Russell Knox among other notables. The history of the HSBC Champions, in its first four editions before it was tagged with the WGC badge and in the years since, is complicated. For example, it led off the European Tour’s 2008-09 schedule and appeared again very late in the same season when it debuted as a World Golf Championship. However, save in 2012 when the Olazábal Course at Mission Hills hosted, the constant has been Sheshan International. The stock par-72 tips at 7,261 yards. Its par 5s annually rank among the toughest sets of all courses on the PGA TOUR. The 603-yard eighth is especially difficult. In the tournament’s first five years as an official event on the PGA TOUR, No. 8 has been the hardest of all par 5s twice (2014-15, 2016-17). It slotted second-most challenging last season behind No. 14 at Pebble Beach. Similar to the experience at The Club at Nine Bridges, last week’s host of THE CJ CUP @ NINE BRIDGES, wind influences scoring considerably at Sheshan International. Winning aggregates have ranged from Bubba Watson’s 11-under 277 in 2014 to Johnson’s 24-under in 2013. Rose recorded a two-stroke victory last year at 14-under 274. That’s a reasonable target again this week. The narrative for the majority of Rose’s career has been sculpted in his putting. As long as he’s in control of it, he’s borderline unbeatable. Case in point, he reached a career peak in putting in 2017-18 and won the FedExCup, and it started at Sheshan International where he ranked seventh in putts per greens in regulation. (ShotLink is not utilized in the tournament.) With bentgrass greens prepped to run just 11 feet or so on the Stimpmeter (to help balance the international field’s overall inexperience on faster surfaces with undulation), it’s understandable why scoring has gone as low as it has. The premium of hitting greens in regulation is multiplied due to the fact that Sheshan International was the third-hardest to scramble for par last year, and that not an anomaly. Moderate breezes cannot be ruled out during any of the four days of this week’s competition. It’ll freshen the most on Friday when a serious threat of rain shares the headline. Daytime temperatures won’t climb out of the low 70s. The winner of the Old Tom Morris Cup will bank 550 FedExCup points and $1.7 million of a record $10-million prize fund. ROB BOLTON’S SCHEDULE PGATOUR.COM’s Fantasy Insider Rob Bolton recaps and previews every tournament from numerous angles. Look for his following contributions as scheduled. MONDAY: Rookie Ranking, Qualifiers, Reshuffle, Medical Extensions, Power Rankings (WGC-HSBC) TUESDAY*: Power Rankings (Sanderson Farms), Sleepers (WGC-HSBC), Fantasy Insider WEDNESDAY: One & Done (WGC-HSBC), One & Done (Sanderson Farms), Twitter live fantasy show * – Rob is a member of the panel for PGATOUR.COM’s Expert Picks for PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf presented by SERVPRO, which also publishes on Tuesdays.

Click here to read the full article…

ATLANTA — For the second day in a row, no one had a better score than Jon Rahm at the TOUR Championship. That’s just what he needed to make up ground on Patrick Cantlay going into a weekend chase for the FedExCup. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Jordan Spieth reveals that couple is expecting first child Rahm birdied his last three holes Friday for a 5-under 65. Cantlay birdied his last two holes for a bogey-free 66 to keep one shot ahead. It’s not quite a two-man race for the FedExCup with 36 holes still to play at East Lake, though it was shaping up as a possibility. Bryson DeChambeau was the next closest player, and his 67 lost ground Friday. He was six shots behind. “We definitely feed off each other,” Rahm said. “And that’s probably why you see the difference in the scoreboard right now.” Cantlay looked as though he was protecting a lead, often playing to the fat of the green. That was more a product of showing respect to an East Lake course that punishes even slight misses on the wrong side of the hole. He hit 16 of 18 greens, and only twice did he have par putts from about the 5-foot range. “I’m playing really well, and I think I’m playing the golf course the right way,” Cantlay said. Cantlay started the TOUR Championship at 10-under par because he was the No. 1 seed in the FedExCup. Rahm began four shots back. Asked if the idea was to chip away at the lead, Rahm replied, “What other strategy is there?” “As soon as we teed off, that didn’t matter,” he said of the four-shot deficit. “There’s a lot of golf to be played, even now.” The reason for Cantlay’s pre-tournament advantage was because of last week at Caves Valley. Cantlay and Rahm played in the final threesome, along with DeChambeau, going into the weekend at the BMW Championship. Cantlay finished 66-66 and won in a playoff. Rahm closed with 70-70 and tied for ninth, dropping to the No. 4 seed. That now seems long ago. The TOUR Championship, to a degree, feels normal now. Cantlay was at 17 under. He and Rahm will be in the final group again. DeChambeau had more work to do, as did Justin Thomas, who made two bogeys and failed to birdie the par-5 18th in his round of 67. He was seven behind. “A place like this, there’s not really a lead that’s safe with how tough it it can play,” Thomas said. “But at the end of the day, I can’t worry about what the other guys are doing. I just have to go out and try to make some birdies and stop making mistakes.” Harris English made his share of mistakes with five bogeys in his round of 69, leaving him in the large group at 9 under. So did Jordan Spieth. He was going for his fourth straight birdie to get right in the mix, facing a 10-foot putt on the 13th hole. He three-putted, lost momentum and shot a 67. Spieth, Rory McIlroy (66) and Louis Oosthuizen (67) were at 8 under. Gone are the low scores from the opening FedExCup Playoff events, at rain-soaked Liberty Natitonal and Caves Valley, where players at each course had a putt at 59. The best anyone has managed at East Lake, still slightly soft from rain and a light breeze, had been a 65. So it’s tougher for players to make up a lot of ground unless the leaders come back, and there has been little indication Cantlay and Rahm are going to do that. Cantlay had plenty of looks at birdie, and didn’t hear many calls of “Patty Ice” because not many of those putts were going in. He got up-and-down from a bunker on the par-5 sixth. His wedge into the 13th spun back to an inch of the cup. Rahm holed a 35-foot putt from off the green at the 13th, gave it back with a bad drive to the right on the next hole, and then closed the gap to one shot with a 10-foot birdie on the 16th. The final two holes felt like a duel, even for a lazy Friday afternoon. Rahm poured in a 25-foot birdie putt on the 17th, and Cantlay matched his birdie from 15 feet, the first time he had made a putt longer than 5 feet all day. On the closing hole, Rahm blasted out of the front bunker to tap-in range. Cantlay chipped down the slope and with the grain — one of the few times he was out of position — and watched it trail off 8 feet from the hole. He made that to regain the lead. “When you have somebody like him who played a round with very few mistakes — you could argue that it could have been a lot lower — it only motivates me to keep doing a little bit better,” Rahm said. “Even though I want to focus on myself, you know he’s not going to let up and he keeps putting it in the fairway and on the green and in the fairway and on the green. “It can raise your playing level a little bit,” he said, “as well as me raising his level when I’m making birdies.”

Click here to read the full article…

Click here to read the full article…