Tiger shares 36-hole lead for 1st time since 2015

The stars are out this week in the World Golf Championships – Dell Technologies Match Play at Austin Country Club in Austin, Texas. The course is a par 71, measuring 7,108 yards and will be on TifEagle bermudagrass overseeded with Poa Trivialis. Like TPC Sawgrass a couple of weeks ago at THE PLAYERS Championship, Austin Country Club is a Pete Dye design. The tournament starts on Wednesday and ends with the final match on Sunday. Past winners since the tournament moved to Austin CC include Jason Day, Dustin Johnson ($10,000), Kevin Kisner ($7,600), Bubba Watson ($7,200) and defending champion Billy Horschel ($8,800). Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $750K Pitch + Putt [$200K to 1st] (Match Play) FORMAT The 64-player field are seeding via world ranking with the top 16 forming the A pool, the next 16 in the B pool, the next 16 as C pool and the last 16 as D pool. From there 16 groups are then randomly assigned with one A, B, C and D player in each. Each group of four players will play their group opponents over the first three days, Wednesday – Friday. The player with the highest point total (1 point for winning a match, 0.5 point for tying, 0 for a loss) after the group stage advances to the Round of 16, which will begin the straight elimination section. Saturday will be the Round of 16 and the quarterfinals. Sunday will hold the semifinals in the morning followed by the final and a third-place match in the afternoon. STRATEGY Another Pete Dye design presents another test of precision golf. Austin Country Club sports deep pot bunkers, undulations throughout fairways and greens, and resembles a links style layout. The course also has its lowlands and highlands, and players like Jordan Spieth ($8,900) have mentioned that the two nines play like two different courses. The front nine is tighter, playing inside a canyon, before the back nine opens up for the stunning views and water holes. All Pete Dye courses demand precision with the approach shot, but we could also be leaning towards Strokes Gained: Off the Tee more this week. Gamesmanship is a factor in match play. Triple bogeys don’t carry the same negative weight as they do in stroke play, but driving it past your opponent and playing your second shot based on what your opponent does is advantageous in this setting. The course doesn’t just suit the bombers, but when Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson win here, we should be taking notice. Again, those players need to survive the tight early holes, where Kevin Kisner has shone, before it opens up to their strengths. Austin CC can also play windy, which is why we’ve seen golfers like Johnson, Scottie Scheffler ($11,000) and Sergio Garcia ($8,300) play well here. Most daily fantasy lineups go ‘chalk’ every year, choosing the top-seeded golfers at this tournament. It’s easy to think the top golfers will advance with relative ease, but as we’ve seen in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament this year and seasons past, the top seeds can lose early or fail to advance to the finals. Since 2017, the most top seeds to advance out of the group stage is five, and only one No.1 seed has won the event in Austin (Dustin Johnson, 2017). Also, only once has the final match been contested by two top-16 seeded players (No. 16 Louis Oosthuizen and No. 2 Jason Day). Match play is highly variant, so embrace the chaos this week; it should be fun. Tyrrell Hatton ($9,200) The good thing about Hatton is that he didn’t gain many strokes on the greens last week en route to his top 25. That shouldn’t be a net positive, but Hatton was gaining an unsustainable amount of strokes on the greens over his previous two tournaments before Valspar Championship and wasn’t gaining a ton via ball-striking. At the Valspar, Hatton gained the sixth-most strokes through approach and 1.64 off-the-tee, the improvement we (and he) were seeking. If we include only past winners in the field, since 1999 their average number of starts in this event before winning is 5.5, with Johnson having the most (eight) and Horschel having the least (four). This week will be Hatton’s fifth start here, and he’s coming in with form, finishing T21 at Valspar, 13th at THE PLAYERS Championship and runner-up at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Group 13 could be a tough draw for Hatton, but Daniel Berger ($9,800) is 3-9 at this event over his previous six starts. Si Woo Kim ($7,100) is fantastic on Pete Dye courses but also struggles in match play, with a 3-7-3 record at Austin CC. Kevin Kisner ($7,600) While Spieth is a potential sleeper in Group 6, Kisner ultimately gets the nod. He’ll need to get past Justin Thomas ($10,700), but the 2019 winner of this event isn’t going to back down from any competition. Since 2016, Kisner’s record is 16-6-1 with a 67% winning percentage. Compile that with his record at this tournament since 1999 and Presidents Cups, Kisner has the highest win rate of any golfer in the field (70%). His recent top-5 finish at TPC Sawgrass, another Pete Dye course, proves Kisner should be on the shortlist of golfers to roster this week. Cameron Young ($7,000) There’s an excellent chance Young will go under rostered because he has to face Jon Rahm ($11,300) and Patrick Reed ($7,500), who everyone loves in this format. Rahm and Reed are not playing up to their expectations coming into this event, and Young could exceed everyone’s expectation of him, especially if he’s going to be hitting second the majority of the time with how well he hits it off the tee. A near win at The Genesis Invitational, followed by a top 20 at PGA National (Honda Classic) and top 15 at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, should give us confidence this ‘young’ golfer has the resolve to beat some top brass in Texas. Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $750K Pitch + Putt [$200K to 1st] (Match Play) Put your knowledge to the test. Sign up for DraftKings and experience the game inside the game. Place your golf bets at DraftKings Sportsbook or by downloading the DraftKings Sportsbook app. All views expressed are my own. I am an employee of DraftKings and am ineligible to play in public DFS or DKSB contests. The contents contained in this article do not constitute a representation that any particular strategy will guarantee success. All customers should use their own skill and judgment in building lineups. 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RIDGELAND, S.C. – Rickie Fowler, hot off a runner-up finish at last week’s ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP in Japan, finished up a long practice session at Congaree Golf Club Tuesday and exhibited genuine excitement when he learned his grouping for Thursday’s opening round at THE CJ CUP in South Carolina. Fowler will play alongside 2022 FedExCup champion Rory McIlroy, his south Florida neighbor, and South Korea’s Tom Kim, golf’s fresh-faced, 20-year-old rocket ship. (A bonus: Kim has Fowler’s good friend and former caddie Joe Skovron on his bag.) It wasn’t that long ago, or so it seems, that Fowler was the kid strapped to the PGA TOUR launch pad. The high-flying California motocross daredevil and gunslinging Oklahoma State Cowboy was the game’s resident star in waiting. He certainly has had shining moments, winning five PGA TOUR titles, including THE PLAYERS, earning more than $42 million, becoming a highly sought-after pitchman and performing on U.S. Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup teams. He may reside at 106th in the Official World Golf Ranking, but he is a first-team A-lister. As needle-movers go, few can move it more than Rickie. Fowler will turn 34 in December, and he finds himself in a different mode in this season of his career. Fowler is busily rebuilding and rebooting after a few dismal campaigns defined mostly by struggle. Fowler made 60 starts over his last three seasons starting in 2019-20, and finished in the top 10 four times. (Consider that in 2014, he had top-5 finishes in all four major championships.) Outside of golf, Fowler said his life could not be better. He and his wife have an 11-month-old daughter who fills their lives with joy. The hard work on the golf course, even through challenging times, never has stopped, and lately, finally, there is real optimism in his tank. (“You’ve seen that Rickie wants to get back to where he was and play at a high level again,” said Billy Horschel, Fowler’s former Walker Cup teammate.) Fowler’s solid performance in Japan, where he lost by a shot to Keegan Bradley, came on top of a tie for sixth at the season-opening Fortinet Championship in Napa. It’s early days, as they say, but in 10 rounds this season Fowler has yet to shoot anything higher than 70. When the charter from Japan touched down Monday morning, Fowler, wanting to stay awake and adjust to his new time zone, just walked the golf course at Congaree to see it. His mind, understandably, was in a pretty good place. “It’s just nice to see some things head in the right direction, to start to build some momentum and confidence,” he said. “That’s definitely something we struggled with the last few years. I might have a good week here or there, but nothing ever back-to-back, or able to build on a good week, anything like that. It (the finish at ZOZO) was definitely good to see.” There are two keys to Fowler’s improved play. In a word, Fowler seems to have simplified the many swing thoughts and new feels that seemed to complicate his long game, or at least prevent it from feeling natural. He returned to the tutelage of the sage Butch Harmon, the man with whom he started this journey. Fowler said he feels terrible that things did not work out with coach John Tillery, who had been teaching him for a period. They certainly worked at it. He said his days with Tillery, and all he learned, have been a sturdy bridge to start up with Harmon again. “I can’t say enough good things about him (Tillery),” Fowler said. “We were living and dying with it together, and I really wouldn’t be in this position that I am now, playing, and being able to do the stuff with Butch, without learning all the stuff that I did with Tillery. It’s a bummer that we didn’t have the success that we wanted, but it also kind of laid the groundwork for right now.” His work with Harmon has led him to a steeper swing plane with his left arm that gets his hands in a better spot, gives him more room to swing, and makes his swing far more efficient. More importantly, Fowler’s confidence in his putting has returned, too. That’s huge. He led Strokes Gained: Putting in 2016-17, and finished as high as 13th four seasons ago, but he has been completely lost on the greens the last two seasons. In 2021-22, he was 161st in the category. That will put pressure on every nook and corner of one’s game. He doesn’t have a great explanation why it seems to be so improved of late, and didn’t putt great on Sunday, when he might have put forth a better challenge to Bradley, who also hadn’t won in a few seasons. But since going to a new putter in Memphis, his final start of last season – where Fowler opened with 65 – the putting has started to build, like a burgeoning drumbeat. So the swirling swing thoughts are reserved only for practice sessions, and the mindset on competition days is “Let’s go play golf.” That, and the 10-footers are starting to find the hole. That combination can ease a golfer’s mind in real time. “That (improved putting) frees up so much from just getting to the green,” he said. “That’s something that, the last couple of years, I never had that … to let myself free up.” The CJ CUP in South Carolina will be Fowler’s last start of 2022. He loves to play in Mexico, at Mayakoba, but his good friend Justin Thomas is getting married that week in November, and Fowler is a groomsman. So he will play this week and carry his positive vibes into 2023. Give Fowler credit. Through the tough times, his chin seldom dropped, and he never has not been shy discussing the process of his long climb back. He carries some pretty good perspective to the struggling times he has endured with class. “This isn’t life out here. This is part of life; it’s what we get to do,” Fowler said. “It’s fun, though not all the time. Looking back, it wasn’t an enjoyable time, but it’s part of it, and it’s ultimately how you come out on the back end, and how you get through it. … If handled and done the right way, it’s only going to make you better.” And Fowler, if nothing else, is better, and just bold enough to harbor aspirations that, in his mid-30s, he can be better than ever.

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PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico — Harris English feels he got away from the basics that carried him to a promising start to his PGA TOUR career. He hopes he’s headed in that direction again. English holed a chip-and-run from off the 18th green Saturday for birdie and a 7-under 64, giving him the 36-hole lead at the Mayakoba Golf Classic as he tries to end six years without winning. English was at 13-under 129, one shot ahead of Vaughn Taylor, who had a 66 in the afternoon. Brendon Todd, coming off a victory two weeks ago in Bermuda Championship, had a 68 and was two back. “Just mainly working on the same stuff every day and kind of going back to the drawing board and figuring out what I was doing really well my first couple years on tour and just stick to that, not trying to reinvent the wheel,â€� English said. Whatever he’s doing, English is on a roll. He had to go back to the Korn Ferry Tour Finals after last season to regain his card. Since then, he has finished in the top 10 in three of his four tournaments. Next up is a long day. Because rain washed out all of Thursday, players will go as long as they can Sunday before darkness, with the 72-hole event concluding Monday. Even with the new policy of top 65 and ties making the cut, 82 players advanced to the final two rounds. The course, which received more than 9 inches of rain from Monday through Thursday, dried remarkably well and the greens had plenty of pace. English motored along, rarely getting into too much trouble. He birdied his last two holes to set the pace. English won at Mayakoba in 2013 when it was the final PGA TOUR event of the year. That was his last win, 170 tournaments ago. “I had a lot of success here and I love this place, love the greens,â€� English said. “Feel like if I can get it on the dance floor and hit 14, 15, 16 greens a round, I can give myself a chance. With this wind, anything can happen, but if I stay the course and keep hitting like I am, I’m in a good spot.â€� So is Todd, who overcame a mental block — he called in the yips — of a big miss to the right that nearly drove him from the game. Todd got it sorted out and picked up loads of confidence with his victory in the inaugural Bermuda event. His only frustration Saturday was with putting. “I hit it to 25 feet, 6 feet, 12 feet, 4 feet, and then missed a 12-footer for par on 5,â€� he said. “Striped it at the flag on 7, and on 8 I hit a close one in there about 10 feet and burned the edge. I just didn’t get the putts to fall in the second nine.â€� Danny Lee, who started the tournament 10 under through 13 holes for a 62, shot 70 and was three shots back. “Just missed a couple putts out there, made bogey on a couple par 5s,â€� he said. “Just golf happened.â€� Jason Day, playing Mayakoba for the first time in 10 years as he tries to get ready for the Presidents Cup, shot 77 and missed the cut.

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