There were moments alongside Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and Peyton Manning when Tom Brady was both mesmerizing and sad. Maybe that’s what we’re about to see in Tampa Bay.
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This week’s RBC Heritage slots familiarly immediately following the Masters where Scottie Scheffler prevailed for the first time in a major. For the 42 who competed at Augusta National and are committed at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina (as of Monday afternoon), the tournament promises that – hang on one sec … checks field to confirm that Scheffler isn’t playing –someone else will win. Notwithstanding Scheffler’s historic surge, the tournament also is known for its heaters. In its first 53 editions dating back to 1969 – all contested at Harbour Town – there have been 10 golfers who have won it multiple times. Davis Love III headlines the club with five titles, while Hale Irwin and this year’s defending champion, Stewart Cink, have won thrice. Twelve former RBC Heritage champions are among the 132 in the field this week, including all of the last nine. Continue reading beneath the ranking of projected contenders for how Harbour Town tests, which boxes Cink checked en route to victory, what’s new this year and more. RELATED: How Team Format Works | Play Pick ‘Em Live | The First Look | Inside the Field POWER RANKINGS: RBC HERITAGE OTHERS CONSIDERED Joaquin Niemann & Mito Pereira Will Zalatoris & Davis Riley Adam Hadwin & Adam Svensson Matthew NeSmith & Taylor Moore Sahith Theegala & Beau Hossler The Zurich Classic of New Orleans does not contribute to PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf, so Draws and Fades on Tuesday will be abridged Eighty two-man teams have gathered at TPC Louisiana for the largest field on the PGA TOUR. All will follow the same format in every round. Four-ball will be used for scoring in the opening round. Foursomes will be utilized for the second round. When two rounds are complete, the low 33 teams and ties will survive the cut and repeat the sequence of scoring for the third and final rounds, respectively. Both members of the winning team will be credited with an official PGA TOUR victory and both will receive exemptions into next month’s PGA Championship as well as the 2023 editions of the Sentry Tournament of Championship and THE PLAYERS. Each also will have his membership extended through at least the 2023-24 season. The distribution of FedExCup points and earnings will treat the final results as if an individual competition occurred. For example, instead of rewarding 500 FedExCup points to the winner and 300 to a solo runner-up, the winning team will split 800 points evenly. Prize money will be calculated similarly. What isn’t in play is an impact on the Official World Golf Ranking. From that standpoint, divisors will not increase. That’s important for those who monitor their values like a stock portfolio in real time. Unlike last year’s reveal of new fairways and greens at TPC Louisiana, nothing has changed since last year’s edition of the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. Well, no modifications were planned, that is. The impact of Hurricane Ida’s pass last August has required a few hundred trees to be planted as well as significant attention paid to the bunkers that were damaged. For the fifth spin as a team competition, overseeded TifEagle bermuda greens are governed to 12 feet on the Stimpmeter. With the absence of overseed and sluggish growth of the only layer of rough (up to two inches), guys who can move it off the tee on the 7,425-yard stock par 72 will be encouraged regardless of the round. As is the case in every shootout, particularly this team competition that’s yielded winners of 20-under and lower in the first four stagings, the primary objective will be to pile up scoring opportunities. The targets at TPC Louisiana can be tricky what with their segments and undulations. Considering the promise of persistent winds throughout the tournament, including gusts exceeding 20 mph, strategy in foursomes could be a gamechanger. Daytime highs in the 80s is forecast. Rain is not a threat. ROB BOLTON’S SCHEDULE PGATOUR.com’s Rob Bolton recaps and previews every tournament from numerous perspectives. Look for his following contributions as scheduled. MONDAY: Power Rankings TUESDAY: Sleepers, Draws and Fades WEDNESDAY: Pick ’Em Preview SUNDAY: Medical Extensions, Qualifiers, Reshuffle, Rookie Ranking
Editor’s Note: This article was orginally published on February 2, 2017. Since then Patrick Cantlay has become a PGA TOUR star with a FedExCup title to go along with six career TOUR titles. PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – The stress fracture in his lower back derailed and stalled his PGA TOUR career for nearly four years. The tragic death of his close friend and caddie in a hit-and-run accident a year ago offered unwanted perspective and heartache. But while those two developments combined to send Patrick Cantlay to the lowest point of his young life, he doesn’t see them tied neatly into one emotional package, ready to offer equal parts inspiration and determination as he begins his comeback this week at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. That’s not how he’s planning to cope. In order to play his best golf this week, Cantlay must focus only on the tasks at hand, the process of managing his way around 18 holes. “I’m just trying to make it all about the golf,” he said on the eve of his first round. “Trying to forget everything else.” It won’t be easy. The image of seeing Chris Roth struck by a car while crossing a street in the early-morning hours in Newport Beach, California, last February will forever remain embedded in his mind. Cantlay, after all, was just a few feet away at the time as the two headed towards a local restaurant. After calling 911, Cantlay then cradled his unconscious friend in his arms. Covered in Roth’s blood, he felt helpless while waiting for the ambulance he knew couldn’t reverse the inevitable. Roth’s death, at age 24, was pronounced a short while later at the nearby hospital. Dealing with death of any kind is challenging. But dealing with it for the first time – under those circumstances and at that age – can test a person’s fortitude. While the flashbacks of that night have lessened with each passing month, they will never completely go away. Nor should they, insists Cantlay. “Just a freak, one-in-a-million type deal,” Cantlay said. “Extremely unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. … I’ve done my best to deal with it, but I still accept that it’s going to bother me now and it’s going to bother me for the rest of my life.” Just two weeks before the accident, Cantlay had received a different kind of punch to the gut. He had been preparing to play the 2016 CareerBuilder Challenge when his back flared up. It would’ve been his first start on TOUR in more than a year. Instead, he pulled out of the event and met with his medical team. The news was not good – he could not play golf for another nine months. Cantlay was devastated. His promising career had already been in neutral for far too long, ever since May 24, 2013 when he was on the range hitting irons prior to his second round at Colonial. He experienced a pain in his back that day and had to withdraw. At the time, Cantlay – then a full-time member on the Web.com Tour — figured he would bounce back quickly. A couple of days off and he’d return the next week. But the pain never disappeared. Initial examinations could not pinpoint the problem. It took two months before Dr. Robert Watkins – whose Marina Spine Center in Marina Del Rey counts many professional athletes as patients – finally confirmed the stress fracture. He also, more or less, confirmed the length of recovery. Six weeks to a year. For Cantlay, it was essentially the latter. He did make three Web.com Tour starts that fall in order to ensure his status for promotion to the PGA TOUR, and somehow gutted out a second-place finish at the Hotel Fitness Championship – an ironic tournament name for someone in such discomfort. He returned to TOUR competition a year later in Dallas and played five events during the summer of 2014. None were pain-free. “That’s kind of the nature of stress fractures,” Cantlay said. “It’s tough not being able to go do what I love to do. That’s the hardest part. I don’t know if I ever really coped with it. I coped with it because I had to. But it never felt OK or right to me.” Cantlay started one more event in 2014, the OHL Classic in Mayakoba in mid-November. He made the cut after a second-round 68 but struggled on the weekend and finished 76th, last on the leaderboard. He was ranked 623rd in the world after that week. Due to his inactivity since then, he’s unranked entering Pebble Beach. Given that Cantlay once spent a record 55 weeks as the world’s top-ranked amateur during his celebrated college days at UCLA, that free-fall off the pro charts might have prompted a career change by less-determined players. Though discouraged, Cantlay never reached a breaking point. “It’s natural to feel a little like that when you’ve taken so many difficult blows,” he said. “But I knew that my main goal was still to play golf at the highest level and I was going to do everything I could to get myself back to a spot where I was doing that.” The unpredictable and lengthy recovery from his stress fracture prompted some drastic action. Cantlay went to Europe to receive the same kind of Regenokine blood-spinning treatment that other athletes – including a handful of pro golfers – praise as a way to overcome chronic pain. “I figured it couldn’t hurt,” Cantlay said. Whether it helped, no one knows. All Cantlay knows now is that he’s been relatively pain-free for an extended period, and that he’s swinging the club well. He’s also ready to share his story, even though it’s not easy to discuss. “It’s difficult every time,” he said, adding, “it’s part of dealing with it.” One thing he doesn’t want to do is exploit the memory of his deceased friend by using it as a motivating factor this week. Golf teammates at Servite High in Anaheim, California, the two had talked about a pro partnership, and Roth was on the bag the last time Cantlay played on TOUR. Their high school golf coach, Dane Jako, told the Orange County Register that “it would have been one of the Bones-Phil Mickelson relationships, I am sure.” Instead, Cantlay’s caddie this week is veteran Matt Minister, who has worked with players such as Nick Price and, most recently, Chris Kirk. Asked if Roth would have been his caddie had he lived, Cantlay replied, “Potentially. Who knows, he may have evolved past me. A lot can happen in a year.” Dwelling on the events of the last year will do no good inside the ropes – and syncing the two major storylines during that time is not fair. “The golf part and the Chris part seem like two completely separate deals,” Cantlay said. “The golf part is very upsetting and an issue for me. It’s been a struggle just to get back and play golf pain-free. I’ve done a lot of work to get to this point to be able to play this week. “But the Chris thing is totally separate. That would be difficult whether I was playing or not playing, and it would be just as difficult both ways and just as life-changing and just as earth-shattering. Just something like that changes your life and puts you on a different trajectory than you ever thought you’d get on. And it definitely changes your perspective on things.” That’s not to say Cantlay – who is making the first of his 10 starts on a major medical exemption — won’t be thinking of Roth this week. After all, they bonded over golf. Roth knew how frustrating the injury problems were for Cantlay, and how important it was for his friend to continue chasing those big dreams. Just being back inside the ropes is the best way for Cantlay to honor his friend’s memory. Asked if he would feel Roth’s presence this week, Cantlay replied, “I don’t really want to turn it into that. It’s not about that. But I know he’d be happy seeing me play again.” So will everybody else who has ever lost a close friend or been robbed of their dreams. Patrick Cantlay’s comeback begins at Pebble. Feel free to wish him well.
Titleist’s new high-end CNCPT CP-01 and CNCPT CP-02 irons were born without limits. When building the CNCPT irons, Titleist’s Research and Development team was allowed to use any materials and processes, with no regards for a budget. “CNCPT is the result of our R&D team having the leashes taken off,â€� Kelley Moser Jr., Titleist’s Brand Manager of CNCPT Clubs told PGATOUR.COM. “ ‘Hey, you guys go find whatever you can find that’s really cool — new materials, new processes, whatever it takes — to give our customers a product worth the price tag that they’ll be paying for.’ â€� In recent years, it seems the floodgates have opened for high-priced irons on the domestic retail market. It’s no longer uncommon for a single iron to sell for more than $400. Titleist, however, says some of its competitors had a product that didn’t match the price points. “We sat back and watched some of what our competitors have done with the price point, and the product themselves [were] not what we thought was worth that price point,â€� Moser said. “But they sold a lot of it. So we said ‘Alright, if we could go ahead and build anything we wanted, what would we do?’â€� Titleist’s new CNCPT irons are the result of that no-holds-barred process. Most notably, the hollow bodied irons use a face insert – Titleist is calling it a “Super Metal L-Face insertâ€� — that’s made from a mysterious, high-strength material that’s “never been used before in golf,â€� according to Moser. “It’s the highest strength material that we’ve ever tested,â€� Moser said. “It allows us to make the thinnest unsupported face in golf. I can’t say what the name of the material is at this point; we don’t have exclusive rights to it. It’s very expensive, very rare, and you have to buy a lot of it at one point in time so it’s an expensive endeavor, but it’s worth it when you watch the ball flight.â€� The thin inserts, unlike most face inserts throughout the industry, have uniform thickness from heel-to-toe and top-to-bottom, rather than a variable thickness. As Moser explains, this helps to reduce hot spots, or in other words, areas of the face that produce higher ball speeds than others. In general, having a very thin, high-strength face helps to raise ball speeds, but it also reduces unwanted weight from the face area to be utilized in other, more effective areas. Titleist used this discretionary weight to add Tungsten – a high-density material — to the clubs’ perimeters. In fact, Titleist reports that Tungsten makes up “nearly 50 percentâ€� of the total head weights in the lower lofted irons. This design means more forgiveness for golfers because the perimeter-weighted head leads to higher MOI (moment of inertia, a measure of energy transfer), and with the positioning of Tungsten low-and-rearward, the irons are designed for higher launch, as well. The CNCPT irons come in two different head models: the CP-01 and the CP-02. The CP-02 head shape is for players who enjoy the look and sound of a traditional blade, but with higher performance than the traditionally unforgiving blade constructions. “This would be a product for guys who maybe used to play blades – we’ve all played blades at one point or another,â€� Moser explains. “But since the advent of cavity back, high-MOI, all the Tungsten you use now, you sacrifice a lot by using traditional blade. Most people know, ‘I want to use a blade but I know I shouldn’t.’ So they’ve graduated and moved onto maybe AP2 or AP3 or something along those lines. But they still would really like to have a blade in their bag. So we can do that. With all the Tungsten and how dense the tungsten is, we can cram a lot of weight in the perimeter of this golf club, and still use that super thin metal face to get the speed that they want. So what you have here is an MB look, with AP2 workability, but an AP3 speed. So it’s a homerun for us. We’ve had a lot of fun showing consumers this product because it’s so vastly different from anything we’ve ever made in the past.â€� The CP-01, on the other hand, is more of a performance-first design with a slightly larger profile, more offset and a thicker topline; it’s made for maximum performance. “The performance of [the CP-01] is unparalleled,â€� Moser said. “There’s nothing in the market that’s going to come off the face faster with the ball flight characteristics that you want to see, than this.â€� Both of the head models are made with hollow-bodied constructions. There have been other high-end irons on the market from various companies that use material between the face and the body for durability, or sound/feel benefits, but Titleist decided to keep the irons hollow. “When you put something to support a thin face, you’re essentially taking away the benefit of a thin face,â€� Moser said. “So we wanted to make sure as thin as we can go, we wanted to keep it unsupported from the inside. That was a big component for us.â€� As for the price tag, Titleist will sell the CNCPT CP-01 and CP-02 irons for $500 per head. Moser explains the price point: “We’re going to sell them for $500 per club, which, in our opinion there’s a market there at that price point. But we didn’t want it to be a marketing story. We wanted it to be about product and performance first. So you’re not going to hear us talking about it a lot. We’re not going to be on TV. We’re not going to be in your face marketing in a traditional sense. This is going to be more word-of-mouth, underground. We’re going to find the right people first. We’re going to fit them, we’re going to get them excited about the equipment, and we’re going to let them tell their friends and we’re going to let it grow organically that way, because we want all the money to go into the product and the research to develop products like this, rather than talking about the products.” Titleist has a special concierge to setup fitting for the CNCPT irons.
