The conditions were mild. The course was playable. The scores were good. All those bad things players were saying about Royal St. George’s? They stopped. Will it stay that way for three more rounds?
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MAMARONECK, N.Y. - The memories are not great. Tiger Woods shot 76-76 and missed the cut by three at the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, but his head wasn't really in it. "I think it was just - I was not prepared to play and still dealing with the death of my dad," he said Tuesday. At the 120th U.S. Open at Winged Foot this week the questions will be about Woods' body, not his mind. In '06, he was just six weeks removed from the death of his father Earl. RELATED: Tee times for Rds. 1 & 2 | Nine things to know about Winged Foot | Looking back at wild finish in 2006 "Yeah, when I didn’t win the Masters that year, that was really tough to take because that was the last event my dad was ever going to watch me play," Woods said. "He passed not too long after that, and quite frankly, when I got ready for this event, I didn’t really put in the time. I didn’t really put in the practice, and consequently missed the cut pretty easily." Woods went on to win the Open Championship later that summer, sobbing on the shoulder of his caddie, Steve Williams, on the 18th green. But at Winged Foot? A month earlier? No. It wasn't happening. He made six bogeys and a double in the first round, three bogeys and two doubles in the second. He was there but not there. Not really. A lot has changed since, starting with the fact that Woods, 44, made just seven official starts last season due to mobility issues with his surgically fused back. One of those, the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP last October, turned into his 82nd PGA TOUR victory, but there was precious little else for the highlight reel. Woods had only one other top-10 finish last season, a T9 at the Farmers Insurance Open. He did not feel well enough to play in the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, which like Torrey Pines is one of his favorite courses on TOUR. He also missed The Honda Classic, his hometown tournament, and elected to sit out THE PLAYERS Championship (cancelled after one round anyway because of the pandemic). And when he came back along with everyone else in June? Meh. He finished T37 at the PGA Championship, T58 at THE NORTHERN TRUST, and T51 at the BMW Championship. "This year I really haven’t putted as well as I wanted to," Woods said, "and the times I did make a few swing mistakes, I missed it in the wrong spots. Consequently, I just didn’t have the right looks at it. I’ve compounded mistakes here and there that ended up not making me able to make pars or a birdie run, and consequently I haven’t put myself in contention to win events." Now he comes to Winged Foot, a course he also played at the 1997 PGA Championship, making history, of sorts. Woods and Phil Mickelson were paired together for the first time as professionals in the final round. Each shot 75 in the rain, each finished T29. (Davis Love III won.) In terms of difficulty, Woods ranks Winged Foot alongside Oakmont in Pennsylvania and notoriously nasty Open Championship venue Carnoustie. "The winning scores here have never traditionally been very low," Woods said. (Hale Irwin won the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot at 7 over par; Geoff Ogilvy was 5 over in 2006.) "I don’t see that changing this week." The Memorial Tournament and BMW Championship brought especially hard conditions, but the rough at Winged Foot is something else entirely. Most players have said it will be impossible to advance the ball from the long stuff. Gary Woodland said he was practicing his chipping, his caddie tossing him balls, when they lost one and couldn't find it for five minutes. Marshalls, Woodland added, are going to be invaluable. Tuesday brought chilly temperatures, with Patrick Cantlay donning a ski hat and Woods wearing rain paints for warmth. He played nine holes with Presidents Cup partner Justin Thomas (they're also together for the first two rounds, along with PGA Championship winner Collin Morikawa) and 2019 U.S. Amateur runner-up John Augenstein of Kentucky. The weekend forecast is for even cooler weather. "The golf course is going to be hard," said Woods. "It depends on how difficult they want to set up these pins, give us a chance at it. But with the forecast, it’s going to be difficult no matter what."
This week, a pair of highly ranked, inextricably linked Texans will tee it up in the event where they each debuted on the PGA TOUR, years before they became household names. In 2010, Jordan Spieth, then 16 and the reigning U.S. Junior Amateur champ, gave the hometown crowd in Dallas a glimpse of what awaited in the years to come. Not only did Spieth make the cut at the AT&T Byron Nelson, but he also stood inside the top 10 through 54 holes before ultimately finishing T16. Four years later, another reigning U.S. Junior Amateur champion from the Dallas area, Scottie Scheffler, made his first PGA TOUR start at the AT&T Byron Nelson. Not only did Scheffler, then 17, make the cut, but he also made a hole-in-one in the third round and finished T22. Both players would be named All-Americans at the University of Texas. In 2012, Spieth led the Longhorns to an NCAA team championship. Scheffler led Texas to a runner-up finish four years later. Spieth won a Green Jacket in his second Masters appearance. Scheffler did so in his third. Spieth ascended to world No. 1 in just 79 PGA TOUR starts – Scheffler got there in his 75th start, with a win in their old college town of Austin. Both players arrive this week having won their last stroke-play start – Scheffler at Augusta National, Spieth the following week at the RBC Heritage. Both will be among the favorites at next week’s PGA Championship at Southern Hills, where Spieth will try to complete the career Grand Slam, and Scheffler can become the first to win the season’s first two majors since – who else – Spieth in 2015. Let’s take stock of both players’ games entering their hometown event, the AT&T Byron Nelson. Scheffler’s breakout On the morning of Feb. 13, Scottie Scheffler was arguably the best American without a PGA TOUR win. He was locked in a four-way tie for third place entering the final round of the WM Phoenix Open, two shots behind 54-hole leader Sahith Theegala. Less than two months later, he had not only rattled off four PGA TOUR wins, he had become the emphatic No. 1 in the world – and a Masters champion on top of that. Scheffler is the first player to leave Augusta National with a Green Jacket and four wins already in that PGA TOUR season since Arnold Palmer in 1960. While Scheffler’s switch to veteran caddie Ted Scott deserves its due credit, analytically there have been some marked improvements that helped lead to his massive success this season. Scheffler was an above-average iron player last season, ranking a respectable 83rd on the PGA TOUR in Strokes Gained: Approach and 45th in greens in regulation. His performance has skyrocketed in both of those statistics this season: Scheffler is up to fourth in greens-in-regulation and 27th in Strokes Gained: Approach. The world No. 1 is gaining more than three times as many strokes with his approach play per round than last season – up from 0.15 to 0.50. A good amount of that can be credited to increased precision with his scoring clubs. From 50 to 125 yards away this season, Scheffler is averaging 3 feet closer than he did in 2020-21. That adds up to a 130-spot jump in that statistic, from 157th into the top-30. On the greens, the improvement has been even more drastic. Scheffler was ranked 107th on TOUR last season in Strokes Gained: Putting – just about breaking even with the field in that statistic. This season, he’s gaining 0.59 strokes per round on the greens, ranking 20th on the PGA TOUR. From 10-15 feet, Scheffler has jumped from 160th in the rankings to 10th. Scheffler’s performance with the driver this season has actually diminished some – a drop in accuracy has led to a significant decrease in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee. But his enormous leaps with his irons and putting have completely masked that numerical dip, giving Scheffler ample fuel for one of the best runs in recent PGA TOUR memory. Improvement off tee driving Spieth Over the last several seasons, Jordan Spieth has struggled with bouts of wildness off the tee. But improved accuracy and perhaps a more aggressive strategy are leading to gains in that part of Spieth’s week-to-week game. Spieth ranked well outside the top 100 in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee in both 2019-20 and 2020-21. While a good portion of that was due to his wildness off the tee (he ranked 181st and 180th those seasons in fairways hit), one could surmise that a hesitancy to pull driver as often also contributed to those lower Strokes Gained numbers. This season, Spieth is averaging a stout 310.5 yards on all tee shots on par 4s and par 5s, 10th-best on the PGA TOUR. That’s an increase of more than 15 yards (295.1) and 35 ranking spots (45th) over last season. This, despite clocking in with identical clubhead speeds each season, 114.59 mph in both 2020-21 and 2021-22. This would suggest that Spieth is choosing to hit driver more frequently, taking a more aggressive approach off the tee. Spieth’s moderate improvement in driving accuracy – from 54% to 58% of fairways hit – is not nearly as big a leap as he has taken in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee numbers. Spieth is ranked 39th in that stat this season, after sitting between 135th and 176th from 2018-19 to 2020-21. After the RBC Heritage last month, Spieth memorably said, “I won this golf tournament without a putter.” He wasn’t that far from the truth: Spieth ranked 60th in the field for the week in Strokes Gained: Putting at Harbour Town, the worst rank by a PGA TOUR winner in six years. For him to unlock his best self this summer, that facet of his game will undoubtedly need to get better: Spieth currently ranks 186th out of 210 qualified players in strokes gained on the greens per round. Both stars should be compelling viewing this week in their home state of Texas.
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – Stewart Cink has seen a lot, but at 47 he doesn’t always remember it, something he readily jokes about on Twitter. At the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town, he shot the fur off the course (a favorite Cink-ism) with twin 63s and then hung on over the weekend. His final-round 70, on a day when no one got closer than three strokes, got him to 19 under par and left him four clear of runners-up Emiliano Grillo (68) and Harold Varner III (66). What made this, his eighth win, stand out? “The fact that it happened at my age,” he said. But also, he added, the friends and family who were there to celebrate with him. Cink, who is the second two-time winner on TOUR this season after Bryson DeChambeau and moves from 26th to third in the FedExCup standings, celebrated the win with wife Lisa and their sons, Connor and Reagan (also Cink’s caddie), plus Connor’s fiancé and several friends. “Everything in between the shots,” Reagan said, when asked what he will remember about the win—his second with his dad this season. “Walking down the fairways, hanging out. We talk and we plan the shots and we’ve got a good system, but it’s just like the time we get to spend joking around walking down the fairway, it’s awesome. It’s the best. It really is.” What’s gotten into Stewart Cink? He talks about the importance of his team, and attributes his comeback season partly to his new trainer Cornel Driessen. With Driessen’s help, the veteran pro — Cink won the 1997 Travelers Championship the year Collin Morikawa was born — has actually gained distance despite being on the doorstep of PGA TOUR Champions eligibility. Cink was 144th in the FedExCup and 300th in the world after he missed the cut at the Wyndham Championship to end last season. He made a few equipment changes, became more efficient, and with Driessen gained so much strength and mobility he began to adopt a whole new style of play. “I was able to really kind of change my game into a little bit more of a power game,” he said. But nowhere was the change to Cink’s team more evident than with the guy carrying his bag as he won the season-opening Fortinet Open in Napa last fall — his first win in over 11 years. “He and I have always just been on the same wavelength,” Cink said of his son. “We’re kind of from the same DNA, and I mean literally like we are the same person. We think about things – we think about jokes, we notice the same funny stuff, we just pick up on the same kind of little details about things in our immediate surroundings.” Despite all that their arrangement was supposed to be temporary; Reagan, 23, is a newly minted Georgia Tech graduate (industrial engineering) who has been working in the flight operations department for Delta Airlines. He’s a scratch handicap and has his own life to lead. “The traveling and living in a circus out here like I’ve done for my whole adult life is made tolerable by being a player,” Cink said at the Sanderson Farms Championship last fall, when he and Reagan agreed that it would take a top-five finish for them to keep going (Cink finished T12). “If you’re playing, you’re kind of the top level of the wedding cake out here.” Cink went back to his main caddie, Kip Henley, and opened with scores of 67-63 at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Las Vegas. “I was like, it doesn’t matter who caddies for me right now, I’m just killing it!” Cink said Sunday with a laugh. Then he shot 70-81 on the weekend. He reunited with Reagan at the Bermuda Championship, but not for obvious reasons. Cink said Bermuda was going to be hard to get to and gave Henley the week off — and then finished T4 with his son back on the bag. Stewart and Reagan now seemed like too good a team to break up. “Our flight out of Bermuda was on Monday afternoon at like 3 p.m. because there weren’t any flights at the time because of COVID, so we had a long time to sit around the hotel room,” said Cink, the second oldest Heritage winner (Hale Irwin, 48). “Lisa was there, Reagan was there, and that Monday in the morning while we were waiting for our flight, we had a big team pow wow.” Cink told Reagan he wanted him on the bag at the Masters. Then he reconsidered. “I said, ‘You know what, come to think of it, how would you just like to caddie for this season?’” Cink said. “He said, ‘I’m so glad you asked.’” Reagan was supposed to start work in two days but called his team. Stewart, though, went straight to the top, placing a call to Delta CEO Ed Bastian — a friend, as luck would have it. “I didn’t ask Ed to do anything,” Cink said. “I just said, ‘Ed, if you were me, what do you think you would do?’ And he’s got grown daughters and I’ve got sons, and he said, ‘Stewart, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.’ I don’t think Ed would mind me quoting him. He said, ‘We love Reagan. We think Reagan is going to work at Delta for 40 years. “We don’t think waiting one more year is going to hurt, so let him caddie.’” Reagan, who is engaged to be married July 31st, will caddie for his dad through the FedExCup Playoffs. “And then I’ll be back on the caddie market or maybe retire,” Stewart said with a laugh. Not that anyone would let him. The best comeback story of this season just keeps getting better.
