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Still looking to make sense of the madness that took place Sunday afternoon at Carnoustie? Here are a few significant digits (metric system, this week) that you’re welcome to borrow the rest of the week.
0 — Number of bogeys Francesco Molinari made in his final 37 holes, nearly unthinkable given the pitfalls that await during every trip ’round Carnoustie, among the hardest links courses in the world.
1 — Number of Italian major champions as of 6:53 p.m. in Carnoustie, the moment Molinari officially became the British Open champion.
2 — Finishing position of Rory McIlroy, who put on a late charge after a rough Sunday start. It was the first major championship runner-up finish of McIlroy’s career
2.5 — Number of years Molinari plans to play until retirement, according to a hilarious list compiled by fellow Tour pro Wesley Bryan.
5 — Number of top-five finishes in Molinari’s last six starts; wins at the BMW Championship and Quicken Loans National plus runner-up finishes at the John Deere and the Italian Open had him red-hot entering this week.
https://twitter.com/TheOpen/status/1021091883462922241
6 — Players tied for the lead at one point during a rollicking back nine
7 — Number of different players that held a share of the lead on Sunday.
15 — Number of birdies made by Sam Locke, the 19-year-old Scottish amateur golfer (and professional barista). Only nine players made more birdies than Locke, who earned low am honors but was undone with a back-nine 42 on Sunday and slipped to a share of 75th.
27 — Number of players who finished under par for the week, up from 2007 at Carnoustie (19) and way up from 1999 (0).
30 — Spots that Eddie Pepperell jumped on Sunday after a final-round 67 left him as the early clubhouse leader despite being, as he said, “a little hungover.”
35 — Molinari’s age; he’s the youngest major winner since Sergio Garcia at the 2017 Masters and continues a trend of older British Open winners. Only three Open winners have been 32 or younger since 2007.
50 — Tiger Woods’s projected World Ranking after finishing T6; good enough to qualify for the WGC-Bridgestone in two weeks.
82 — The highest score of Sunday’s final round belonged to Zander Lombard, a relatively unknown South African who fell from the edge of contention to a share of 67th after a 40-42 effort on Sunday. His was the only final-round score in the 80s.
SOURCE: GOLF
Carnoustie, historically the toughest course in The Open’s rota, could see low scoring this week
CARNOUSTIE, Scotland – A record heat wave has tee shots at Carnoustie running faster than a caffeinated Usain Bolt.
Players are hitting as little as 7-iron off the tee, and even long-irons are crossing the 300-yard barrier. The toughest course in The Open’s rota is providing a different type of test this week.
“Car-nasty” became notorious in 1999, when lush rough and narrow fairways made the course near-impossible. The course was damp again in 2007. Even with easier conditions, 7 under par was Padraig Harrington’s winning score.
Now players will face a firm and fast Carnoustie on fairways that have been yellowed by a record heat wave in the United Kingdom.
Last month was the second-hottest June on record in the United Kingdom. Motherwell, Scotland, recently hit 91.8 degrees, the highest temperature ever recorded in Scotland.
“I don’t remember the last time we went six weeks without rain,” a British farmer recently told the New York Times. “Only a proper week of full-on British rain can save the situation now.”
That’s not in the forecast this week. Carnoustie has received half its usual rain over the past three months. There have been occasional sprinkles this week, but not enough to alter the conditions. The forecast for the remainder of the week calls for minimal precipitation.
That means the 7,402-yard course, the longest in The Open rota, will play significantly shorter. And the rough that tormented players in 1999 now offers little penalty because it is so dry and brittle. With well-watered greens and breezes that may not blow harder than 20 mph, there is some talk about an unprecedented week of scoring at Carnoustie. No one has finished double-digits under par in seven Opens here.
“When the wind is blowing, it is the toughest golf course in Britain,” said World Golf Hall of Fame member Sir Michael Bonallack. “And when it’s not blowing, it’s probably still the toughest.”
Some are comparing this week to 2006, when Tiger Woods won at Royal Liverpool. He hit driver just once on a course so parched that balls kicked up dust when they hit the turf. He shot 18 under par to beat Chris DiMarco by two shots.
This week, Woods put a new, lower-lofted 2-iron in his bag to send his tee shots scooting down the fairway. There’s one problem, though.
“I haven’t been able to use it that many times … because I’m hitting my other irons so far,” he said. That includes a 333-yard 3-iron on the 18th hole.
That hole used to play as a par-5. Now players who hit driver are left with little more than a pitch shot. Dustin Johnson drove it into the burn fronting the green. The 12-yard-wide hazard crosses the fairway 450 yards from the tee.
Along with the bothersome Barry Burn, which plays an outsized role for such a narrow hazard, it will be imperative for players to avoid Carnoustie’s penal pot bunkers.
“I haven’t seen one yet that … I could actually hit it on the green out of,” Dustin Johnson said.
Carnoustie’s bunkers, among the toughest in the British Isles, are comparable to miniature water hazards because both hand out a one-shot penalty. Some of the vertical faces are 6 feet tall. The bunkers are so small that players are often left with awkward stances, and the ball is so close to the face that it’s impossible to do much more than pitch out.
Johnny Miller lost the 1975 Open here when he needed two shots to get out of a fairway bunker on the 18th hole. He made bogey to fall one short of the playoff won by Tom Watson.
There are, however, a few opportunities for long hitters to blow their tee shots over the traps because the rough is of little concern. On other holes, it is better to lay back short of the bunkers.
“There’s 5,000 different ways … to play these holes out here,” Reed said. The safe play often leaves a more difficult approach shot, though.
“There’s no perfect strategy that eliminates risk,” said Harrington. “It’s very difficult to play short of the bunkers all the time. The beauty of the course is that there are a lot of different ways of playing it, but eventually you’re going to have to grow up and hit the shots.”
Players will certainly have plenty of decisions to make. Carnoustie has just three par-3s, leaving players with 15 tee shots on par-3s and par-4s. They may be hitting wood off the tee of the 248-yard 16th, as well. Jack Nicklaus hit driver into that hole in the 1968 Open.
Choosing a club isn’t the only challenge. Trajectory will have an outsized effect on the distance shots travel.
During Tuesday’s practice round, Reed hit two tee shots with 6-iron on the 16th, which was playing downwind. The “chipped” shot, the one he hit with 70 percent of his strength, rolled 40 yards past the shot he hit with a full swing.
“Trajectory means a lot,” Woods said. He didn’t foresee a lot of opportunities to hit driver because it is so difficult to control a ball that rolls on Carnoustie’s sloping fairways for 60 or more yards. But U.S. Open champion Brooks Koepka said he could hit up to 9 drivers.
“Sometimes we can just take all the bunkers out (of play) by hitting driver,” he said. “There’s no reason not to take advantage of that, especially with the rough being not so thick.”
Source: PGATour.com
On his first day of retirement, John Peterson drove an hour and a half from The Greenbrier to Roanoke, Va., flew to New York City, waited out a three-hour delay at LaGuardia, stomached some greasy airport food, tried to soothe his howling 8-month-old son on the entire flight home to Fort Worth (while apologizing to every passenger within earshot) and then stood around for more than an hour to get his luggage and golf travel bag, which, come to think of it, he probably won’t need for a while.
“That’s about the worst part of the whole deal,” he said by phone Tuesday. “I was in a bad mood the entire day.”
Traveling and being away from his young family is the biggest reason why Peterson – 29 years old and in the prime of his career – is choosing to walk away from the PGA Tour, after he failed, in excruciating fashion, to earn the necessary FedExCup points to keep conditional status.
The past few years have been stressful for the free-spirited Peterson – his house flooded and his wrist ached, his desire waned and his family expanded – and so was the final day of his season. The Tour had sent him a message in March, detailing the various checkpoints to secure his status for the rest of the season, or perhaps even a full card for 2019. Peterson admittedly didn’t pay close enough attention to the figures, because he operated the past few months with the wrong information.
The Greenbrier was the final start of his major medical extension, which dated to his recovery from wrist surgery in 2016. He thought he needed $60,000 for conditional status; in reality, he had to earn 55.33 FedExCup points, or the equivalent of a six-way tie for 13th.
“I really wanted to give it everything I had last week,” he said. “I totally expected to do it.”
And yet many wondered: Did he actually want to do it?
All year the 2011 NCAA champion had been torn between two career paths. Because of his status, he usually played only one tournament a month, leaving plenty of time for him to make inroads in his next career, in real estate and business development. Then, a week or two before his next scheduled start, he’d return to the range and try to sharpen his game, usually with uninspiring results.
“It definitely was awkward,” he said, “because I’ve had to make plans for both.”
His best result this season was a tie for 43rd at the Wells Fargo Championship, where he held the first-round lead and stunned reporters with his honesty. About how he didn’t need golf to be happy. How he wasn’t cut out for Tour life. How he had no regrets.
Freewheeling, he still didn’t play well enough to prolong his season. And so, with his career seemingly coming to an end, his family gathered last week in the mountains of West Virginia.
“Starting on Tuesday, I had never felt so much pressure in my entire life,” he said. “That’s the opposite of how I thought I’d feel. I really wasn’t worried about it. I did everything I could and prepared like I was going there to win. But I’d never really felt pressure like that before in my life. Maybe it was because my whole family was there, or probably because it’s my last one unless I played great. But I was just in a different spot mentally.
“I probably needed to feel it more often, because it seemed to work for my game. Throughout my career, whenever I had to play good, I always did. Maybe I should have stopped dilly-dallying in the middle of the season years ago. I took it for granted, I guess. But when my back is against the wall, I’ve always played pretty well.”
Battling to make the cut last Friday, he double-bogeyed his 17th hole to fall one off the projected number. “Gotta make birdie here or this is all she wrote,” he told his brother-in-law/temporary caddie, Brice Wells. On The Old White TPC’s ninth hole, Peterson piped his drive, wedged to 7 feet and hearted the birdie putt to play the weekend.
“Screw it,” he said. “Might as well do the whole thing now.”
Believing that he needed a top-25 finish to earn conditional status, he sat in a tie for 38th after a Saturday 68.
“I was all business Sunday, more than I ever have been,” he said. “Usually when I’m 35th or something going into the day, it’s just like la-di-da. But that day, I woke up and I said, ‘I’m doing this. I’m not going to half-ass a single shot.’”
And he didn’t. Peterson made five birdies in the first 12 holes, and when he glanced at the leaderboard on 16, he saw that he was in 22nd place. He thought he was safe. He hit “the best 3-wood of my life” on 17, a 290-yard missile to set up another birdie, then sank a 6-footer for par on the final green to shoot 66 and post 9 under, in a tie for 13th place – his best finish on Tour in 16 months.
“Hell of a job, dude,” Peterson’s playing partner, Roberto Diaz, told him. “See you in a couple of weeks.”
“I thought that I’d done it, no problem, even gave a fist pump,” Peterson said. “And then they get into the tent and said, ‘It’s going to be close.’ They told me what I really needed. It just sucked.”
Monitoring the standings in the clubhouse, Peterson could only watch as Keegan Bradley and Bubba Watson both drained putts from outside 15 feet on the final hole to join the logjam in 13th place.
Peterson would have secured conditional status with a six-way tie for 13th, but not eight. He missed by 0.58 FedExCup points – or a single shot over the course of a season.
Two days later, he was still miffed by the final result.
“I looked on the FedExCup standings from last year, and they don’t even show decimal points,” Peterson said. “How they figure I miss by half a point is ridiculous to me. It’s just a bad way to end it.
“Half a point will never define that day at all for me. In my mind, I did what I had to do and doubled it.”
Even with the sour ending, The Greenbrier was one of the most satisfying tournaments of his seven-year career. It wasn’t just the clutch shots he summoned under pressure; it was the reaction from his peers that was most heartening. Veterans from Charles Howell III to Sam Saunders to Kevin Na stopped him and told him, “Dude, you’re way too good to not be out here.”
“I’ve never cared about what anybody else thought,” Peterson said, “and some guys maybe admire that. Because from the outside perspective, it looks like I’m throwing away all of this – the cool spots and the courtesy cars and the millions of dollars. But if you’ve played the Tour at all, you know how hard it is, and you know what a rough lifestyle it can be, especially if you miss three or four cuts in a row.
“So it was cool to see the support, because I didn’t even know that anyone else cared if I was there or not. It almost seemed like some of them wanted me to make it more than I did.”
Peterson’s plans for the next few months are fluid. One of his best friends, Chris Powers, has built a real-estate empire in Fort Worth, and Peterson wanted in. He’s in the process of buying a duplex near the TCU campus, which he’ll then demo and rebuild into a bigger student-housing complex. He’s also eyeing a couple of other projects, including some ranching properties in west Texas.
Golf will continue to be a part of Peterson’s life, only differently. Over the past few months he’s had long chats with Charles Warren, who banked $5 million as a full-time Tour player from 2005-10 but quit in his prime to spend more time with his family. Warren still plays a lot of recreational golf but hasn’t once regretted his decision. Peterson needed to hear that.
One of the reasons he recently rediscovered his passion for the game is the spirited money matches at Shady Oaks. A few months ago, Peterson faced a thousand-dollar putt, a 7-footer on punched greens that he needed to start outside the hole. “And before the 18th green on Sunday,” he said, “the biggest amount of pressure I’d had was that putt at Shady Oaks.”
He holed both.
As much as Sunday felt like the end, Peterson hasn’t officially retired, at least not yet. He’s currently 184th in FedExCup points; if he remains in the top 200 through the end of the regular season (six events remain), then he’d “consider” playing the Web.com Finals, during which he could earn a full Tour card for next season.
“It’d be kind of stupid to not play those if you’re in them,” he said, “because if you get hot for a week, you’re back on the PGA Tour and I can play 20 events a year and shut it down.”
That, of course, would put him in the same predicament as this year, with the grind and the travel and the time away from family.
“If I did it, I’d play the most limited schedule,” he said. “I would do it just because I know I can still play. I may not like it as much as I used to, and I may not like the travel at all, but if I can still compete – which I proved to myself that I really can if I apply myself – then I’d stick it out for 20 events. That’s still more than half the year at home and to work on other projects. I’d be like Steve Stricker, only 20 years younger.”
And he readily admits: Had last week gone differently – had he whiffed the birdie putt to miss the cut on Friday, had he missed the 6-footer for par on Sunday to get oh-so close, had he not heard the demoralizing news in the scoring tent – he wouldn’t have even considered this plan.
“We’d be done,” he said. “And if it doesn’t go my way at Web Finals” – assuming he gets in at all – “then 100 percent, that’s it.”
But now …
Well, now, Peterson will keep track of the FedExCup to see where he stands and if he needs to start preparing. He knows he’ll probably finish right around the cutoff. Just as the Tour official told him in the scoring tent Sunday, it’s going to be close.
“Maybe this time,” he said with a chuckle, “that half-point swing is in my favor.”
Source: Golf Channel
