While we’ve enjoyed spring-like weather in Lake County since the onset of 2015, the Midwest and the East have suffered through a most difficult winter once again. Yet the spring season is on the horizon for those suffering folks. When you grow up in those colder climates, you can always tell when spring begins. It starts just about the time the magnolias are in full bloom in Augusta, Georgia, and the big stars of the golfing world tee it up at the Masters golf tournament.
At this moment we’re just a mere three weekends of tournament golf removed from the first major championship of the year. This week the PGA Tour visits Arnie’s tournament at Bay Hill. The following two weeks feature the world of big oil and Texas as the tour goes to San Antonio for the playing of the Valero Texas Open and then heads southeast across the state for the Shell Houston Open. After that, the quest for the green jacket commence on April 9.
With the relatively new wrap-around schedule on the PGA Tour, which started at the Frys.com in early October in Napa and concludes with the playing of the Tour Championship in mid-September at Atlanta, the Masters is pretty much the midpoint of the 2014-2015 season. Thus far the big boys on the world’s richest circuit have competed in 18 tournaments. And 18 events into this season there are no prevailing themes, no obvious favorites and no real direction to take in assessing this year’s PGA Tour.
During the course of the first 18 events, there have been 18 different winners. Six of those champions are first-time winners on the PGA Tour. The first-time champs range in age from 24 to 44 years old. Two of those first-time winners do have a background on the European Tour and have won on that circuit. The other four would be difficult to pick out of a lineup of young guys wearing golf hats. Among those who have previous victories on the PGA Tour, the age range of that group is from 21 to 43. Only two of those 12 golfers have a grand slam title on their golfing resume. A couple of the victors have just two total PGA Tour wins although one of the old-timers has more than 30 victories worldwide. In the end, what I’m trying to say is that there is no obvious favorite going into this year’s Masters. It will most probably be a most wide-open affair.
Ben Martin, Robert Streb, Nick Taylor and James Hahn are all first-time winners this year. Martin, Streb and Taylor won during the early portion of the fall season at Las Vegas, Sea Island, Georgia and Jackson, Mississippi respectively. Hahn outlasted an all-star leader board to win in Los Angeles last month. Brooks Koepka and Alex Cejka won for the first time in America although both have victories on the European Tour. The 24-year-old Koepka won in Turkey last fall while the 44-year-old Cejka has four career wins on the European circuit.
Among the winners this past season with a resume of past victories, Sangmoon Bae and Jordan Spieth have two career wins while Jason Day has a total of three. Patrick Reed has four total wins. All are 20-somethings with Spieth leading the talent brigade at age 21. A fivesome of 30-somethings are well known to fans of the game, have multiple wins on tour and just might be good enough to break through with a first major triumph at Augusta National next month. They include four-time winners Ryan Moore and Jimmy Walker, putting genius and seven-time tour winner Brandt Snedeker, six-time champion and past Fed Ex Cup winner Bill Haas, and perhaps the most talented member of this grouping with nine victories, 30-year-old Dustin Johnson. Also among this group is 38-year-old Charley Hoffman, who now has short hair, has exactly two victories on his golfing resume, and is perhaps quite fortunate to have won the Mayakoba Classic in Mexico the week after the World Golf Championships tournament was contested in China. Most of the big boys took that week off, leaving the door wide open for Hoffman to burst through. Where have you been all these years, Charley?
As I mentioned earlier, only two of the 18 PGA Tour winners of 2014-2015 have a major championship in their background. In fact, these two linksters have five grand slam titles combined. Bubba Watson is the defending Masters champion and has won the green jacket twice. Alas, Bubba has thus far won the Masters in even-numbered years, so maybe he has to wait until 2016 until he can get a third major title. The nature of Bubba’s game is such that the Masters seems to be the only major he is capable of winning. That’s not a terrible thing as most pros can’t win any majors. Yet he can’t keep the ball on the narrow fairways at the United States Open and the PGA Championship and he has a difficult time dealing with the vagaries of the British Open let alone finding his way across the pond. Bubba could win the 2015 Masters and has to be considered one of the favorites, but one can never tell with the zany but gifted one.
The other past major champion who has won this year is Ireland’s Padraig Harrington. Harrington is 43 years old, has a pair of British Opens and a PGA Championship to his name, and hadn’t won on tour since 2009. His victory at the Honda Classic at the beginning of the Florida swing was as out-of-nowhere at Hoffman’s win in Mexico. I have always been a big fan of Harrington, but it is reasonable to expect that his win in Palm Beach last month was perhaps the last gasp of a future Hall of Fame career. In fact, Harrington just might be the last victor among the members of the Tiger Woods-Phil Mickelson-Ernie Els-Vijay Singh generation.
The 2014-2015 wraparound campaign has been a tightly contested one. Eight of the 18 tourneys have been decided by sudden-death playoffs and five of the last seven have gone into overtime. And yet there is no prevailing theme to this year. The new breed has won. The golfers in the prime of their career have won. A pair of guys ages 43 and 44 have been victorious. No one has won more than once. Nine of the 18 linksters have competed in the Ryder Cup or the Presidents Cup, but that isn’t always indicative of major championship success. No one has stepped to the forefront on the PGA Tour thus far and if the season ended tomorrow, it would be hard to determine a golfer of the year.
Thankfully we’re simply close to the midpoint of this year’s campaign. Yet it might take up until Sunday evening at the Masters to have any sort of inkling regarding the top golfer of 2015.
