PHILADELPHIA — The top 70 golfers on the PGA Tour were in the Philadelphia area last weekend for the playing of the BMW Championship. It was stage three of the Fed Ex Cup playoffs and the big boys were teeing it up at Aronimink Golf Club, a historic Donald Ross design that was founded in 1896 and has hosted the PGA Championship, Senior PGA, the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Junior and will be hosting the LPGA Championship in 2020 and the PGA Championship in 2027.
The top 70 were fighting for their Fed Ex Cup playoff lives as only the low 30 professionals would advance to next weekend’s Tour Championship at East Lake Country Club in Atlanta. There were a few shocks, such as Keegan Bradley winning the BMW and jumping to sixth on the points list while former Fed Ex Cup champion and three-time major winner Jordan Spieth ended up on the outside looking in when he finished in 31st place.
Yet the most eye-popping statistic of the week revolved around Keegan Bradley. A former major titlist with his victory in the 2011 PGA Championship as a 25-year-old, Keegan has been lost in space since the PGA Tour adopted the no-anchoring putter rule in 2016. Like Webb Simpson, Keegan began using the long putter at a young age. He wasn’t one of those typical long putter golfers who went to the broomstick when their stroke with a regular length putter started getting twitchy. Yet at the start of the 2016 season he showed an inability to adapt to the different mandated putting style.
A regular on the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup teams from 2012 through 2014, Bradley started to fall away from the game’s top echelon. In 2016 he was 114th on the tour’s money list. The following season he somewhat righted the ship and finished in 51st place in earnings. Still it was a far cry from those earlier campaigns when he finished 13th on the money list in 2011 followed by 10th in 2012 and 11th in 2013. Since the start of the anchored putting ban in 2016, Keegan has only played in one World Golf Championship event (the 2018 Match Play), hasn’t received a Masters invite in 2017 and 2018, and didn’t get into the British Open in 2017. He had a best finish of a tie for 42nd place at the PGA Championship this year, one of the three major titles he entered.
Going into the BMW Championship, Bradley was second on tour in iron play, sixth in tee to green accuracy, 15th ranked in driving accuracy, and 28th in hitting greens in regulation. Yet when it comes to the short game, Bradley was ranked 110th in short game scrambling. Most glaring, he was the 186th ranked putter on the PGA Tour this year. For those of you who are stats-junkies or evalumetrics experts, it had to be almost improbable for Keegan Bradley to still be a part of the Fed Ex Cup playoffs. After all, close to half the strokes a top professional golfer ends up taking during the course of a competitive round come from that short wedge or chipping range as well as on the greens. When your short game has you in 110th place and your putter has you ranked 186th in the world of gifted linksters, it’s hard to imagine how you could even be in the top 70 let alone somewhere among the top 125 exempt golfers.
The stats pretty much show that Keegan Bradley can hit a bunch of fairways, hit a bunch of greens, constantly two-putt when he has reasonable birdie chance, and can’t get up and down with any degree of proficiency when he happens to occasionally miss a green in regulation.
Yet last week the stars were totally aligned on Keegan’s behalf. The 186th-best putter on the PGA Tour this year finished first in putting statistics last week at the Aronimink Golf Club. True, saturated grounds were the order of the day as the Philadelphia area was hit with an array of heavy rainstorms. The pros played lift, clean, and place if their ball was in the fairway, and since Bradley hits more fairways than most, he wasn’t trying to bash muddy golf balls out of the rough very often. Also, because Keegan hits a hot of greens in regulation, he could basically fire away at the pins because the saturated greens were kindly holding all week long. Donald Ross greens are historically difficult with multiple levels and undulations, yet if the greens are super wet like they were last week, then the ball won’t roll out. In the case of Bradley, it was almost like throwing darts. He had more than his fair share of short putts for birdie. He also had a few magic moments and made some bomb putts. And he caught a break or two as runner-up Justin Rose bogeyed his final hole Sunday to fall into a playoff with Bradley and then bogeyed the first playoff hole to lose the BMW title.
So now Keegan Bradley has his name on the BMW Championship trophy. Well, sort of. The trophy Bradley received at the awards ceremony last Sunday dates back to 1899. That would seem to be a bit of a head-scratcher since the automobile hadn’t been invented in 1899 and the Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) Corporation wasn’t founded until 1916. However, the 2018 version of the BMW Championship is a tournament that has morphed from the original Western Open. Several times over the course of the broadcast last weekend, golf’s talking heads mentioned that the BMW was the second-oldest professional tournament in the history of American golf and was the third-oldest pro tourney of all time after the British Open and the United States Open.
Prior to World War I, the four most prestigious tournaments in golf were the British Open, the U.S. Open, the Canadian Open and the Western Open. The Western Open was run by the Western Golf Association of Golf, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Western was a most popular PGA Tour event and most of its tournaments rotated throughout the Chicago area. It spent numerous years at Butler National and Cog Hill, and on several occasions in the 1960s and 1970s it was contested at Beverly Country Club, the course I caddied at as a youth.
Since 2007 it has been the third stage tournament of the Fed Ex Cup series and while the Western Open trophy is still given out, the name of the game’s third-oldest golf championship has disappeared. So too has the Chicago connection as it has recently been contested in Philly, Indianapolis, Denver and St. Louis. The Western and the BMW continue to have the Chick Evans Scholars Foundation as its principal charity, something that has been a tournament tradition since the 1930s. Yet older than the Western trophy is the mantra to drive for show and putt for dough. The putter is the reason that Keegan Bradley is the BMW champion.
