The weather provided a bunch of starts and stops during the Players Championship earlier this week. The weather conditions, which included heavy rains alongside ever-changing winds, resulted in a Sunday cut and a late Monday finish. The luck of the draw was crucial when it came to surviving the cut. Golfers of note such as Brooks Koepka, Jordan Spieth, Jason Day and Collin Morikawa played during the toughest of times and missed the cut. For a while it seemed more like the British Open than the Players Championship as golfers ripped a 6-iron on the 17th hole island green where normally a wedge is the club of choice. It was true carnage.
Australian Cameron Smith, who lives about five miles away from TPC Sawgrass these days, was the last man standing Monday evening when a winner was finally declared. His victory in the 2022 Players Championship is Smith’s most important win of note in a career that has blossomed during the past three months.
Cameron Smith is not exactly one of those household names that would get an invite onto Greg Norman’s Saudi Golf League. He was a youthful phenom in Australia, winning the Australian Boys Amateur as a 17-year-old in 2011 and then capturing the prestigious Australian Amateur Stroke Play Championship later that summer. Nonetheless he was accomplishing all this Down Under, far removed from the intense amateur competition one would face in Europe and America. As a 19-year-old Cameron won the 2013 Australian Amateur Match Play and then decided to turn professional. He played the rest of that year on the Australian Tour and in 2014 he started teeing it up on the Asian Tour.
His big break came in the fall of 2014 when he entered the CIMB Classic in Kuala Lampur. The CIMB is a tournament that is jointly on the schedule of the Asian Tour as well as the PGA Tour. He played well that week and finished in fifth place. In the spring of 2015 Cameron traveled to America. He received a sponsor’s exemption into the PGA Tour event at Harbour Tour and then decided to attempt to qualify for the United States Open. He finished 15th at Harbour Town and got into the U.S. Open at Chambers Bay in Washington. While everyone else was focused on eventual champion Jordan Spieth and runner-up Dustin Johnson, Cameron ended up coming in fourth. He received exempt status on the PGA Tour for the remainder of the year and was able to keep his card for the wraparound 2015-16 season.
Cameron Smith’s first PGA Tour win came in the spring of 2017. It was that rare moment on the PGA Tour where he had a lot of help with his inaugural victory. The Zurich Classic in New Orleans is the tour’s only team event and Smith teamed up with Jonas Blixt of Sweden for the win. That victory got him a two-year exemption on tour and he has never looked back. That December in Australia Cameron won the Australian PGA and repeated the feat in December of 2018, successfully defending his title. That notoriety was enough for Smith to play for the International Squad at the 2019 President’s Cup Matches at Royal Melbourne for Captain Ernie Els. Smith went 1-1-1 in those matches and beat Justin Thomas in the Sunday singles.
In January of 2020 Cameron captured his first individual title on the PGA Tour by winning the Hawaiian Open. Four months later he teamed up with fellow Aussie Marc Leishman to win a second two-man title at the Zurich of New Orleans. He surprised the golfing world this past January by winning the Tournament of Champions at Kapalua. It wasn’t surprising that he won. It was surprising that he shot a PGA Tour-record 34-under-par for 72 holes. Smith seemed to make every putt he needed to and it was obvious he was one of the tour’s top putters.
At TPC Sawgrass last week, Smith one-putted eight of the last nine greens. He hit a crazy good shot onto the island green on 17 and made the birdie putt. On the final hole he punched out from the right rough, only to watch the ball cross the fairway and go into the lake. With the Players Championship on the line, Cameron hit a 55-yard wedge to three feet and sank the putt to prevail by one stroke over Anirban Lahiri and by two strokes over Paul Casey. The $3.6 million payout to Cameron Smith is the largest in PGA Tour history.
Golf is a hard game to prognosticate but it certainly seems as if Cameron Smith is an up-and-coming star who is just now entering his prime. He appears to be the second coming of Ben Crenshaw with his silky smooth putting stroke. He describes his style as a “freewheel putting stroke” and he marks his golf ball with a purply-pink marker in tribute to his favorite Australian rugby team, the Brisbane Broncos. He’ll definitely play in the Presidents Cup this fall.
The Players Championship was not without its share of controversy. On Friday Keegan Bradley marked his ball on the green, but didn’t move the ball. A gust of wind moved his ball and Bradley picked it up and replaced it. He incurred a two-stroke penalty because when the elements impact the position of the ball, the golfer must live with its results, whether it is to his benefit or not. Bradley got upset about the penalty and lashed out at the USGA. That rule came into effect in January of 2019 and Bradley proved once again that PGA Tour pros who have millions of dollars in their bank accounts are still capable of incurring penalties for rules violations that most high school golfers are fully aware of.
Daniel Berger was involved in a controversy on Monday when he sliced his ball into the water on the 16th hole. Berger thought the ball went into the water near the green whereas playing partners Viktor Hovland and Joel Dahmen contended that his ball landed in the water a good 30 yards short of the green. It’s hard to be deadly accurate at those moments, especially when balls are travelling 250 yards toward the water. Berger ended up taking the farther-away drop.
Finally, five-time PGA Tour champion and three-time Ryder Cup member Johnny Pott weighed in on the week of carnage at TPC Sawgrass. Pott told me that he was sure that golf course architect Pete Dye “is looking down with a smile as the players are experiencing the course’s true test.” Dye has always been a proponent of the “tough par” and the 2022 version of the Players Championship certainly did provide a unique experience this time around for golf’s strongest tournament field. Hats off to Cameron Smith for surviving long enough to win.
