ONE of the many frustrations with the present state of professional golf is the narrow focus on the biggest names of the game’s decision-makers. LIV Golf, for example, would like to have none but the world’s top-ranked players in its fields and the PGA Tour has responded to LIV by creating a series of signature events which feature only its elite players.
This concentration of the world’s finest players event after event threatens both self-implosion and also the romance of the sport. Of the former risk, consider World Series Cricket, the breakaway operation which no doubt hastened the improvement of cricket as a spectacle in the 1970s but which also absolutely exhausted its players. They not only became sick of the endless demands of performing at world class level but increasingly found that they couldn’t maintain them.
Of the latter, consider the case of the Frenchman Matthieu Pavon who could surely never have fathomed the direction his life was about to take when he carded a 77 to miss the cut in his national championship last September, a sixth straight failure to crack the top 40, four of which were missed cuts. Not that the 31-year-old is a mug. He joined the DP World Tour in 2017, he retained the card ever since with relatively little fuss, but a first win had proved stubbornly elusive and it must have seemed a very distant prospect four months ago.
But in his next start he was sixth in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, a week after that he won the Open de Espana, he backed it up with a top 10 in the Andalucia Masters, led the Nedbank Challenge at halfway and shared the first round lead in the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai.
It was a wonderfully flabbergasting about turn in form and yet still, as he hit the 15th tee in the final round of that season-ending event, he needed another four birdies to claim one of the 10 PGA Tour cards on offer to the highest ranked players not already exempt.
“Then everything clicked,” he explained later, of the magical quartet of par breakers that followed. “I slowed down, dropped some putts, hit some pretty good shots and ended up needing to hole a life-changing putt at the last.”
He drained it and was soon opening his rookie season in America with seventh place in the Sony Open and then, at the end of last month, he became the first French winner on the PGA Tour in the Farmers Insurance Open.
“I spent seven years battling on the DP World Tour to get my first win,” he explained after lifting the trophy. “Getting it proved to me that I’m capable to do great things. Since Dubai I’m on a cloud, I’m flying. Being here has been a dream since I first came to West Palm Beach aged 16. I loved everything about America – the mentality, the sport, everything you guys do. It feels like I’m an American somehow.”
Last week in Bahrain, Pavon’s compatriot Mike Lorenzo Vera talked movingly about his friend. “He has worked so hard for this,” he said. “No, not hard: really hard. He has been working his ass off and we saw the difference in him at the end of last year in Europe. He came to the course and it was like he was suddenly 2.5 metres tall.
“I have seen him work for a long time and I saw no new process, but I think he has been talking to himself differently and now you see what happens, you see his talent.
“It is also nice that he has a little bit of revenge on some very high up people in French golf who underestimated him publicly and he has proved them wrong. Not just wrong but very wrong. I am super happy for him doing that.”
Pavon’s tale has resonated around the sport. Fans like it. The media like it. Fellow players like it. But if all fields were elite we would not see its like. So let’s beware the brave new world and crack on with three picks for this week’s WM Phoenix Open in the Arizona desert.
The tournament is known for the febrile atmosphere of the stadium par-3 16th hole and the exciting nature of the final few holes of the host course, TPC Scottsdale, which calls for bold decisions and high quality shot execution. It has suited players who have won, or will go on to win, major championships. Nine of the last 11 winners fit this bill including Scottie Scheffler who seeks a hat trick of wins this week. His 11/2 price is a little skinny, for all that magnificent course form, so we’ll look elsewhere.
Justin Thomas
Thomas has finished top six in each of his last four starts and last week was the first time in three years that he has gained over two strokes on the field with his approaches. That bodes well for this week and a course where he has finished top 10 in each of his last six starts, including twice third and fourth last year – moreover the most consistently good approach work of his career has been in Scottsdale.
Tom Kim
The Korean fits into the “might go on to win a major” category. He also likes playing in front of an excitable crowd and on a test that call for bold shot selection. He’s a two-time winner in the desert in Las Vegas.
Sahith Theegala
The attraction of the American, who won a first PGA Tour title last September, is that his breakthrough really should have come here in 2022 when he had the destiny of the trophy in his hands with a handful of holes to play but finished third. Such memories can fuel the best of players and can do so for Theegala who was second at Plantation in the first start of the year and 20th last week.
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