– Ludvig Aberg is one of the 22 players who are playing the THE PLAYERS for the first time this year. He started yesterday with a scorecard of 67 strokes, in which two eagles stand out on holes 16 and 2. And it’s not that he plugged in two big shots, it’s that he left it very close in both cases, just over two meters on the 16 and about three and a half meters on the 2… This thing about eagles is just an anecdote, a conjunction of great play, efficiency on the greens and, sometimes, even a bit of luck. But then you have to go out there and make them… Aberg already has two in a single round on the Stadium course at TPC Sawgrass and Scottie Scheffler, we’re not talking about just anyone, has only made one in eleven competition rounds.
Much more important, even, than the Swedish player’s eagles is to delve a little deeper into his numbers and realise that he was able to get 100 percent of his recoveries (4/4) and that he left a good handful of excellent birdie options on the way.
As is well known, the young Swede entered the top 100 in the world for the first time last Monday. He is the 120th player to enter such an exclusive club in the history of the world ranking, which is now 38 years old (1986). Only 120 have achieved this in this time, so it must not be very simple. The peculiar thing about the matter, like almost everything in the explosive emergence of this player in the world golf elite, is that Aberg has not yet played a single Major, he is going to make his debut in this year’s Masters, in a few weeks. We are not revealing any secret, it is obvious, but it is still dizzying. Everything is as wonderful as it is bizarre in the incipient career of this young man, who has not even been a professional for a year, being precisely a player who has nothing extravagant, very ‘predictable’ in excellence due to the great consistency of his game.
– Scheffler said, just after winning the Arnold Palmer, that he wanted to learn to enjoy victories a little more, that sometimes he felt he did not value them enough. Yesterday, after signing an excellent 67, which again puts him in the breach, he was asked if he was really able to celebrate as he deserved the victory at Bay Hill. His answer: “it’s not easy to celebrate when you have another tournament right next week, as was the case. We had fun on Sunday night, but I had to prioritise preparation for this week…” In the end, the goat goes to the mountain, as you can see. And Scottie finished off between ironic and joker: “It was some burgers, a bit of sparkling water, a bit of cranberry juice… It was tremendous”.
– Will it be Xander Schauffele’s week? The Californian gets tired of closing very solid weeks (this year, without going any further, he already adds four top ten in six tournaments) and for now he has started as co-leader in this THE PLAYERS, but he has already said recently that all this is very well, but that it is time to win more tournaments. Schauffele believes that this is exactly what he lacks to be considered an extraordinary player and, the truth is, you have to agree with him, but without going too crazy either, since his career already includes victories of enormous weight. By the way, it causes some perplexity that this is the second time in his career that he leads a PGA Tour tournament after 18 holes (the first time was in last year’s US Open), although it is just a detail of no importance.
– To be absolutely perplexed, in any case, nothing like knowing the incredible story that Matt Fitzpatrick discovered yesterday. The Englishman, who closed yesterday with a splendid round of 66 strokes, now feels very comfortable with the driver in his hands and acknowledged that he had been without it for a year and that it was recently, in Phoenix, where they realised the problem. It’s to see it, hear it, and not believe it: it turns out that in February 2023 Fitzpatrick did some tests with his irons and his driver, adding some weight to the grip. With the irons the experiment worked well for a few weeks, but not with the driver, and for some reason that no one understands, not even him, that weight (about four extra grams) stayed there. Fitzpatrick has felt all this time that as soon as he wanted to hit it very hard his ball went to the left, but it was not until the moment of changing the grip, a few weeks ago, when the guys from Titleist warned him, hey, do you know you have a weight here?…
“I almost had a heart attack,” the English player said yesterday with grace. And it was to remove it and regain normality and confidence with this club. It’s crazy. And even crazier is the fact that he won at Harbour Town and the Alfred Dunhill Links with the damn weight in the driver’s grip. “I wouldn’t say I did well for a while with that weight there, maybe I would have won four tournaments without having it,” explained Fitzpatrick himself, also clarifying that no one has been fired from his work group for the mistake: “No, absolutely not, it was as much my fault as anyone else’s, so that possibility was not there”.
