– We are going to reduce the group of candidates for victory in the Genesis, with the pertinent caution that golf requires, to only six players. Patrick Cantlay (-14), of course, because he is the sole leader and has put himself in that mode in which he gets from time to time and which basically consists of seeming the best player in the world, for consistency and determination, even when he is not brilliant, which was the case yesterday, in the third round. You can see him in these first 54 holes and you really don’t understand that he only has six victories on the PGA Tour (not counting the one at Zurich, a pairs tournament, and the one at the 2021 Tour Championship, where he was not the one who scored the fewest strokes, although he won the Fedex Cup). Sometimes, of course, it’s not enough to seem the best for 54 holes…
The other five are Schauffele (-12), Zalatoris (-12), List (-11), English (-10) and Day (-10). Of all of them, although it may surprise at first glance, it is Luke List who has the most recent taste of victory, as he won the Sanderson Farms four months ago. Jason Day, who also won relatively recently (Byron Nelson 2023), does not end up seeing all the options, as he confessed yesterday, due to certain problems or doubts with the driver. He seems sincere and the statistics confirm it (yesterday he was 44th in the Strokes Gained Off the Tee statistic), but it is also not a bad thing to go under the radar…
– Perhaps Matsuyama (-8), Poston (-8) or Conners (-8) could be included among the candidates, who are the ones who come next, but, truthfully, it already seems a very forced scenario. Those who are sure not to be are the world’s Number One, Scottie Scheffler (-5) and Number 2, Rory McIlroy (-4). They are too far away on a course where the best card of the week has been Cantlay’s 64 in the first round. However, Rory also attended the media yesterday, probably because the media requested it. The Northern Irishman is the ‘big wildcard’, especially when Tiger is not around. And besides, Rory always has something interesting to say. Yesterday he went off the map.
– One thing led to another and in the end McIlroy, who does not usually shy away from any issue, again described the model that he has in his head of the new world order of high competition golf, if the longed-for agreement with the Saudis comes. This time he did it with more details. “I think all of this is now a chimera… But I think there should be a part in the southern hemisphere, Australia, South Africa. Obviously there would have to be another part in the Far East, whether it’s Korea, Japan or China. Another in the Middle East. We have been going to the Middle East for a long time: Dubai, Saudi Arabia… And then back to the United States for the spring and summer. I don’t think it would look very different from what it is now, but maybe the front and end of the year could be a little different,” he said, in one go.
In addition, when asked if these tournaments would count for the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, he specified: “I think it would be a single circuit, a single circuit would be created for the eighty best players in the world”. And again he established the comparison with the Champions League of European football “which would be above, feeding the other circuits”. Feeding and feeding off, it is understood.
As questions were posed to him, he went into more details of what he has in his head, which is probably also a sketch of projects that have already been or are going to be on the negotiating table with the Saudis. Yesterday, Rory spoke of a circuit that would be about 24 tournaments, including the four Majors, of which approximately half would be played in the United States, which after all, he said, is the most important market. Likewise, he also acknowledged that this week’s model, with a cut, seemed really satisfactory to him and that some of the tournaments of the new world circuit could or even should have it, those with the greatest historical load, for example.
In short, a really tempting sketch, although one would have to ask where you put LIV Golf in all this mess… On the other hand, it is also not understood that fixation for tournaments of seventy or eighty players. Would it be so difficult to take the project to a field of 108 or 114 players, for example, with the opportunities and dynamism that this ‘effort’ could bring? If you are going to establish a cut after the second round, at least in some tournaments, you really don’t understand the fixation on those eighty best in the world.
– Let’s close this Ras de Hierba with Will Zalatoris. Even he understands that his best version is coming sooner than expected, after all the physical problems he has suffered and that operation on his back less than a year ago. Whatever happens, his breakthrough is worthy of all celebration and more than newsworthy, considering the profound technical change he has had to work on in his swing, precisely to preserve his hips, the source of all his back problems. Do you remember that painful image of Zalatoris, when he had to withdraw from the 2022 BMW Championship? How curious, that was the last tournament that Cantlay won, today the top favourite… The twists and turns of life.
