By Brian Wacker
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, goes the saying. Which Brooks Koepka considers Dustin Johnson in that equation isn’t entirely clear, but this much is certain: Johnson has become Koepka’s latest target, for his game and with his words.

“I like my chances,” Koepka said after a one-under 69 in the third round of the PGA Championship put him two strokes behind Johnson. “When I’ve been in this position before, I’ve capitalised. I don’t know, [DJ’s] only won one.”

Ding, ding.

Earlier in the week, Koepka declared that the friendship with his fellow Bash Bro was essentially a media fabrication, overblown and not accurate. His crew, he said, is not made up of fellow players. He often plays practice rounds on the PGA Tour alone.

If there was still any question about Koepka’s priorities on tour, his comments Saturday should remove any doubt. He is here to win majors, not friends.

It’s an approach that isn’t directed exclusively at Johnson, either. Among those lurking another stroke back are Jason Day and Justin Rose, both major winners with stout resumes and a proven ability to withstand the final-round cauldron of such events.

But it has been five years since Day won the PGA and seven years since Rose’s U.S. Open victory, points that were not lost on Koepka when he was asked about the difficulty of those men trying to add another piece of major hardware to the mantel.

Is a second one harder to win?

“If you look at the top of the leaderboard, I’d say yes,” Koepka said. “It does become difficult if you think you’ve played good enough to win multiple ones.”

Which Koepka has—four in all, including each of the last two PGA Championships. Now, he’ll try to become the first player in a century to win three straight Wanamakers.

All he has to do is beat Johnson. It’s a proposition he seems fully confident in if not motivated by.

Given his own resume, he has every reason to be.

Four of his Koepka’s seven career victories have come at major championships, with wins at the 2017 and 2018 U.S. Opens and each of the last two PGAs. In his last five majors, he has finished no worse than fourth.

Now comes a shot at a fifth, with Johnson among those he’ll have to beat.

Two birdies in his last three holes to rebound from a string of three straight bogeys helped. So does the pressure of playing in the final round of major and adding another piece of sterling to the trophy case.

“It’s just a comfort level,” Koepka said. “I feel comfortable around the lead in the big events.”

No matter who is in his way.

The post Why does Brooks Koepka like his chances Sunday? Because Dustin Johnson’s “only won one” major, for starters appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Joel Beall
Going under the radar has rarely been said about Rory McIlroy, with good reason. Save for a certain 15-time major winner, no one in the sport possesses the Ulsterman’s magnetism, inside the ropes or out.

Yet it is the season’s first major and McIlroy, for the first time in recent memory, he is not among the leading storylines. Consider it the byproduct of McIlroy’s undistinguished play as of late, recording a lone top-30 finish in his five last outings.

Now, no in-their-prime player is held to a higher benchmark than McIlroy. He has the ability to make a tough game look easy—coming off his Player of the Year campaign in 2019, McIlroy began this season with six consecutive top 5s. When he fails to do so, observers wonder what’s wrong.

However, McIlroy posited on Wednesday at Harding Park that nothing is wrong with his game. It just needs tidying up.

“I feel like I’ve played pretty well. I just haven’t got a lot out of my game,” McIlroy said on the eve of the 2020 PGA Championship. “Haven’t scored as well as I was doing before the lockdown. Wasn’t really efficient, or haven’t been efficient as I was back then. Short game hasn’t quite been as sharp.”

The self-analysis of his short game isn’t wrong. He posted negative strokes gained/putting figures in three of five tournaments in golf’s restart, and finished last in the field at Memorial in sg/around-the-green. Though the overall stats in the category aren’t particularly jarring, when extrapolated they shed light on where McIlroy has gone awry. These performances, or lack thereof, have manifested in at least one poor round per event.

McIlroy sees this as a positive. Proof that the past two months aren’t indicative of a deep-rooted issue, that all the ingredients for better golf are available.

“There’s been good scores in there. I shot a 63 at Colonial; I shot a 65 to make the cut at Hilton Head; a 63 at Travelers, a couple of good scores last week in Memphis,” McIlroy said. “So the good stuff is in there.”

RELATED: The last time Rory McIlroy paid a greens fee will fill you with envy

Digging into the results, McIlroy’s driving prowess has endured, ranking fourth on tour in sg/off-the-tee and fifth in distance. His iron game has been sharp, too (20th in approach), although he’s struggled from the tall stuff (173rd in rough proximity), a matter that could loom large at Harding Park.

Perhaps the biggest delineation for McIlroy from golf’s pre and post-COVID-19 sabbatical has been the fans, with McIlroy admitting it’s taken time for him to recalibrate their effect on his play.

“I think we’ve all had to get used to it, right, and at this point I have got used to it,” McIlroy said. “For me personally, it’s just taken a little while to get used to that. As I said, it’s been five tournaments in. I should be pretty much adapted to it now.”

One thing McIlroy has adapted to is the inherent pressures of these events. The sport is very aware McIlroy hasn’t won a major since 2014, and with each season that passes without adding to his trophy collection the worry and wonder grows. But McIlroy has divorced himself from outside expectations, allowing only himself to establish where his convictions lie.

“It doesn’t keep me up at night and I don’t think about it every day,” McIlroy said.

Conversely, as he pointed out, there are seven major opportunities presented in the next calendar year to silence those calls, starting this week at a venue where he captured the 2015 WGC-Match Play. In regards to Harding Park, McIlroy believes the key is not necessarily going low but keeping the high scores at bay. “Turning the 73s that I’ve shot into 70s. That’s the sort of stuff that I think when you’re sharp and you’re playing a bit and you’re sort of in your groove you’re able to do that a little better, and that’s the stuff that I haven’t been able to do since coming back out here,” McIlroy said.

While that sounds easier said than done, McIlroy has excelled at this event, winning two Wanamakers and logging six top 10s at the PGA. He feels at home with the organization’s setup, one he credits to PGA of America chief championships officer Kerry Heigh.

“I’ve always liked how PGA Championship setups have been for me. I think they’re fair,” McIlroy said. “It’s not as if—you look down a fairway at a PGA Championship and it’s sort of the same width the whole way down to the green. A lot of courses, they try to pinch it in at 320 and try to handcuff the longer hitters, whereas here the courses just let you play, which I like.”

As for entering under the radar, should McIlroy enjoy a strong start on Thursday, that storyline business will take care of itself.

“I feel like everything else is pretty good. I’m driving it well. My iron play is good for the most part,” McIlroy said. “If I can just keep playing like that and keep being a little bit more efficient with my scoring, I’ll be right where I need to be.”

The post How Rory McIlroy can get out of his funk (and why it might not be hard to do) appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Brian Wacker
Over the last four months, Adam Scott spent his days in Australia hosting junior clinics, teeing it up with up-and-coming amateurs and visiting a stroke victim who he’d recently befriended. He even helped wash the carts at Caloundra Golf Club in his native Queensland.

With professional golf on hiatus for much of that time because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Scott’s options were limited. Even when the PGA Tour resumed its season in mid-June, he was in no hurry to come back.

“Although the bar was closed and other things were closed at the club, it was still fun to be in a golf club environment,” Scott said Tuesday. “I don’t get to do this stuff so much, so I took advantage of a couple of those opportunities with my mates back home and played some of the local courses, which was fun.”

Now it’s time to go back to work.

Scott will end his long break at this week’s PGA Championship at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, where he will tee it up for the first time in a tournament since the opening round of the Players Championship. With his return, he is the last of the top 30 in the Official World Ranking to play competitive golf since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the sport in mid-March.

Once the tour resumes competition, Scott, currently ranked No. 9 in the world, decided to remain in Australia because of the continued spread of the coronavirus and restrictions on those travelling into the United States.

“It took a while to get used to being a full-time dad, but it was great,” Scott said of the layoff. “It had been probably 20 years since I’d been home in Australia at that time of year and for that length of time I hadn’t been there, and I certainly enjoyed that very much, given whatever restrictions we were still under.

“From a career and a playing sense, it was a great break for me.”

Once he did decide to come back, Scott went to South Carolina, where he set up shop for two weeks at Congaree Golf Club, about 30 miles northwest of Hilton Head Island. Doing so allowed Scott and his family to quarantine in advance of the PGA. Then the restriction was lifted halfway through their stay for players travelling for the tournament.

Adam Scott hasn’t played a competitive round since mid-March. (Sean M. Haffey)

Scott remained in South Carolina anyway, before arriving in San Francisco on Friday for a few rounds at TPC Harding Park while his family headed to their home in Switzerland. From that standpoint, the 2013 Masters champion’s preparation didn’t feel all that dissimilar to what it normally would have.

“Very little distraction,” he said. “It felt very similar to what I’ve done. I arrived here early, which I often do for majors and play normally before the crowds. But still just to get those extra days here and come to grips with the course, I don’t feel like it’s been very different at all, actually.”

TPC Harding Park shouldn’t take long to get used to, either. The 40-year-old Scott is one of only three players in the field to have played in each of the last three events there—the 2005 WGC-American Express Championship, the 2009 Presidents Cup and the 2015 WGC-Cadillac Match Play. Not that he performed particularly well in any of those tournaments, tying for 29th in 2005, going 1-4 for the week in 2009 and losing all three of his matches in round-robin play in 2015.

“I think the setup is a lot different this time around,” Scott said. “They’ve managed to keep a lot of poa out of these greens, and that was very pleasing for me and probably everyone coming here this week. They’re pure. They’ve toughened the course up.

“Hopefully with a bit better focus and execution this week, I can perform a little better than I have here in the past. But it’s a golf course that I feel very comfortable that I should be able to play well if I get my head down and perform.”

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By Dave Shedloski
Seth Waugh’s first thought when reached by telephone in Florida late last week was, reflexively, the hour of the day three time zones away. “Yeah, it’s around 8 o’clock out there, so we’d be on about our fifth tee time right about now. Kind of a shame to think about, but, obviously, nothing compared to the pain going on in the world,” the CEO of the PGA of America said.

“Out there” is San Francisco, where the 102nd PGA Championship was scheduled to begin Thursday at TPC Harding Park. Instead, the premier event of the PGA of America has been postponed to early August as part of a reconfigured 2020 professional golf calendar in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

August isn’t strange to the PGA Championship, having been contested in the eighth month of the calendar every year since 1972. At the behest of the PGA Tour, which wanted to realign its split-calendar season, the PGA agreed to push its major championship into May last year. Now it’s back to an Aug. 6 start date, and it’s set to be the first of three majors tentatively rescheduled for this year. (The Open Championship at Royal St. George’s has been cancelled.)

The PGA led off the majors season once before, in February 1971, at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., when a local boy named Jack Nicklaus won the second of his five PGA titles.

“We are excited to be the first major out, if things work out, but there is a lot of uncertainty,” Waugh said haltingly. “Obviously, a lot more important things going on. We can’t make any assumptions, really, so we are going about this looking at several different scenarios, and it probably won’t be until early summer until things become more clear.”

Amplifying the comments from earlier this week by Kerry Haigh, the chief championships officer for the PGA of America, who spoke to GolfChannel.com, Waugh said the PGA is considering four scenarios for the championship, with Plan B being a tournament without fans in attendance. Plan A, which was to proceed as normal with fans and corporate hospitality sales, already has been tossed out.

“The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has been pretty vocal about his opinion on things,” Waugh said. “He’s basically saying no fans at any sporting event until phase four, which for them is where the vaccine is available, and the chances of that are, well, who knows. So we’re assuming no fans, but we’re still planning for both scenarios.

“They [Harding Park] want to have it, and so do we, but we only want to do something that’s in their best interest to be a good partner. And if for some reason something changes or they aren’t comfortable committing to doing it even without fans, then we’ll look to go somewhere else.”

Going somewhere else is Plan C, and it sounds as if moving the PGA Championship to another venue at least has been discussed in more detail in the halls of PGA headquarters in recent days. Waugh said that several courses have reached out to the PGA with the offer of hosting the championship. “The game of golf is an amazing community,” he said.

Ultimately, he said, the PGA, should it have to be moved, would likely migrate to a venue familiar to its broadcast partner, CBS Sports. “Because you can’t just plop them down without the camera sites and tower placements and all of those kind of pre-tournament decisions already familiar to them,” Waugh said. “It has to be a kind of a pre-existing venue that CBS effectively has done in the past. And, obviously, we do own one golf course, so there’s a list of possibilities.”

The course that the PGA of America owns is Valhalla Golf Club, near Louisville, Ky. Valhalla, designed by Nicklaus, has hosted three PGA Championships, in 1996, 2000 and 2014, as well as the 2008 Ryder Cup.

As for major-calibre layouts on the CBS schedule, once you eliminate California contenders Riviera Country Club and Torrey Pines, the leaders would be Muirfield Village Golf Club, in Dublin, Ohio, and Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. It’s doubtful Muirfield Village, which has held a Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup, would get the nod when its annual Memorial Tournament, hosted by Nicklaus, is rescheduled for July 16-19. Quail Hollow was the site of the 2017 PGA, won by Justin Thomas, and was just announced Thursday that it was being awarded the 2025 PGA Championship. The course wouldn’t require much extra effort to get into shape, because the Wells Fargo Championship that Quail Hollow was slated to host through May 3 was among the nine tournaments the PGA Tour was forced to cancel during the pandemic.

The preference, though, is to keep the PGA at Harding Park. It’s where Waugh and his organization wanted to be on Thursday. But August works—like it has for many years before.

“You think of the air times [on television] and the event becomes even that much more important, right?” Waugh asks wistfully. “People are hungry for content, and for viewers to be able to sit back on the East Coast and watch it in prime time, you know, it would be great for the PGA Championship and great for the sporting world, if you will. So we remain excited about it, and we remain hopeful. We are truly hopeful.”

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