On Friday at TPC Southwind, Argotsinger was pressed into duty again as a caddie, this time for four-time tour winner Harris English in the middle of the second round of the FedEx St Jude Championship. When English’s regular caddie, Eric Larsen, got wobbly from heat exhaustion on the second tee, their 11th hole of the day, Putnam pointed English in the direction of Argotsinger, the head pro at nearby Windyke Country Club.

“I had just gotten there when they were making the turn, so I walked the first hole, and then on the second tee I saw Eric take a knee,” Argotsinger said. “Next thing you know, Andrew [Putnam] is telling Harris, ‘Hey, I know this guy can caddie.’ And there we went. It was pretty surreal.”

Larsen, who has caddied for English for the last six years, said he had not eaten much and drank only Gatorade throughout the day as temperatures soared into the 90s and the heat index peaked at 119. Once the heat index exceeds 100, caddies are allowed to remove their bibs, but Larsen hadn’t yet done so when he bent over to tie his shoe on the second tee and felt woozy when he stood up straight. He was taken to the clubhouse and received a saline IV, and by the time English holed out for a one-over 71, Larsen was up and walking around.

“I’m glad he stopped when he did and didn’t keep going ‘cause it could have gotten bad if he kept pressing,” said English. “It’s tough out there. Really brutal. I grew up in South Georgia, and I think it’s the hottest I’ve ever felt on a golf course.”

Argotsinger, 29, said that English kept it light and did most of the yardages himself, and that he didn’t have to do too much except carry the bag, “though I did suggest he change clubs on the last hole. He hit it to eight feet and made birdie.”

A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Argotsinger attended Mississippi State to earn his PGA Golf Management degree. He’s been head pro at Windyke for six years but has had an opportunity to play TPC Southwind several times. His best score is 72, though he never has had to play it when it’s set up for the tour’s first FedEx Cup Playoff event. But walking the fairways with English, Putnam and Eric Cole was way more fun.

“How many guys get to walk inside the ropes and talk to these guys during a PGA Tour round? Yeah, it was a pretty incredible day,” he said.

As he spoke, Argotsinger had two souvenir Yetis tucked under his arm. Larsen also slipped him $100 for his efforts. “I told him to go have a nice dinner,” Larsen said. “Hey, he bailed me out.”

English offered to get him tickets for the final two rounds, but Argotsinger couldn’t accept.

“Nope,” he said. “I have to go back to work tomorrow.”

The post WATCH: Hot stuff as caddie suffers in steamy Memphis and fan comes to the rescue appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

All’s well that ended well for Harris English during Saturday’s third round of the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, but not without a few holes of restless worry about a potential penalty stroke derailing him.

English played in the final twosome with Harry Hall, training by three as he was getting ready to attempt a birdie putt from the first cut of rough just off the green on the second hole at Colonial Country Club, 17 feet from the cup. After addressing the ball, English, a 33-year-old tour veteran, stepped away, explaining to those around him that “My ball keeps rolling that way,” pointing toward the hole. English indicated that the ball was moving before he backed away.

Since English’s ball was in a “general area” and not on the green, if English caused the ball to move, he would have to replace his ball and incur a one-shot penalty. If he failed to replace it and play it from the spot it had move to, he would then get a second one-shot penalty for playing a ball from a wrong place.

English, Hall and English’s caddie conferred as PGA Tour rules official Dave Donnelly arrived to try to suss out the situation.

“I was taking my practice strokes right here, and I’m kind of looking at the ball a little bit, and (inaudible) is pointed that way,” English said.

Donnelly then asked English: “When the ball moved, was the club over there or was it behind the ball?”

“When it first moved, it was right here,” English said, his putter head positioned beside the ball as if to take a practice stroke.

That, of course, becomes the critical issue in this whole matter. If English had not yet to address the ball and it started moving, or it was moving already when he addressed it, English would not be on the hook for a penalty and would simply need to play the ball where it lies.

“What you showed me right there, that could not have caused the ball to trickle like that with you far enough away from it,” Donnelly said. “With that not having caused it to move and you didn’t do anything else to cause it to move, then the ball is just in play where it is.”

So English putted the ball from its new position, leaving the birdie attempt three feet short, then rolled in his par.

Mark Dusbabek, a tour rules official working on the Saturday broadcast, injected that the reason it appeared English was told he could play on with no penalty was that there wasn’t enough evidence to show he had caused the ball to move. “Therefore, if you don’t have that virtual certainty, it’s moved by natural forces and you play it from its new position.”

Adding to the confusion, however, was the fact the broadcast did not have any video that showed English’s ball moving before he addressed it to provide the virtual certainty in that direction either.

When the telecast moved from Golf Channel to CBS, English and Hall playing the sixth hole at this point, Jim Nantz came on the air and said the tour was still reviewing the video and would talk to the players about it again after the round, leaving English’s par-4 score in limbo. That uncertainty might help explain the fact English was at the time one over for the round and four back of Hall.

“I think the best way for him to deal with this is to process this like he is going to get a penalty,” analyst Trevor Immelman said. “If he doesn’t, then it’s a bonus.”

Thankfully for English, he didn’t have to wait until the 18th to get things officially settled. On the ninth hole, an official told English that he had been cleared of any potential penalty and the par 4 would stand.

“It was important for the committee to get to Harris as soon as we could and put his mind at ease,” Dusbabek said. “Based on his testimony, the ball had moved prior to him addressing the ball, putting the club behind the ball. He had been taking some practice swings he said and he saw the ball move forward a little bit. His actions did nothing to cause the ball to move. It was deemed it had moved by natural forces so no penalty.”

Nantz asked Immelman how big a deal it was for English to find out early rather than wait until the 18th hole. “Absolutely huge. I actually look for him to go one little run here now now that his mind is cleared out.”

And indeed English proceeded to birdie the next hole and climb into a share of the lead. By the end of the day he had shot an even-par 70 to sit one shot off the lead shared by Hall and Adam Schenk.

The post Colonial contender waits several holes for decision in midst of unusual rules issue appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Christopher Powers
If we told you Rory McIlroy made seven birdies on Friday, just one day after torching TPC River Highlands to the tune of an eight-under 62, you might call game. Curtains. Night night. Thanks for coming out, everybody.

Unfortunately, you wouldn’t just be wrong, you’d be comically, laugh-out-loud funny wrong. Not only is McIlroy not leading, he’s six strokes back, and it wasn’t because he made seven bogeys, either.

In fact, through 11 holes McIlroy had made just one bogey against six birdies, at the time putting him at 13-under and at the top of the leaderboard. Then came the 12th hole, where McIlroy, the No. 2-ranked golfer in the world, morphed into a 15-handicapper who was playing with his future father-in-law for the very first time:

“It sort of came out of the blue,” McIlroy said afterward. “I haven’t made a big number like that — a couple of big numbers like that  — in a long time. When you hit a tee shot like that on 12, the first one, it makes the second one pretty difficult. You’re sort of guarding against that left one, and I missed it right. It was just one of those where I put myself in a great position in the tournament and three bad swings have sort of cost me six shots, and I’ve got all that work to try to make up over the weekend. But at least I have the time to do it.”

Golf. Is. Hard.

Quadruple bogey for Rory McIlroy on 12. pic.twitter.com/n8cwaZXHh9

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) June 24, 2022

Hey, it happens, even to Rory McIlroy. It all added up to what should have been a tournament-killing ‘snowman’, but McIlroy had been so good up to that point that he was still very much in contention. A double-bogey six at the short par-4 15th quickly sucked some more life out of him, however.

McIlroy did manage to pick up a birdie at the 16th and then had good looks at 17 and 18, settling for back-to-back pars to finish of a psychopathic even-par 70. A reminder of how good these guys are: McIlroy made an eight and a six on the back nine and still shot 39.

And still, he’s only six off the lead of Xander Schauffele, one behind second place. A front-nine 30 on Saturday and suddenly he’ll be right back where he was on the 12th tee on Friday. Would not put it past him.

Stefan Schauffele knows best

Tim Nwachukwu

On Thursday Xander Schauffele hit all 18 greens in regulation en route to a seven-under 63. On Friday? Only 15 of 18. For shame.

Despite those abysmal GIR numbers, Schauffele still managed to match his opening-round score, opening up a five-shot lead in the process. It’s the largest 36-hole lead in the Travelers Championship since 1984, per the PGA Tour.

“Anytime you can hit a lot of greens at any tournament, it definitely makes it a little bit easier on yourself,” Schauffele said. “I feel like Austin [Kaiser, Schauffele’s caddie] and I have just been a little bit more diligent and a little more deliberate with our task when we’re over the golf ball and picking numbers and picking sort of the right shot. So I think I’m very focused on that and not much else.”

After his first 63 of the week, Schauffele said his recent form has been solid, but his father Stefan believed he’d been doing too much tinkering. Thursday and Friday featured very little of that, he says.

“He [my dad] wants me to do what I did today. Just Austin and I work together, focus a lot on land numbers,” Schauffele said Thursday. “Just numbers in general versus me trying to tinker with my golf swing too much. It kind of made me hone in on targets versus sort of golf swing.”

It’s clearly working, and it’s put Schauffele in position to … wait for it … earn his first solo, non-Olympic, PGA Tour victory since the 2019 Sentry Tournament of Champions. It’s an impossible-to-believe sentence to type, given how good he is, but it is accurate. He’s not getting that far ahead of himself, naturally.

“it’s only Friday,” he said. “We’ve got 36 more holes, and I need to stay aggressive. This is a course that’s giving up some birdies, and if you’re leading the pack and you get kind of comfortable, people are going to hunt you down.”

Harris English … back?

Icon Sportswire

McIlroy’s recent title defence at the RBC Canadian Open was one of the strangest in recent memory, not only because the wins came three years apart but also because of what transpired in those three wild, COVID-affected years. Should Harris English go on to defend his Travelers Championship title this weekend, it would be equally as strange given what English has been through over the last year.

In the time since his Travelers win, which he earned after an epic eight-hole playoff against Kramer Hickok, English picked up a wacky solo fourth at the WGC-FedEx St Jude that included a Sunday meltdown alongside Bryson DeChambeau. He then played a solid supporting role in the Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits, going 1-2-0 in the American team’s 19-9 romp of Europe. That same week, a rules call came in during the matches about English’s weathered putter grip, which he then had to switch out before Sunday singles. After the Ryder Cup, he struggled in the fall due to issues with his hip, which he decided to get surgery on, ultimately leading to a five-month layoff.

English, who before the surgery was enjoying some of the best golf of his life, returned in early June at the Memorial, where he missed the cut with a pair of 77s. The US Open treated him a bit nicer, English opening with rounds of 73 and 69 before fading to T-61 on the weekend. On Thursday at TPC River Highlands, a four-under 66 was another nice step on the road back, but Friday’s five-under 65 confirmed he’s just about rounding back into form.

“The hip is doing better,” English said on Friday. “The toughest thing is walking and playing. I feel like back home I can go hit a bunch of balls on the range, but up and down these hills and being on your feet for five or six hours is the toughest part.

“I feel like the more I play competitive rounds out here, it’s just going to get stronger,” he added. “So I’m happy to have made the cut, made the weekend for two tournaments in a row. This is my third tournament back, so I am just excited to keep playing golf.”

English did a little more than just make the cut. At nine-under, he’s among a group of five players who are tied for second, a group that includes Ryder Cup teammate Patrick Cantlay.

“I was kind of getting tired of watching these guys on the couch,” said English. “Missing the majors hurt me pretty bad. I love playing the Masters. That was definitely weighing on my decision to get surgery. I’m going to miss the Masters if I get surgery. But it is what it is, and hopefully I can play many more. Really just I love playing competitive golf and I love being out here with the guys competing, so I definitely missed that and made me want to be out here even more.”

Should English return to his pre-surgery form, which saw him pick up a pair of wins in 2021 and finish solo third in the US Open at Torrey Pines, there will be many more Masters, and many more majors, in his near future.

You may also like:
DP World Tour suspends LIV golfers
LIV Golf: Top stars set for Portland
Rory calls LIV players’duplicitous’
JT shuts down LIV rumour mill
LIV players permitted to play in Open
PGA plans tour series to rival  LIV
LIV Golf announces latest major signing
Brooks Koepka set to make his move to LIV
Report: Ancer is the latest LIV Golf recruit
18 parting thoughts from the US Open
Can you guess the top 10 US Open earners?
The US Open golf needed
Fitzpatrick became a major champion by turning his shortcomings into strengths
Phil admits he wasn’t ready

The post Travelers Day 2 takeaways: Rory’s back-nine blow-up, Xander’s squeaky-clean start and Harris English on road back appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Shane Ryan
If you’re a recreational golfer, especially one who likes to spend time on the range, you’ve likely had this experience at some point: A single swing thought clicks into place and you start hitting the ball very well—and very consistently. Your confidence grows with the success, and after another dozen great shots, it becomes irresistible to add a little something—a new move, more speed, anything. It even works, at first, and a good thing becomes even better. Then, slowly and subtly, you start to lose it. The thing you added spirals out of your control, and you’re not sure exactly how to fix it. The shots get worse, and perhaps unconsciously, in ways you won’t realise until later, you lean into the new thing rather than losing it, which only makes things worse. By the time your bucket of balls runs out, you’re a sweaty, angry mess, and those perfect moments from just minutes earlier are a distant memory. It’s only later, with clarity, that you are able to revert back to the original thought and rediscover your form for next time.

If that sounds familiar, you’ve experienced in microcosm, and in metaphor, what many professional golfers endure over a period of years. The beats are all the same: the initial success, honed in whatever unique style they possess, that gets them to the top of the sport. This is often followed by the nagging desire to constantly tweak and improve, which leads to a departure from what worked in the first place, which leads to the golfing wilderness and the blind struggle to escape, which leads to a thousand false solutions, which is finally resolved—if it’s resolved at all—only by returning to the “true self” that propelled them to the heights in the first place.

Rory McIlroy, who has never given a dull interview, hit this theme hard after his victory Sunday the CJ Cup.

“I feel like the last couple weeks I’ve realised that just being me is good enough,” McIlroy said, “and maybe the last few months I was trying … not trying to be someone else, but maybe trying to add things to my game or take things away from my game. I know that when I do the things that I do well, this is what I’m capable of. … That starts with being creative and being visual and maybe sort of sifting through the technical thoughts and not maybe being as technical with it. … Sometimes I forgot that in a quest to try to be too perfect probably, but this week was a great reminder that you don’t need to be perfect to be a great golfer.”

As far as epiphanies go, it may sound basic, but in a game like golf that is so fickle even for the best players, where the default strategy is to master the technical side of the game in an attempt to reduce and control the chaos that constantly threatens, it seems to have struck him as especially profound. The idea that he’s good enough to trust himself, to simply visualise what he wants to do and then execute, seems to have run contrary to how he was operating before, and the effect on his psyche—you can feel it from afar—is liberating. Two weeks ago, he was ready to give up golf for the year in frustration. Now he’s a champion again.

He’s not alone in experiencing this trajectory, though each player’s epiphany looks a bit different. Coming up on the PGA Tour, Steve Stricker was the constant victim of an inferiority complex and impostor syndrome. As a northerner from a small town, he naggingly felt like he didn’t belong, even as his game proved otherwise. It took him a longer time than it should have to make the tour, and after he achieved some initial success with two wins in 1996, his confidence was rattled to the core the first time he played with Tiger Woods.

“After the first round had ended,” he wrote later in The Players Tribune, “I told Nicki, my wife and caddie, what I had been thinking since the moment we left the course: ‘I can’t compete with that type of game. I just can’t compete with that.’”

Tracy Wilcox
Steve Stricker suffered an imposter syndrome at the start of his career, fearing others would “see” his game wasn’t good enough to be on the PGA Tour.

Like McIlroy, Stricker saw his game suffer, though he fell to greater depths and for a much longer time, even losing his tour card in the process. Doubt plagued him, the work he had put in to get to that point felt “meaningless” and the path back to the top was unclear. In Stricker’s case, chasing distance was one of his unwise deviations, but the overarching theme was the same.

“I realised that I was exerting too much of my time and energy trying to play golf like someone who I wasn’t,” he wrote.

Stricker had his own epiphany, returned to a former style of play (and perhaps of being), found happiness and entered the golden age of his career in the late 2000s, winning nine events in five years and rising as high as No. 2 in the world.

“My advice to young golfers may be cliché,” he wrote, “but it’s still incredibly important: Don’t try to fix something that isn’t broken. Golfers on the PGA Tour are at the highest level because they’ve stayed true to their game.”

And they fall off the top, to hear them tell it, because they fail to stay true. Brendon Todd doesn’t just have one of the tour’s greatest comebacks to his name—he has two of them. Twice, he fell so low in the World Ranking that he was considering taking another job, and as recently as 2018 he had plans to meet with a financial adviser to talk about starting a fast-food franchise. When he lost his game, he really lost it, and like so many before him, he chased solutions anywhere. What changed things, finally, was a coach named Bradley Hughes whose task at its simplest was to return him to “normal,” and let the brilliant parts of his game shine.

The same is true for Harris English. A former Georgia Bulldog like Todd, English is a recent member of the victorious U.S. Ryder Cup team and one of the best players in the sport. Only a few years ago, however, he’d fallen to 149th in the world after a promising start to his career, before making his own comeback journey. When asked to explain what changed, he credited his coach and, time and again throughout the year, returned to the explanation of “going back to what I did well.”

Jamie Squire
Harris English went from promising star out of college to struggling pro before ‘going back to what I did well.’

It seems so easy, when you hear players like these say the words, but it’s plainly so hard. The phrase “know thyself” comes to us from ancient Greece and is so well-travelled at this point that it may be the ultimate platitude. But as we see from players like McIlroy and Stricker and Todd and English and countless others, it may be the most important philosophical principle in professional golf.

Having started with a scenario the recreational golfer can relate to, let’s end with another: Have you ever given up the game for a while, either by choice or by necessity, and then returning after weeks or months or even years away? If so, you may have experienced another common phenomenon in your first time back, in which you prepare yourself to struggle, you expect to struggle, and you resign yourself to months of work to recapture your form … only to play far better than you could have dreamed.

It’s hard to know why this happens, but maybe it’s as simple as forgetting the accumulations of unwieldy knowledge that bogged you down and returning to a purer form of play that on some level, your body and mind can execute intuitively. For so many PGA Tour players, the process to regaining the lost heights is exactly the same—it takes years, but it’s no more complicated than rediscovering the truth, as players and as people, of who they really are.

The post Rory McIlroy undergoes an increasingly common journey: The return to a ‘true self’ appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Alex Myers
Turns out, there was some Ryder Cup drama on Sunday at Whistling Straits. Just not the kind anyone saw coming—especially Harris English.

The Ryder Cup rookie appeared on the Fore the People podcast with John Peterson and J.J. Killeen following Team USA’s historic rout and shared a story involving his putter grip. His old, old putter grip.

Apparently, it was in such bad shape that someone called a rules official about it possibly being non-conforming. And as English arrived at the Whistling Straits clubhouse on Sunday ahead of his singles match with Lee Westwood, he was puzzled to see captain Steve Stricker’s number on his phone.

“I had no idea what he was calling me about, he hadn’t called me this whole week,” English told Peterson and Killeen. “He said, ‘Hey Harry, I’ve got some bad news. We’ve got the head rules official here and he wants to take a look at your putter grip.’ I’m like, ‘s—.'”

Here’s a better look at the tattered grip that caught the attention of viewers during English’s epic eight-hole playoff win over Kramer Hickok at the Travelers Championship:

Michael Reaves

“I’ve been putting with it for 8, 9, 10 years—I have no idea how long,” said English, who won twice and earned more than $6 million during the 2020-2021 season using his trusty club. “Somehow, someone thought it made me putt better. I don’t know. I have no idea why.”

Whether that someone was part of Team Europe is another question. Regardless, the grip was declared non-conforming because the cloth part had frayed completely off the rubber part at the butt end of the grip.

English would either have to change grips, change putters, or somehow fix the grip to a rules official’s satisfaction. In stepped Davis Love III.

“Davis, the savvy deer hunter and knifesman he is, got an X-Acto knife and cut the part off,” English said. “We gauzed it so it would be flush with the other cloth part. He did it in a few minutes.”

Who says Ryder Cup assistant captains don’t do anything?

In the end, English wound up losing his match, but keeping his grip. At least, for now.

The post How Harris English’s putter grip caused an unusual rules issue at the Ryder Cup appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Joel Beall and Golf Digest Staff
Steve Stricker has made his captain’s picks. And Stricker is going with youth.

The United States Ryder Cup captain named Jordan Spieth, Tony Finau, Xander Schauffele, Harris English, Daniel Berger and Scottie Scheffler as his six captain’s picks Wednesday morning.

The six join automatic qualifiers in Collin Morikawa, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay and Brooks Koepka to round out America’s roster for the biennial event later this month at Whistling Straits.

There was no drama surrounding the picks of Spieth, Finau and Schauffele, as the trio had long been expected to make the team. Spieth, making his fourth Ryder Cup appearance, enjoyed a career revival in 2021, highlighted by a win at the Valero Texas Open and contending for the Masters and Open Championship. For Finau, making his second straight Ryder Cup team, a win at last month’s Northern Trust broke a five-year victory drought, but his breakthrough was hardly a one-week triumph. During the season, Finau was 14th in scoring and 16th in SG/tee-to-green. Though Schauffele doesn’t have an official win, he captured the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics and finished fifth on tour in total strokes gained. He will be making his Ryder Cup debut.

English was also considered a sure-thing coming off a career-best campaign, winning twice (Setnry Tournament of Champions, Travelers Championship) to go along with high finishes at both the fall and summer U.S. Opens. While he represented the U.S. at the 2011 Walker Cup, this is English’s first professional Team USA appearance. English is the oldest captain’s pick at 32.

The picks of Berger and Scheffler, however, provided Wednesday’s theatre.

Berger was statistically one of the best ball-strikers on tour this season, finishing fifth in approach and 11th in strokes gained, while winning at Pebble Beach and racking up eight top-10s across the super season. The analytics favoured him as well, as he finished fourth in DataGolf’s Ryder Cup rankings over the past three and six months. His lack of Ryder Cup experience was the only knock, but clearly it was not enough of a restriction in Stricker’s mind.

Scheffler, also a Ryder Cup rookie, is still in search of his first PGA Tour win. However, he has finished in the top-10 in the past three majors, along with coming in second at the WGC-Dell Match Play. Scheffler, 25, ranked seventh in birdie average and was sixth in DataGolf’s Ryder Cup rankings over the last three months.

Jamie Squire
Jordan Spieth celebrates during the rare positive moment at the 2018 Ryder Cup for the Americans.

A notable exclusion among Stricker’s picks was Patrick Reed. The former Masters champ was not necessarily expected to make the team following his hospitalisation with bilateral pneumonia, but Reed returned at the Tour Championship in hopes of making a last-second bid for the club. Reed had played in the past six Team USA matches.

Team Europe will finalize its picks following this week’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth in Surrey, England. Here are the thoughts of the Golf Digest staff on Stricker’s picks.

Which pick surprised you?

Dave Shedloski: Frankly, none of these picks surprise me. This is a solid group of players. Their respective strengths are obvious. They give Captain Stricker flexibility on pairings. But what I like is their personalities. They will mesh well with the automatic qualifiers.

Daniel Rapaport: Scheffler, in that he filled the only spot that wasn’t spoken for. The first four—Finau, Schauffele, Spieth and English were shoo-ins, and Daniel Berger all but spilled the beans that he was in last week. So there was really only one mystery left to solve.

Brendan Porath: No pick was a surprise. These were six obvious choices. There were other suitable options to Scheffler, who was likely the last pick with the most uncertainty. But he’s not a surprise.

Chris Powers: With all the talk about the Kevins—Na and Kisner—it felt like Scottie Scheffler was going to be the odd man out. Thankfully, that is not the case, because Scheffler’s game is perfect for Whistling Straits. This could prove to be Stricker’s best selection.

Who was the biggest snub?

Shedloski: Well, let’s not mince words here. Leaving Patrick Reed, so-called Captain America, off the team is a pretty big deal. One of America’s best putters and strongest competitors, but his negatives were just too obvious. Stricker said he lost sleep over leaving him off. Health was a real question. His 2018 post-match comments to the New York Times on Sunday night in Paris probably didn’t help. And, well, other than putting his game hasn’t been great.

Jamie Squire

Rapaport: Kevin Na. I’ve been on this horse for a while—I get that he doesn’t fit the course on paper, but if the Solheim Cup taught us one thing, it’s about who’s going to step up and make pressure putts. Na has that Poulter-like juice, and I thought he’d be a perfect addition to a team already loaded with bombers.

Porath: It’s hard to argue for snubs when there were so many options in a crowded field, but I suppose Webb Simpson has an argument for being left out. He was ahead of Scottie Scheffler on the points list and has sacrificed many times over in team events teaming up with partners who might be considered difficult. Reed was also ahead of Scheffler on the points list, but given his health uncertainty and the fact that he burned down the house on the way out of Paris, I don’t think he should be considered a snub.

Powers: Patrick Reed, even with the health concerns and poor form of late, is by far the biggest snub. Goes to show how deep this team is when Captain America, who was 11th in the final team standings and has an incredible team event record, gets left off.

Looking at all 12 players, what’s your assessment of Team USA?

Shedloski: If Stricker was looking to make the team stronger, he succeeded. In fact, you could argue the six picks are stronger—right now—than the automatic qualifiers, who as a group haven’t been trending all that well, aside from Cantlay and DeChambeau. And Brooks Koepka’s health is now a question. But seeing these picks makes me feel better about the U.S. team that’s heading to Wisconsin.

Rapaport: They’re massively talented and will be a sizable favorite. My only concern, apart from the lack of a Na/Reed-type character, is the lack of steady-handed leadership. There’s no one in their 40s, and the 30-plus guys—Koepka, English, Johnson and Finau—aren’t exactly guys to step up and make a speech.

Porath: It’s absolutely rock solid on paper (although isn’t that often the case at the start of these matches?). The statistical profiles are perfectly suited for Whistling Straits, and these were the best six captain’s picks to pair with the auto qualifiers. There are actually more questions about the six auto bids because of health issues related to Koepka and Morikawa, but Stricker knocked his captain’s picks out of the park.

Powers: To add Jordan Spieth, Tony Finau and Scottie Scheffler as captain’s picks make this team incredibly menacing … on paper. As for on the course, that remains to be seen, though the Whistling Straits home-course advantage will certainly help.

The post Spieth, Schauffele lead American captain’s picks; Reed left off appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Shane Ryan
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — To Bryson DeChambeau, controversy is like water to a fish—everywhere, all the time, and if he’s ever away from it too long, you might start to wonder if he’s still breathing. Harris English, on the other hand, could come out in his next tournament and do something wildly out of character, such as … oh, maybe pour a gallon of gasoline on every green, or use a wiffleball bat as a driver … and it’s not a guarantee that anybody would notice.

That’s the study in contrast presented in the final group of Sunday’s final round at the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, where English holds a two-shot lead at 18 under as he looks to continue his torrid streak by winning the biggest event of his career, and perhaps move into first place in the FedExCup Playoff rankings while securing an automatic spot in the Ryder Cup.

It’s the hottest player in the world against the most infamous, and chances are good that it will be both interesting and weird.

To be clear, this is far from a two-horse race. Cam Smith is tied with DeChambeau at 16 under, and at a course where a 62 or 63 is not just possible but likely inevitable, there are arguably 10 to 15 players still in the hunt, including Abraham Ancer at 14 under and Scottie Scheffler and Ian Poulter, both at 13. Still, the top line is the most interesting, and it looks like theirs to lose.

DeChambeau was the more spectacular player on Saturday, making five birdies on the back nine to post 63 and fight his way into the final group. He looked various shades of morose while doing it, and is currently being dogged by what feels like half a dozen different scandals, but his game didn’t suffer.

English, on the other hand, started his round with seven straight pars, constantly stuck between clubs as his approaches left him more than 20 feet from the hole. He finally made one of the bombs on 8, a 23-footer, and his irons finally came to play on nine, when his approach stopped two feet from the pin for a second straight birdie. His consistency kept him company on the back nine, but the ball-striking that has seen him win two tournaments this season, including the Travelers Championship in late June, set him up for three more birdies and a quiet 65.

The difference between the two players could be seen in their post-round pressers. English, clearly content, spoke about the process that carried him out of a two-year slump.

“I’ve spent too many years chasing my swing, trying to swing it like somebody else instead of just refining what I did,” he said. “I don’t think I have anything to prove. I play this game for me and to be competitive. I love competing, I love playing tournament golf. Ever since I was a kid, I felt like I played better in tournaments than I did practising at home or in practice rounds. I guess it’s when you turn on the lights, when you get going, I love playing with pressure.”

When things began to go south for English, he responded by imitating the swings of players like Brooks Koepka and Rory McIlroy, which sent him into a spiral that didn’t end until he was 369th in the world in 2019. It was only by learning to be himself and to accept his style of game that he found his way out of the abyss. He credits his coach Justin Parsons with guiding him to that place of self-recognition, and since he got there, he’s been spectacular.

“When you struggle a little bit, it happens to everybody, you tend to search,” he said, “and you get on this path of trying to change your swing because you think it’s broken or something’s wrong with it instead of just tweaking it here and there. That’s the way golf is, and you’re trying to always work back to center…I think I went too far off the beaten path and lost a lot of confidence and really had no idea what I was doing.”

That’s over now, and on Sunday he can achieve several milestones in a single round.

DeChambeau declined to do a formal post-round press conference with writers, though he did some TV and radio interviews.

“It was beautiful to be able to score really well,” he said. “I didn’t feel like my ball-striking was perfect, but I got it around really well and I was very pleased with it.”

It didn’t get much deeper from there—he mentioned that he lost 10 pounds while suffering from COVID-19, and that he’s had to dial back his driver in Memphis because it’s not necessarily a course conducive to the tour’s longest hitters, but beyond that it’s not crystal clear why he’s so frustrated with the media, or any other entity that has earned his ire.

The circus-like atmosphere that increasingly attends DeChambeau’s rounds will be on full display Sunday, when larger crowds are expected at TPC Southwind, but English will be ready.

“I enjoy playing with Bryson,” he said. “To me it’s a lot like playing with Bubba Watson, I enjoy seeing what he does. It’s fun. He’s great for the game.”

“I play golf to be in this position,” he added. “I know I can do it.”

Which brings us to Sunday, 1 p.m. Memphis time, when two very different people will tee off with the same exact goal in mind.

The post Polar opposites Bryson DeChambeau and Harris English have Sunday date in Memphis appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

English and Kramer Hickok battled, battled and battled like madmen for the better part of two hours in sudden death Sunday night at the Travelers Championship. But current rules allow for just one man to be named winner, and English made sure that name was his thanks to a 16-foot birdie on the eighth playoff hole to capture the day at TPC River Highlands.

“It was incredible,” a gassed English said on the 18th green. “What an experience.”

Nearly three hours before, English dropped a 27-footer for birdie to get to 13 under for the week and grab the clubhouse lead. As Bubba Watson and Hickok struggled down the stretch, co-leaders starting the day and playing in the final twosome, it appeared 13 under would be enough. But Hickok—who had just two top-10s in 67 career tour starts prior to the week—answered with a birdie of his own from eight feet on the 72nd hole to force a playoff.

What followed wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing displays of golf, unless your aesthetic is suffering and chaos.

English and Hickok traded pars for seven straight holes. They were two lip-outs from Hickok and a bricked six-footer for the win from English. There were good-but-not-great approaches, sensible lags and nervy five-foot saves. It was two hours of guys both keeping the door open while not surrendering an inch.

“I was just trying to put as much pressure on him as possible. He was trying to do the same,” Hickok said. “I put him in uncomfortable spots, he put me in some, too.”

However, gruelling as the cauldron of playoff golf can be, these are PGA Tour players; a birdie was bound to happen, especially considering the 18th served as the stage for six of the sudden-death holes (that they didn’t have a closest-to-the-pin on the floating Travelers logo to decide the tournament’s fate seemed like a miss). English was the one that produced the bird thanks to a solid approach and better putt, bringing the second-longest playoff in PGA Tour history to an end.

It is English’s second win of the 2020-21 super season and fourth of his career, and he’s putting together a viable Ryder Cup case. While a trip to Whistling Straits may be in his future, English was just happy to cross the finish line after Sunday’s marathon, and cross it as victor.

“Kind of sorry it took seven or eight holes, but we were both grinding. Kramer is a hell of a competitor,” English said. “We were both fighting to the end and that’s what you want.”

Three other takeaways from the final round of the Travelers Championship.

Bubba stumbles down the stretch

With five holes left Bubba Watson held a one-shot lead. Five holes later, Watson was left to wonder what the heck just happened.

Watson, who has won the Travelers Championship three times in his career, was denied a record-tying fourth title after playing the final five holes in six over.

“Gosh, I mean, the close to the round, I thought I hit good shots,” Watson said afterwards.

The leakage started at the 13th, when Watson hit a poor lay-up at the par 5. His third trickled up to the edge of the green and his birdie did not fall, taking 5 on the third-easiest hole on the course. At the 14th, Watson’s approach missed the green to the left and his putt from the fringe barely reached the green, giving Bubba a bogey. He found a pond on the drivable par-4 15th, leading to his second straight bogey. Then a third at the par-3 16th thanks to a three-jack.

Watson’s tournament run officially ended at the 17th when he dumped his approach in the same pond that swallowed his drive on the 15th, leading to a double. The final damage was a three-over 73, dropping from first to T-19 in 90 minutes.

However, Watson was able to focus on the good from the week and had a sense of humour about the bad.

“I’m glad that I was there, had the opportunity,” Watson said. “You know, I would love to do it again next week, throw up on myself again. It would it be great. I want to the opportunity and the chance to win.”

Brooks says he can’t get up for non-major events

Brooks Koepka has called the major championships “easy,” and as audacious as that claim is, his résumé backs it up. What often goes unsaid is Koepka’s outlook on the tournaments outside those four weeks. On Sunday, Koepka gave us a glimpse into that mindset.

Koepka, who contended for last week’s U.S. Open but fell just short, turned in an admirable performance at TPC River Highlands with a final-round 65 translating into a T-5 finish. But when asked if he was battling mental or physical fatigue following Torrey Pines, the four-time major winner was blunt in his assessment.

“It’s all mental. It’s tough to focus like that for …I’m going to be flat out honest,” Koepka said. “A major I get excited and I feel stuff on the first tee. I just struggle to do that in regular events.

“The focus and discipline is there in a major where it’s not here. I kind of go for everything.”

To be fair Koepka has never been one to shy away from playing to a persona, and he is at the echelon where he is judged by what he does at the majors and at the majors only. He’s also not telling us anything our eyes haven’t seen: His track record at majors is legendary; at regular events, it’s really, really good … but far from great. Still, to see Koepka articulate that struggle was illuminating.

In that same breath, don’t misconstrue Koepka’s admission as an admission of defeat.

“Yeah, I mean, I’m not trying to finish second,” Koepka said. “It’s just I think the majors are easier to win if you’re disciplined. Out here I think there are a lot more guys that have the opportunity to win just the way it sets up. Instead of having like three off the side, you’ve got five. So you got a little more room for error, and I think that’s why.”

The Travelers likely marks Koepka’s final competitive round before the Open Championship. He said he’s going on vacation (“I’m not going to touch a club for like 10 days”) before arriving in England a few days before the Open Championship, which begins July 15.

Drew Hallowell

DJ’s mini-slump continues

Dustin Johnson hasn’t been lost in the wilderness; his Masters win technically happened in this super season. In that same breath, the Johnson we’ve seen in 2021 is not the Johnson we’re used to seeing. Even a 10th-place finish two weeks back at the Palmetto Championship at Congaree was somewhat of a disappointment, as Johnson faltered on the weekend off a handful of unforced errors.

The mini-slump continued Sunday, with Johnson’s Travelers’ title defence running out of gas.

Johnson entered the day in a tie for ninth, three back of the lead. Not the easiest deficit to overcome, be it strokes or the amount of guys between him and the lead. Conversely, TPC River Highlands is known for facilitating runs, and few can make runs as easily as Johnson.

There was no surge on Sunday, however. Johnson made the turn in one over, with back-to-back bogeys at the 12th and 13th putting to rest any notions of a second-nine push. Three birdies over the last five holes made the performance look better than it was, but a one-over 71 dropped Johnson 16 spots into a T-25 finish.

In fairness to Johnson, he is held to impossibly high standards. Yet the man himself admits he hasn’t been the same this season.

“I mean, I feel like I’m doing a lot of things really well. It’s just every time I feel like I make a mistake it’s a bogey,” Johnson said Saturday. “When you’re playing well, you miss a shot, you’re grinding out the pars. That’s just what I haven’t been doing lately, or making big numbers, which I don’t really do either.”

As his Saturday 65 proved, Johnson’s not far off from a turnaround. But Sunday was not that day.

The post One of the longest playoffs in PGA Tour history, Bubba’s late stumble and Brooks explains why he struggles at non-major events appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By E. Michael Johnson
Harris English won twice in 2013 then waited close to eight years to get his third PGA Tour title when he won the Sentry Tournament of Champions earlier this year. He didn’t have to wait nearly as long for win No. 4—although Kramer Hickok made him earn it in a playoff tied for the second-longest sudden-death playoff in PGA Tour history.

At a relatively stingy TPC River Highlands, English emerged from a bevvy of challengers to come out on top thanks to a final-round 65 that included six birdies against a lone bogey on No. 17. That was enough to get him into extra holes with Hickok, whom he defeated after a hard-fought playoff on the eighth extra hole.

English’s win can be traced to his success on the par 3s and one final putt at the last. English rolled in a 48-foot birdie bomb on the par-3 fifth and a much closer one of three feet at the eighth. At the 16th English struck a beautiful 8-iron to just inside eight feet and made his third deuce of the round. But after the bogey on 17, English found himself knotted with Hickok and Marc Leishman—who had finished nearly two hours earlier. After a 330-yard tee shot, the approach was less-than-desirable, resting nearly 28 feet from the hole. English knocked in one more putt and then watched as Hickok, playing in the group behind, matched him coming in.

The putter English uses is the venerable Ping Scottsdale HoHum at 35.5 inches long with 3 degrees of loft. Despite the name, English has hardly become bored with the club, which he used during his two wins in 2013. English told Golf Digest back in 2013, “This mallet makes heel, toe or centre hits roll the same. It’s been in my bag since my senior year of college.” English ranked T-18 in strokes gained/putting for the week, and he punctuated the win with a birdie from 16 feet on that eighth playoff hole.

It wasn’t just English’s work with the flat stick, however, that contributed to victory. English was ninth in strokes gained/off-the-tee, picking up nearly four shots on the field with his 9-degree Ping G400 driver with a Mitsubishi Kuro Kage XD 70 shaft. He also was third in strokes gained/tee to green, assisted by his Ping Blueprint irons and Ping Glide 3.0 and Glide Forged wedges.

With that kind of all-around game, win No. 5 shouldn’t take too long, either.

What Harris English had in the bag at the Travelers Championship
Ball: Titleist Pro V1
Driver: Ping G400 (Mitsubishi Kuro Kage XD 70), 9 degrees
3-wood: Ping G400, 14.5 degrees
Irons (3): Ping G410 Crossover; (4-9): Ping Blueprint; (PW): Ping Glide 3.0
Wedges: Ping Glide 3.0 (52, 56 degrees); Ping Glide Forged (60 degrees)
Putter: Ping Scottsdale HoHum

The post The clubs Harris English used to win the 2021 Travelers Championship appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Brian Wacker
HONOLULU — Success can sometimes have its pitfalls. Take Harris English, for example.

In 2013, English won twice in a five-month span on the PGA Tour. Just two years removed from turning pro, many considered the four-time All-American out of the University of Georgia to be one of the game’s rising stars. And that’s when Callaway came calling.

“They made a nice offer,” said English, who until that point had used Ping equipment.

But with the new deal came new clubs. That meant the putter had to go, too.

Not that English minded. He said the experience was awesome, that it was like being recruited to college all over again, and he had a respectable 2014, notching five top-10 finishes for the year, followed by second- and third-place finishes each of the next two years. Still, at the end of 2016 his contract with Callaway ended, so he decided to go back to Ping, re-signing with the company in January 2017.

That decision eventually reunited him with a familiar tool—Ping’s Scottsdale HoHum mallet putter, 35½ inches long with 3 degrees loft, the same one he’d used in college—and for his two prior PGA Tour wins. English put the club back in play midway through the 2017 season and it has been his primary putter since.

“My assistant coach took it off the putting green, and he was like, ‘Man, I’m a terrible putter. If I can make putts with this putter, anybody can putt with it,’” English said, describing how he first came to use the putter while in school. “It’s been a staple that I’ll always go back to. It’s something with the face: It’s pretty soft. It’s very unique, easy to aim. There’s a reason why I go back to it. It’s kind of an old faithful putter, and I feel like I’ve had some of my best putting weeks with that putter.”

That included last week at the Plantation Course, where he led the field in strokes gained/putting and won in a playoff over Joaquin Niemann.

Now he’ll try to pull off an Aloha double the way Justin Thomas did when he won both of the tour’s Hawaii events in 2017. And he’ll have the familiar flat stick by his side.

“I [first] played Ping clubs since I was 12 years old, and just have a lot of confidence in them,” English said. “It’s tough to say, but it was a good run when I was in my 20s, but I feel like I’m really happy with what Ping is doing and confident in what I’m playing right now.”

The post Harris English’s first tour win in seven years came with a surprisingly sentimental backstory involving his putter appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.