Scott, Adam (1980- )

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    Five Players to Watch at the BMW PGA Championship

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    The golf world is looking toward the Ryder Cup later this month, but the field in this week’s BMW PGA Championship is packed with top contenders.In two weeks, all of golf’s attention will be on the Ryder Cup matches in Rome.In the meantime, though, there’s a big tournament that begins Thursday: the BMW PGA Championship at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England.As usual, the field is packed with top contenders. Rory McIlroy, Viktor Hovland, Matt Fitzpatrick, Tyrrell Hatton, Tommy Fleetwood and the defending champion, Shane Lowry, are all set to play before they join Team Europe, which will try to capture the Cup for the fifth time in the last seven competitions.Here are five other players to keep an eye on.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesAdam ScottIn 2014, the future could not have looked brighter for Scott. The year before, he became the first golfer from Australia to win the Masters Tournament, and he had now ascended to No. 1 in the world. In his early 30s, Scott, possessing one of the best swings in the game, was still in his prime.Those days are gone.Scott, 43, who has 14 victories on the PGA Tour, hasn’t won since the Genesis Invitational in early 2020. At the majors, he hasn’t finished in the Top 10 since tying for seventh in the 2019 United States Open at Pebble Beach. His best showing in the majors this year was a tie for 29th in the P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill near Rochester, N.Y.Still, there is reason to believe that he’s not done just yet. From May through August, Scott, ranked No. 43, finished in the Top 10 in four of his nine starts, coming up just short of qualifying for the FedEx Cup playoffs.He tied for 14th at Wentworth in 2021 and tied for 42nd in 2022.Michael Reaves/Getty ImagesLudvig AbergA bright future may also await Ludvig Aberg of Sweden.Aberg, 23, who turned professional three months ago, won the Omega European Masters in Switzerland earlier this month. The next day, he was one of the Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald’s six picks to be a member of Team Europe.Formerly the world’s top-ranked amateur, he caught Donald’s attention in January during a tournament in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.“He was drawn alongside [the vice captain] Edoardo Molinari that week, and he let me know how impressed he was with this young guy from Sweden,” Donald told Golf Digest.“And it was my job as captain to keep my options open for anyone to make the team,” he added.Aberg, who played golf at Texas Tech, became the first player to secure his tour card in the United States by finishing first on the 2023 PGA Tour University Ranking. He has made the cut in six of his seven tour starts since turning pro, his best performance a tie for fourth at the John Deere Classic.Jared C. Tilton/Getty ImagesTom KimFor Tom Kim of South Korea, 21, who is making his debut in this tournament, the future may be here already. Kim, ranked No. 18, qualified for the Tour Championship at East Lake, the final event of the playoffs, and finished in a tie for 20th.He had an impressive 2022-23 season, recording nine Top 10 finishes in 26 starts, including a victory at the Shriners Children’s Open in Las Vegas, a tie for second at the British Open at Royal Liverpool and a tie for eighth in the U.S. Open at the Los Angeles Country Club. At the Shriners event, Kim became the first player since Tiger Woods in 1996 to win twice on the PGA Tour before turning 21.Kim, who has been a professional since he was 15, is an entertaining player and provided one of the most amusing moments of the year when he fell in the mud at Oak Hill and washed his clothes off in the creek.Harry How/Getty ImagesJon RahmRahm, ranked No. 3, needs to get back in form and fast — for his own sake and for the sake of Team Europe.The No. 1 seed heading into the playoffs, he tied for 37th and 31st in the first two events and closed at East Lake with another disappointing showing to tie for 18th in the final standings. Rahm, who is from Spain, didn’t win once in 10 appearances after his comeback victory over Brooks Koepka in the Masters. In fact, from May through August, he compiled only two Top 10 results, one of those being a tie for second at Royal Liverpool.Rahm, 28, who had held the top spot for 30 consecutive weeks, is not a fan of the current playoff format.“You can win every single tournament up until this one,” he told reporters at East Lake. “You have a bad week, you finish 30th, and now you’ll forever be known as 30th in the FedEx Cup this season. I don’t think that’s very fair.”Rahm tied for second with McIlroy at last year’s event at Wentworth, a stroke behind Lowry.Jared C. Tilton/Getty ImagesBilly HorschelWhile he won’t be on the U.S. squad heading to Rome, it’s still a big week for Horschel, 36, who won this event in 2021. He finished in the Top 10 only three times in 22 starts this past season on the PGA Tour.One of those Top 10 results came in his final tournament, the Wyndham Championship, when he finished fourth. Horschel, ranked No. 50, turned in a career-low 62 in the second round and followed with a 63 to enjoy a share of the lead after 54 holes. A victory would have put him in the playoffs, but he faltered with a 72.His season’s low point was an 84 in the first round at the Memorial Tournament in early June. He rebounded the next day with a 72 but did not make the cut.“Listen, we all struggle at this game, and I’m not the first PGA Tour pro to play bad for an extended stretch,” Horschel told Golf Digest in June. “There are some people that think we should play well every week right. But golf’s a tough game. Life’s a tough game.” More

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      Forged After a Tumultuous Era, World Golf Championships Fade in Another

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      A match play event in Texas may be the last W.G.C. event, ending an international competition that preceded golf’s high-rolling present.AUSTIN, Texas — It was not all that long ago — Tom Kim, after all, is only 20 years old — but before Kim emerged as one of the PGA Tour’s wunderkinds-in-progress, he would watch the World Golf Championships.“For sure, 100 percent,” Kim cheerfully reminisced as he clacked along this week at Austin Country Club, the site of the championships’ match play event. “There was W.G.C. in China. There was Firestone before. You had Doral. You had this.”Had, because once one man wins on Sunday, the championships appear poised to fade away. An elite competition forged, in part, because of another era’s tumult has become a casualty of this one’s.“Everything runs its course and has its time,” said Adam Scott, who has twice won W.G.C. events. Barring a resuscitation, which seems improbable given the PGA Tour’s business strategy these days, the W.G.C.’s time was 24 years.The W.G.C. circuit was decaying before LIV Golf, the Greg Norman-fronted league that is cumulatively showering players with hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, cleaved men’s professional golf last year. Two W.G.C. events vanished after their 2021 iterations, and a third, always staged in China, has not been contested since 2019 because of the coronavirus pandemic.And as the PGA Tour has redesigned its model to diminish LIV’s appeal, even the Texas capital’s beloved match play competition has become vulnerable to contractual bickering and shifting priorities.“We’ve had great events and great champions, but the business evolves and it adapts,” Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said this month, when the tour reinforced its decision to wager its future on “designated events” that should command elite fields and, in some cases beginning next year, be no-cut tournaments capped at 80 players or less. (LIV, whose tournaments always have 48-man fields and no cuts, responded with a wry tweet: “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Congratulations PGA Tour. Welcome to the future.”)With a $20 million purse, doubled in size from five years ago, the match play competition that began on Wednesday is a designated event under the 2023 model. Next year, though, it will not be on the calendar at all, winnowing the W.G.C. to one competition. And Monahan has said it would be “difficult to foresee” when his circuit’s schedule might again include the HSBC Champions, the W.G.C. event in China that will be the last remaining event formally existing in the series.The Chinese tournament’s website has had few updates in recent years, and an inquiry with the event’s organizers went unanswered. HSBC, the British banking powerhouse that is the tournament’s title sponsor, declined to comment.But the PGA Tour’s freshly calibrated distance from the Shanghai competition is fueling what looks to be an unceremonious end for the W.G.C., which were announced to immense fanfare in 1997, when the tour and its allies were smarting over Norman’s failed quest to start a global circuit for the sport’s finest players. The events, which debuted in 1999 with a match play event that sent some of the game’s best home after the first day, were intended to entice and reward the elite without challenging the prestige of the four major tournaments, as well as to give men’s professional golf a greater global footprint.It worked for a spell, and five continents hosted W.G.C. events, many of which Tiger Woods dominated. With the exception of the Chinese tournament, though, the circuit had lately been played in North America.“The ‘world’ part of the World Golf Championships wasn’t really in there,” Rory McIlroy, the four-time major tournament winner whose W.G.C. résumé includes a victory in the 2015 match play event, mused in an interview by the practice putting green.McIlroy, among the architects of the tour’s reimagining as Norman’s unfinished ambitions proved more fruitful this time around, said he had also worried that the W.G.C. events had come to lack “any real meaning,” even as they had been “lovely to be a part of, nice to play in and nice to win.” The tour’s emphasis on select tournaments, many executives and top players like McIlroy believe, will lend more consequence to its season and make it a more appealing, decipherable and concentrated product that can fend off the assault by a LIV circuit bent on simplifying — its critics say diluting — professional golf.“Your casual golf fan knows the majors, the Ryder Cup and maybe the events that are close to their hometown,” said McIlroy, who is among the players devising a new weeknight golf competition that is expected to start next year. “I get it: Professional golf is a very saturated market with a ton of stuff going on, and people have limited time to watch what they want to watch.”The Austin tournament’s end will, at least for now, reduce match play opportunities on the circuits that have been aligned with the W.G.C. Though the Austin event — which has three days of group-stage play, followed by single-elimination rounds — has a field of only 64 players, less than half of the size of last year’s British Open, it has been larger and more accessible than other signature match play tournaments.Rickie Fowler hits from the rough during the first round of W.G.C. match play.Eric Gay/Associated PressBut given the format’s popularity, it will linger, if a little less, on the international golf scene. The Presidents Cup, Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup will remain fixtures — the Solheim will be contested in Spain in September, with the Ryder decided soon after in Italy — and more modest events, such as the International Crown women’s tournament that will be played in May, still dot the calendar.Some players this week appeared more mournful than others about the erosion of the W.G.C. and the decline of match play. Scott said he hoped the tour’s new system would be able to accommodate the next generation of ready-for-stardom players from around the world, as the W.G.C. did, even as he said he was not insistent that match play be a staple.“We don’t play much match play, so the kind of logic in me questions its place in pro golf, but also we’ve got to entertain as well, and if people like to see it and sponsors want to see it, yep, I’m up for it,” Scott said.He grinned.“Maybe we should have some more, get a bit more head-to-head and see if guys like each other so much after,” he offered mischievously. “The year of match play!”The PGA Tour has not ruled out a return to the format, though it would assuredly be limited. LIV could also eventually try to tap into interest. At an event in Arizona last week, Phil Mickelson, a LIV team captain, said that match play was “certainly something that we are discussing as a possibility for the season-ending event.”But the W.G.C. appear effectively finished. Kim, the youngest player this week, was delighted that he had arrived just in time.“I played once before it all goes away,” said Kim, who has six top-10 finishes in his early tour career and expressed confidence in the circuit’s direction. “I played once in my life.”He wandered off to practice. A round against Scottie Scheffler, the reigning match play champion and the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, loomed soon enough. More

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      Four Major Tournaments in Four Months Is a Lot of Important Golf

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      Professional golfers worry about sustaining peak form, but say that scheduling four championships April through July is good for the game, and anyone who gets on a roll.KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. — This is just the second time in the modern era of men’s professional golf that the sport’s four major championships will be contested in consecutive months, one each from April through July. The schedule was similar in 2019 when, after years of deliberation, the P.G.A. Championship opted to move to May, from its long standing date in mid-August.But the pandemic in 2020 forced three major championships, the P.G.A. Championship, the United States Open and the Masters, to be held from August to November. So, when this year’s P.G.A. Championship concludes Sunday at the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island, the world’s top men’s golfers will have played five majors in 10 months. Moreover, if the 2021 U.S. Open and this year’s British Open are held as expected in June and July, respectively, golf will have crammed seven majors into 12 months.If that weren’t enough, many of the best men’s players will also be competing in the Tokyo Olympics golf tournament from July 29 to Aug. 1.It is unlikely such a grueling schedule would occur again, at least intentionally, but it raises the question of whether golf’s best players can be expected to peak for the sport’s biggest championships repeatedly in a compressed time period. And moving forward, what are the challenges to staying mentally and physically prepared for golf’s new format of four majors in four months? For pro golfers, it is a little like the lengthy playoff runs in professional basketball, hockey, soccer and baseball.“It feels like every two or three weeks we’re at a venue where it’s super stressful because it’s a difficult golf course or a difficult event,” Kevin Kisner, a three-time winner on the PGA Tour, said.Kisner added: “It feels like I’m constantly getting beat up out here with the big schedule. The hardest thing is every event feels big. I haven’t played well in any of them.”It has forced some players to make difficult choices, like skipping regular tour events that they used to play so they can rest for the condensed series of major tournaments. Justin Thomas, the world’s second ranked golfer, made such a decision last month when he took two weeks off after the Masters, even though not playing can diminish a golfer’s competitive edge.“I’m just not in the physical or mental state to be able to play a golf tournament after the grind of a pressure-filled event like the Masters,” Thomas said. “I need the time to relax and then get into it later where I feel like I’m peaking for this big stretch coming up.”While the new schedule has added to the strain of trying to claim what can be a career-defining major championship, most players believe it is worth it for two chief reasons: Golf no longer goes head-to-head with the N.F.L. in the fall, and players can take a break and put their clubs away earlier.Moving the P.G.A. Championship from August to May does both because it allows the PGA Tour’s season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs to start, and end, sooner.“If you poll all the players, I would think they would be happy about the way it is now,” Jordan Spieth, a three-time major winner, said this week. “We can finish our season in August and not compete with football. And then create a little bit of an off-season for ourselves.”Playing the P.G.A. Championship in the spring rather than the summer also allows the event to be played in more parts of the United States. Scheduling the tournament in August meant that areas of the country that experience especially hot summer conditions, which are ruinous to greens, could not stage a P.G.A. Championship. That eliminated wide swaths of the country.“We think the cadence of the schedule is just better for fans — better for players,” said Seth Waugh, the chief executive of the P.G.A. of America, which conducts the P.G.A. Championship. “Obviously it’s exhausting for them to go April, May, June, July, and then if this year you’ve got an Olympics. It’s a long grind.”The P.G.A. of America represents more than 28,000 teaching and club golf professionals nationwide who serve the recreational golfing public. More golf majors early in the year theoretically enhances overall interest in the sport. Said Waugh: “Our chance to kind of light the fire for the game in May is pretty significant.”In the end, Adam Scott, the 2013 Masters winner, thinks that tour players will be better adjusted to the new schedule after having done it a second time in 2021. He pointed to Brooks Koepka, who won two U.S. Opens and two P.G.A. Championships in a 26-month span beginning in 2017, as inspiration for his colleagues.“I look at it as a huge opportunity,” Scott said of the condensed schedule. “And I think seeing what Brooks has done from the schedule of winning a couple in really quick succession, or four in quick time — that’s what is possible if you can get on a roll.” More

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      How to Grip a Putter: 9 Ways the Pros Use

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      The claw. The two thumbs. The alternative reverse overlap. Every golfer at this week’s Masters Tournament has a preferred way to putt and a reason for doing it.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Accurate putting is widely considered the most pivotal golf skill, and the most intractable. While golfers generally hold their clubs the same way for a full swing, when it comes to rolling a little white ball into a hole roughly four inches wide, even the best players in the world contort their hands and arms into exotic grips to calm their nerves and foster consistency.Here are nine ways that top golfers at this week’s Masters Tournament try to solve the eternal puzzle of putting:Lee WestwoodThe ClawDoug Mills/The New York TimesLee Westwood: The ClawPopularized about 25 years ago, the claw grip, in right-handed golfers, features a right hand that does not merge with a stabilizing left hand at the top of the putter, as was done in conventional grips for decades. The right hand branches out on its own, with the putter pinched claw-like between the thumb and forefinger, which can purposely make the right hand more passive in the stroke.Bryson DeChambeauThe Arm LockDoug Mills/The New York TimesBryson DeChambeau: The Arm LockA college physics major whose early nickname on the PGA Tour was “the mad scientist,” DeChambeau was ranked 145th in putting on the PGA Tour until he converted to the arm-lock method and improved his putting ranking to 28th. It’s all about keeping the proper angles: DeChambeau turns his elbows outward in opposite directions and his wrists inward. Simple.Jordan SpiethThe Left-Hand LowDoug Mills/The New York TimesJordan Spieth: The Left-Hand LowThe left-hand low grip is likely the most widely used nontraditional way to grip the putter for right-handed golfers. It puts the left hand below the right hand and in an authoritative position to control the path of the putter head instead of a golfer’s dominant right hand. Interestingly, in Spieth’s case, he is naturally left-handed even though he plays golf right-handed.Matt WallaceTwo ThumbsDoug Mills/The New York TimesMatt Wallace: Two ThumbsWallace has his palms facing each other with both thumbs on the top of the putter shaft and the index fingers placed along opposing sides of the putter. In theory, this creates symmetry and permits the hands to hang straight down, rather than one above the other in a conventional grip. The shoulders remain level, which makes it easier to develop a (sometimes) preferred pendulum putting motion. Also known as the prayer grip.Phil MickelsonLefty ClawDoug Mills/The New York TimesPhil Mickelson: Lefty ClawMickelson is right-handed in most things he does other than golf, and his right hand, with a pointed index finger (sometimes called a pencil grip), becomes the top part of his version of the claw grip. The left hand is in the guiding position. Mickelson values the claw because it makes it easier to have “a longer, smoother stroke” on the fast greens of the Masters and tour events.Tiger WoodsThe Reverse OverlapDoug Mills/The New York TimesTiger Woods: The Reverse OverlapAlthough Woods is not at this year’s Masters, a photo from the 2020 tournament shows Woods using what is perhaps the most common putting grip in golf. He has rarely strayed from the revered reverse overlap. His left forefinger lies across the right hand, settling between the third and fourth fingers. Woods says the best part of the grip is the unity it brings to both hands.Brooks KoepkaAlternative Reverse OverlapDoug Mills/The New York TimesBrooks Koepka: Alternative Reverse OverlapKoepka, a four-time major champion, has adapted the reverse overlap by extending his right forefinger rather than curling it around the shaft. One intended advantage of this style is that the angle of the right wrist can remain the same through the stroke so that the putter face does not waver open or closed and cause an inconsistent ball path.Adam ScottLong Putter ClawDoug Mills/The New York TimesAdam Scott: Long Putter ClawScott is the only Masters champion to have used the older version of a long putter, which could be anchored against the chest. Revised rules forbid the top of the putter touching the body frame, but Scott has adjusted with a right-hand low claw grip. He also tends to leave the flagstick in the hole while putting, which is not common.Justin RoseModified ClawDoug Mills/The New York TimesJustin Rose: Modified ClawRose likes to think of his left arm as the driving force of his stroke, and he frequently practices putting with his left hand only. His version of the claw has his two right fingers over the top of the shaft instead of resting on the side. Asked why he prefers this grip, Rose had the most basic, succinct answer of all: “It feels simpler.”

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