Steele shows resolve to not slow down
Brendan Steele knows all about a fast start to the season. What he’d like to avoid is the slow finish.
Steele won the Safeway Open a year ago, and he felt he was on his way. He made the cut in his next 16 tournaments. He had three top 10s, including a tie for sixth in The Players Championship. He made the cut in both majors he played during that stretch.
He was 13th in the FedEx Cup, and the Tour Championship looked like a sure thing. And then it wasn’t.
“I really felt like at the end of the season through the summer, I definitely limited myself as to what I was trying to achieve,” Steele said. “I just wanted to make the Tour Championship so bad, I was just trying to scratch and claw for every point I could. There was never going to be a week where I had a chance to win playing like that because you play to the level you’re thinking.
“If you’re trying to make the cut, you’ll be right around the cut line,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to win. I wasn’t trying to play my best. I was just trying to get whatever points I could and I played right to that level.”
He made only three cuts in his last seven events, and two of those tournaments didn’t even have cuts.
Steele was at No. 27 going into the BMW Championship, closed with a 72-72 weekend and missed the top 30 — and the Tour Championship — by two shots. Since the wraparound season began in October 2013, Steele became the first player to win the season-opening event and not make it to East Lake.
He hopes he at least learned from last year.
“I just started playing a little more cautiously and a little bit more afraid,” he said. “I don’t know if I got a little bit more tired or what happened, but I was just worried about the outcome and not the process of actually hitting good shots and playing good tournaments. … I’m going to try not to do that this year and just really move forward and try to win as many tournaments as I can, and get myself into contention in majors and do all the things that everybody wants to do out here.”
He gets his first chance quickly. After his two-shot victory to repeat at the Safeway Open, he was on a flight to Malaysia to play the CIMB Classic.
Cubs and corn
This may be the corniest idea yet offered to pay tribute to the Chicago Cubs.
The (Arlington Heights) Daily Herald reports officials of the Richardson Adventure Farm in Spring Grove, Ill., have chosen last year’s World Series champs to be the subject for this year’s corn maze.
After the Cubs signed off on the idea, artists went to work creating an epic corn tapestry that features, among other things, the team’s logo and an image of the late, great Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray along with Caray’s catchphrase “Holy Cow.”
The 28-acre maze will be open through late this month. But farm owner George Richardson said anyone who misses it might have a chance to see it next year if the Cubs win the World Series this year.