Anything can happen at Sawgrass
10 only three times. Then again, one of those was a victory in 2007, and Mickelson still isn’t sure how he did it.
Woods, while not playing this year, also has been unpredictable. He is on the short list of two-time winners at The Players. He has never missed the cut in 19 appearances. But he has only contended for the title three times. Along with his two wins, he was runnerup in 2000 to Hal Sutton, Koepka had no answers. “I don’t know if it’s the players or the way they set up the golf course sometimes,” Koepka said. “Back when it was in May, you could catch flyers, so hitting the fairways was a premium. Now, not so much.”
Koepka also hit on another trend worth nothing.
“At the same time,” he said, “probably every great player has won here.”
For the first 20 years on the TPC Sawgrass, 18 of the winners are now major champions. Since then, for every Mickelson or Sergio Garcia or Martin Kaymer, there was a Craig Perks or Si Woo Kim.
“I think it is a course of strategy because everyone kind of plays to similar spots,” said Adam Scott, who won in 2004. “I don’t think you can overpower the course. And I don’t think you can play out of the rough all week and do well. It’s really open to whoever can play well. I don’t think it favors long hitters. I don’t think it favors just a short game.
“I think it tests all areas of the game.”
The test looms a little larger for Koepka, who lost his No. 1 ranking last month to McIlroy and is trying to find his game since returning in January from a knee injury. Koepka left Orlando after the Arnold Palmer Invitational and flew to Las Vegas to work with Butch Harmon.
“I felt like I just
I had so much going on in my head, so many swing thoughts and needed to clear the slate,” Koepka said. “I just needed a different set of eyes. Maybe something might click, because I was failing.”
And now Koepka seeks to get things right on a course where so many shots are on the edge of great or disastrous, part of that a product of having water in play on so many holes, the most infamous being the island green for the par-3 17th.
The most telling about the unpredictable nature of this tournament might have been last year. McIlroy, with his fluid, powerful swing, won by one shot over Jim Furyk, a 48-year-old who was among the shorter hitters even when he younger.
“One thing about this golf course, I’m not sure it favors a style of game as far as power is concerned,” Furyk said. “But it will test a lot of different areas of you game.”