AGAINST THE ODDS
Jeremy Ellwood analyses some of the more unlikely professional wins from players who have managed to turn the form book on its head
et’s get straight to the point. How on earth do golfers occasionally win tournaments during years in which they do precious little else? If you’re a golf punter, the players you are looking out for are definitely not the ones with a string of MCS to their name, but rather those who look as though they might be running into a bit of form or who are simply so classy they could win any time they tee it up.
The adage of ‘form is temporary, class is permanent’ has always baffled me a little because it must surely be possible to show all the class in the world, but if you never run into any form, you’re not going to do much. Anyway, semantics aside, let’s investigate further.
Just who has achieved the feat of winning in a year which could otherwise be described as poor or worse? Well, a surprising number. Most recently, Stephen Gallacher in India last year, and Alvaro Quiros with his first victory for six years in Sicily in 2017. More from both later, along with Oliver Wilson on his fairytale Dunhill Links victory in 2014. But who else?
I would love to have been able to include David Duval as the most remarkable of all. At a time when his golf game had pretty much deserted him, he popped up to almost win the 2009 US Open at the fearsome Bethpage Black. He rattled in consecutive birdies on the 68th, 69th and 70th holes to threaten a miracle, before eventually finishing two shy of Lucas Glover. There you go – I’ve
included him anyway through the back door, but the point is that Duval played 22 PGA Tour events that year and missed the cut in 15 of them, with his next best finish T55th at Pebble Beach in February. Quite where that 2nd place finish in a Major came from, who knows!
Going back a while, Paul Way’s star burned brightly in the mid1980s, with his three European Tour victories famously including the 1985 PGA Championship. But by the time of his final victory in the European Open in September 1987, Way was badly out of form, with T34th in Jersey back in April his only other top-40 finish so far that year. Somehow, he compiled an impressive closing 67 to hold the cream of the European Tour at bay at Walton Heath, with Woosie and Greg Norman among those in the mix. His next best finish in 1987 was T32nd, with only five top-50s all season and 13 missed cuts from 24 starts.
In 2001, American Garrett Willis teed it up in the Touchstone Energy Tucson Open for his maiden PGA Tour event as a card-holder and promptly won it. The rest of that year yielded 20 missed cuts from 33 starts and just two other top-25 finishes. He would never again scale such heights. The following year in Europe, German Tobias Dier won the TNT Open after firing an incredible opening round of 60. His next best finish that year was T44th and he missed 17 cuts from 29 starts. That opening round in The Netherlands eclipsed his season’s stroke average by nearly 13 shots.
So, what of Messrs Wilson, Quiros and Gallacher, and to what do they attribute their seemingly unlikely victories? Wilson famously secured his maiden European Tour win in 2014’s Dunhill Links during a season in which he was mainly playing the Challenge Tour and struggling to make any real impact there. The records show that he made eight out of ten main tour
cuts that year, but those figures are slightly skewed as his victory got him into the four end-of-season ‘no cut’ events with guaranteed money. His average finishing position was 59th even with the win.
A few months after the Dunhill, Wilson gave me an honest selfappraisal of his long-awaited triumph. “I turned up swinging it well with some good feelings and it was at three courses that I know really well and where I’d had good results before. There were a lot of things to feel positive about, but at the same time, I hadn’t made many cuts and confidence was low. But I knew how to get it round those courses. Tee-to-green it was the best tournament I’ve ever had in my life by a mile. That said, those courses allow you to do that because they’re not that tight. It was exactly what I needed at that time as a step to moving forward.”
Wilson was all too aware that it was only a step in the right direction, nothing more. “The Final Series was actually a great opportunity because it shows you exactly where your game is at,” he told me. “St Andrews and those courses were fantastic, but they’re all links courses and very different to what we play week in, week out. They were just what I needed at that time, but playing proper tough courses again took a bit of getting
used to.” Wilson knew he wasn’t fully ‘back’, and there would be more lean times before he finally re-established himself last year.
If there was an element of ‘right courses at the right time’ about Wilson’s victory, for Quiros it was perhaps more ‘right event at the right time’ in 2017. Although the Spaniard had won six times in his first six years on tour, the last of those had been in 2011 and his game had been in the doldrums to varying degrees since then.
His victory was even more astonishing than Wilson’s given what the rest of the season yielded. He made just four cuts from 20 events and those moneyearning performances were 62nd, 49th, 22nd and, almost unbelievably, 1st in Sicily, where he beat Zander Lombard in a play-off. His average finishing position was 95th.
Like many others before and since, Quiros had gone in search of a better swing: “I committed to changing my swing and that was the key to why, from 2012 until 2018 really, I wasn’t able to deliver as I used to that easily and that naturally. Those years, my knowledge about my swing looked like it was disappearing, and it’s impossible for a golfer to compete without knowing his swing,” he lamented to me last year.
How, then, did he win in Sicily? “It was an accident,” he went on, smiling. “The victory was almost an accident!” This is probably true, for playing without a full tour card in 2017, Quiros had somehow built a seven-shot lead early in the final round before stumbling down the stretch, perhaps understandably given how little he had been in contention of late. Despite this, he thinks it was experience that saw him home.
“It wasn’t the strongest field of a European Tour event,” he explained. “I want to think that my experience played a big part over there, playing in a play-off with a guy who had just arrived on tour.”
Finally, then, Gallacher and his win last year. His best result in six events prior to the Hero Indian Open was T67th in Dubai and he had made just one cut. He recorded only one other top-25 in the late-season Italian Open, finished in the top 50 just four times all year and missed 16 cuts from 22 events. “It’s been a tough year to be honest – probably the strangest year I’ve ever had,” Gallacher told me last year. “I’ve missed a lot of cuts by a shot, two shots. It’s just one of those ones where I’ve got the win but I’m feeling disappointed about the year. It’s strange. I’m working very hard but I’ve just not been driving very well and my bad shot has been too bad, so I’m trying to get my bad shot better.” I asked him if he would rather finish top ten every week with no wins or have one win but miss a lot of cuts. “I’ve actually been thinking about that and I don’t really know,” he replied. “The good thing for me was that I got the win early doors and then you’ve got an exemption – it’s got you the next couple of years regardless of what happens.
“I just played really well and led the birdie stats,” Gallacher responded when I asked how he could explain such an unlikely win. “That’s generally what it is – if you make a lot of birdies, you have a chance of doing well in the
“I hadn’t made many cuts and confidence was low, but I knew how to get it round those courses”
tournament. I’ve basically been having a lot of double-bogeys and stuff like that. I’ve been missing it both ways off the tee and that’s the killer. It’s the penalty dropping – a couple of OBS and a couple of sevens and you can’t compete.”
Even that week he only ranked 67th for Strokes Gained: Driving, losing 0.57 of a shot per round on the field. But he did rank 2nd for strokes gained in approach play, where he picked up 2.52 shots per round on the field.
Interestingly, Wilson and Quiros have missed the cut in all five events they have so far played in 2020’s interrupted season, while Gallacher has a best finish of T21st from five starts. But don’t write them off too soon. History shows that any one of them is capable of winning should experience, know-how and other variables somehow override the form book in any given week.