Caves Valley middle stop of gantlet
Run of three majors in five weeks taxing, but players not worried
Professional golfers, particularly those at the top of the money list, have long talked about gearing their games up for the majors. It’s a practice that probably predated Jack Nicklaus, though the legendary player considered by many to be the greatest in history certainly popularized the approach.
Then there’s Bernhard Langer, who is dominating the PGA Tour Champions as few before him have in the 37-year history of the sport’s 50-and-over circuit. A twotime Masters champion, the 59-year-old German has won the season’s first two majors and nine majors overall since turning 50.
So is Langer honing his game for the tour’s next run of majors — three straight on the schedule in a span of five weeks, including the Constellation Energy Senior Players Championship at Caves Valley Golf Club in Owings Mills on July 13-16? The short answer: not really. “I sometimes find it difficult to gear up toward a major,” Langer said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “What are you going to do different? Are you going to go to Augusta [for the Masters] and play a couple of practice rounds two weeks before and figure out what you need to do?
“If you are a complete player, which you kind of need to be to win a major, I think, you should have most of those shots and whatever you need to fine-tune or improve on, you can still do that on short notice a few days before . ... A very good player would like to be good all the time.”
Olin Browne, whose two PGA Tour Champions victories include the 2011 U.S. Senior Open, said the biggest difference between the regular events and the majors is that the majors last four rounds, one more than the typical tour stops.
“The better you’re playing, the more rounds you’d rather have in a tournament