World Golf Championships attracts big PGA Tour field
With cutoff for FedExCup Playoffs looming, St. Jude Invitational attracts star players.
To play the week before a major championship or not to play?
Every player has an opinion. For some it is an obvious answer, and for others it remains an unsolved mystery.
“For me it varies. It really does,” said Matthew Fitzpatrick. “I’ve never played the week before Augusta. But you know, the other majors, it tends to just fall in periods where the golf courses beforehand, they either happen to have suited my game or just want to get in a flow of golf really in the time period.”
The World Golf Championships-FedEx St. Jude Invitational lived this annual debate for players for many years when it preceded the U.S. Open in June. Those days were supposed to be over with an original summer date slated for July 2-5: two weeks after the U.S. Open and two weeks before the British Open. The hope was that Tiger Woods would finally make an appearance at the St. Jude. But with the golf season being interrupted for 91 days due to the global pandemic, the WGC-St. Jude is back in the same old boat rescheduled for the week before the PGA Championship, which is being held across the country at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco.
So how did it affect Fitzpatrick’s decision to play at TPC Southwind?
“I played pretty well there last year, so I’m actually looking forward to playing there before to hopefully sort of get some confidence going into the PGA and sort of build some momentum,” said Fitzpatrick, who finished T-4 in 2019.
Jack Nicklaus, the winner of a record 18 major titles, valued preparation and made a habit of skipping the week before a major and going to the tournament site early and charting the course. In contrast, former St. Jude champion Lee Trevino, one of Nicklaus’ toughest foes and a six-time major winner, typically grooved his game by playing his way into a tournament.
“I don’t care if it’s the Screen Door Open,” he once said. “If the money’s out there, I’ll tee it up on a gravel road.”
In more recent years, Tiger Woods, who announced Friday he’d be skipping the WGC, rarely played ahead of a major while Phil Mickelson prefers to play and has been a mainstay in Memphis, saying, “What makes it a good preparation for me is just the competition. … It’s hard to replicate it at home. I feel the best way to prepare is to play well and get in contention and competition when you’re really trying to focus.”
Justin Thomas, the 2017 PGA Championship winner, has followed the Woods model, opting to take the week off before the majors to preserve energy before the most physically and mentally taxing weeks of the year.
“One of the biggest ways to take a lot of energy out of yourself is winning a golf tournament or having a chance to win a golf tournament, and I felt I would never want to go into a major off of that, so why am I going to go play a tournament the week before when I’m going there to try to win? That to me just doesn’t make sense,” Thomas explained. “It takes so much out of you.”
If there’s a hole in Thomas’ logic, it’s that despite his strong feeling about not playing the week before majors he made an exception and signed up for four rounds at TPC Southwind.
“That being said, I’m not going to miss the opportunity to play in a WGC. If it was another event at a course where maybe I didn’t like, I probably wouldn’t go play, but I like that tournament and I like that course,” he explained. “Hopefully we’ll just get hot for two weeks.”
World No. 1 Jon Rahm has played in just 14 majors and still is developing his philosophy but said so far he’s tried to rest up before majors.
Rahm, who won the Memorial in his most recent start, heaped praise on the TPC Southwind layout as one of the primary reasons for his decision to play.
“What I like is it’s a test of a golf course. You have to be really, really, really good tee to green,” he said. “I think it’s a really, really good test before a major championship.”
Rahm also predicted that a tough setup before a major could provide the mental toughness a player needs to perform his best at a major championship.
“Different things work for different people,” Rahm said. “Some play the week before. Tiger didn’t. Who knows? It’s something you find over time. I’ll let you know if I ever get on a streak of winning multiple majors. That will mean I’ve found the secret.”