It's a good job Pebble Beach is Pebble Beach, because otherwise this week's PGA Tour event might stretch the patience of us hopeless souls who spend more than half a week obsessing over golf scores. It ought to be enough that we did the pro-am thing in the AmEx, and after three courses there and two at Torrey Pines, we should now be down to one. But we're not. Once more, we go multi-coursing for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where the calibre of celebrity rises with the calibre of courses.
Pebble Beach is holy ground, and if you've never been, I can't recommend it enough. Green fees might be prohibitively priced – several hundred dollars, or 1.5x the latest revolutionary driver – but to my amazement when visiting the Monterey Peninsula some years ago, you can basically just swan up, park your car, and stroll the grounds. Notwithstanding the game of beer pong taking place in the house to the right of the 18th fairway which rather undermined the zen aspect of it all, my experience was almost spiritual. What a place.
By no means do I believe that world ranking should have much more than a tenuous correlation to price, but Fitzpatrick's does help illustrate the point. He is 25th currently, and that's despite choosing to skip a couple of valuable, Rolex Series events in the Middle East which would likely have helped improve that figure.
It puts him fourth among this field and I would actually suggest he's currently the fifth-best player, behind those mentioned minus Day himself. Fitzpatrick though is 10th in the market, and the negatives which explain such generous odds are nowhere near significant enough to shift him from the very top of my shortlist.
The first concern to address is his form in the event, which reads MC-60, but he played Pebble Beach nicely on his debut, and last time he came here had journalist and college friend Dan Rapaport on the bag. Rapaport is an excellent player and by no means do experienced caddies always equate to success, but he was filling the shoes of no ordinary caddie that week. Fitzpatrick is usually accompanied by the veteran Billy Foster, and will be here.
This tournament has produced many a skinner down the years, but always with some kind of logic. Ted Potter for instance had been 16th in the event previously, Vaughn Taylor inside the top 10 a year prior to his win, and namesake Nick Taylor also boasted a very good record at Pebble Beach, Monterey and Spyglass Hill.
DA Points had been 14th two years prior to winning, Matt Gogel had played well in both previous starts and been runner-up on debut and, for all its idiosyncrasies, the Pebble Beach Pro-Am has thrown up the same names pretty regularly. That's true of all these shocks and also Berger, who had been 10th and fifth before winning last year.
The Japanese finished 12th on his first start this year, shooting 64-65-65 over the final three rounds of the Sony Open, where compatriot Hideki Matsuyama won in stunning fashion. After a quiet start, Kodaira played the final 54 holes better than anyone bar the Masters champion and course specialist Kevin Kisner, so it was a mighty performance.
Whether he can build on it remains to be seen but we know already this accurate type is best when faced with a challenge like that of Waialae. He won the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town because his fairways-and-green games can be deadly at a course like that, and the same ought to be true of these three short, turning, coastal layouts on the opposite side of the country.
Reavie has done that before, and it's fair to say neither the AmEx nor the Farmers suit him anything like this does. At Torrey Pines he's played 10 times without a top-20 finish, and his best in a dozen tries at the AmEx, where he's missed his last three cuts, is a staying-on 12th.
Last year he played poorly in both but managed 16th place here despite lying 118th after the first round, in 2020 he followed three missed cuts with 25th place, and it was a similar story in 2016 when he suddenly found his scoring boots when arriving at Pebble Beach and led after a first-round 63.
Twenty years ago, Perez led this tournament by a wide margin before double-bogey at the 14th hole on Sunday cut his lead, which was a shot when he stood on the 18th tee. There, he hit his first drive out-of-bounds, his second one left into the Pacific Ocean, and a dizzying 30 minutes later had made triple-bogey to hand the title to Gogel.
Chances are that will remain his best opportunity to win this title but he's since been fourth, seventh, 14th twice and 26th last year, and on several more occasions has been on the fringes of contention heading into the final round. Last year's effort was his best for several months and remained that way until June, and this formerly hotheaded character seems to enjoy an event in which he has won the corresponding team competition.
There is of course no guarantee that Perez can back it up but it was clearly a massive shot in the arm, and given that he's one of the shorter hitters around, it's fair to conclude this tournament ought to suit more. His first win came in a multi-course pro-am and if he's to add a fourth on the PGA Tour, where better than the place that owes him one after the events of 2002.
Posted at 2020 GMT on 31/01/22
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