It's approaching a year since the PGA Tour resumed at Colonial Country Club, a mainstay of the circuit for almost a century and in some respects the ideal place to begin the long road back to normal. The 2020 renewal of the Charles Schwab Challenge was anything but, of course: no crowds, semi-serious Covid-19 protocols, and a field strong enough to convince some idiot in the UK to write a player-by-player guide to the entire field.
Now, days after thousands of spectators swarmed around Phil Mickelson on his way to a famous and historic major win, all that does feel like history when it comes to golf, and indeed life, in the United States. That means we have fans back on the course, and a field more in keeping with previous renewals, headlined as it always is by Jordan Spieth.
So comfortable is Spieth here at Colonial that he threatened to win as a 45/1 shot last summer, just as he had while struggling for form in 2019. Both these performances relied on the putter — he led the field in both renewals — and it was a dazzling short-game which carried him to this title in 2016. In total, he's played in his home-state event eight times, completing 32 rounds, and he's been inside the top 10 after 21 of them. It's a phenomenal record.
It's something he touched upon at Kiawah Island last week, and while this was in response to how well he deals with a breeze, the same ball-shaping skills are a good fit for this tight, traditional course which does require draws and fades unless you are one of those who can play the long ball and go over the top.
"I love hitting shots and I think in this course with these conditions, you got to hit the shots," he said. "It's going to be a lot of fun. You can play with the wind and you can play with the trajectory of the shots. That's what I like about playing golf.
"Since I was young, me and my coach, we always like to go on the range and play around the trees, hit it low, hit it high, like just mess around. Doing a lot of that, it gives me a lot of creativity on the course and allow me to hit all the shots I want to.
"Yeah, I think there's nothing more fun than just be creative on the golf course and have fun."
It may well be that he has to return home to Valderrama to win again but ninth at The PLAYERS, a quarter-final run in the WGC-Match Play and some promising golf in both the WGC-Workday and the Middle East tell us he's been close to winning at a much higher level than that already this year.
Having been 66/1 for this in 2020, a far stronger renewal which featured every one of the world's best players bar Patrick Cantlay and Tiger Woods, Garcia looks overpriced on the same mark if we're able to excuse his run of four missed cuts in a row — and there are grounds for doing so.
This spring, Kuchar has missed the cut in The Masters and the PGA Championship, as well as The PLAYERS, but on his other four starts he's finished no worse than 18th, and has twice been inside the top six with a round to play. That includes two weeks ago in Texas, where he was third entering the final round.
It's disappointing that he played poorly on a difficult Sunday where rain and wind made a soft, long course a real grind, but Kuchar will be much more at home at Colonial, where he was runner-up having led through 54 holes in 2013, finished sixth in 2016, produced an excellent weekend for 12th in 2017, and shot a third-round 65 to climb the leaderboard to a decent position in 2018.
If he can improve again with his irons, this is a course which will better reward his accuracy, which has returned as he's ranked second, 20th and 19th in fairways hit across his last three individual starts. Put him in the fairway, add that progressive approach work, and suddenly it wouldn't need much for him to be on the first page of the leaderboard.
At a course we know he likes, he'd be much shorter, but his Colonial form can be viewed in a better light than at first glance. He was 27th here when out of form on debut, and had flown in from the BMW PGA Championship in Surrey. In 2011, he was at his lowest ebb, yet despite missing four cuts beforehand and another after, he played reasonably to finish 44th. In 2012 he'd missed two of his last three cuts and failed to make the weekend, while in 2013 he was 35th, this time having flown in from Bulgaria.
Sixteen rounds from his last four tournaments, all much closer to Texas, is a far better way to prepare, and he's won two post-major tournaments before. To do so this time he'll need to put behind him a sustained run of troublingly poor golf, and perhaps calm down a little, but there's been enough in what he's done more recently to take a chance at 200/1.
While a missed cut in his hometown event at the Wells Fargo will have disappointed him, Varner hit the ball really well at Kiawah Island only to rank 80th of 81 players in putting, and if he can make his share then better awaits at this far more suitable course.
And as far as putting last year's T19 into context, it's worth remembering that it came at a time of heightened racial tension in the US, so much so that Varner was interviewed at length at the start of the week, not something he's used to.
Posted at 1230 BST on 25/05/21
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