After Jordan Spieth swept through the season’s first two majors, it seemed he was a sunrise/sunset certainty to win PGA Tour Player of the Year.
Then Jason Day decided to go all freaky these past two months, winning the year’s last major as well as four of his past six events.
Is the sure thing not so sure anymore? Could the Tour Championship have some actual bearing on the POY voting by the players?
“Majors are big. With what Jordan’s done this year, it’s pretty amazing,” Rickie Fowler said. “But Jason’s making his late charge, so he’s not making it any easier on the voting side of it.”
Players entered in at least 15 PGA Tour events choose the winner, with the voting closed Oct. 1. The winner is announced the following day.
Spieth has won four times on the PGA Tour, with, most important, victories at the Masters and U.S. Open (with a fourth and a second in the two other majors). Day has one more PGA Tour victory but one less major. A dominant performance at East Lake could tilt the scales a bit more in his favor.
Only this much Henrik Stenson knows for sure: “Someone with the first letter ‘J’ will win it.”
“In my mind, it’s a very tight race,” he said. “Yeah, I would still wait until this week is over before I would put in my final vote on that. I think it comes down to what happens this week.”
Furyk can't go: Withdrawing in the middle of a round last week with wrist pain did not bode well for 2010 Tour Championship/FedEx Cup winner Jim Furyk. Sure enough, he announced Tuesday that he would skip East Lake and place "all my efforts on being healthy and ready to play in the Presidents Cup." The match, pitting the U.S. against the world (minus Europe) begins Oct. 8 in Korea.
Presidents Cup captain Jay Haas will have until the day before competition begins to select a replacement if Furyk continues to hurt.
Furyk’s injury has been deemed a bruised wrist, unrelated to the injury that kept him out for an extended portion of the 2004 season. There is no next man up in the Tour Championship. With Furyk out, they’ll play with a 29-man field this week, for the second consecutive year. And Furyk will receive the $132,000 30th-place share, plus whatever FedEx Cup bonus his eventual points standing calls for.
Bubba Golf not Tour Championship golf: For the second consecutive year Bubba Watson is nicely positioned at East Lake, a top-five points guy who can win more than $11 million with a Tour Championship victory. And for the sixth time, he's iffy about doing anything here. The two-time Masters champion and former Georgia Bulldog does not play well on this little swatch of Georgia real estate. His average finish in his five previous Tour Championship appearances is 18th, his best a fifth in 2012.
Seems the same characteristic that makes him popular with the people — his go-for-broke shot-making — does not serve him well here. A change in strategy is in order. “It’s aiming more to the center of the greens. It’s playing to the safer side. It’s not trying to get too much out of a club. It’s looking at all these things and figuring out how the best way that I can make pars on some shots,” he said.
That sounds all well and good, but can he really do it? “It might happen this week, and it might not,” he said, offering no promises.
Newbies aplenty: Nine of the 29 players in the Tour Championship field are first-timers. The one with the highest world ranking is Brooks Koepka (17th). Five players have won the Tour Championship in their first appearance. … For the first time since the first FedEx Cup in 2007, the top five in the points standings are among the top 10 in the world ranking. … Heads up Jason Day, only two players who entered the Tour Championship as the points leader — Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh — have won the FedEx Cup.
