HOUSTON – Now, this is something you definitely don’t see every day.
Mark Hubbard was disqualified after finishing his second round of the 2022 Cadence Bank Houston Open at Memorial Park Golf Course on Friday after violating Rule 4.1c.
What did Hubbard do, exactly?
“Hubbard knowingly added a 15th club at the turn and used the club several times without declaring it out of play,” per the PGA Tour.
The rules of golf state there can be only 14 clubs in a player’s bag during a round.
It is unclear what club Hubbard added to his bag. Hubbard, who shot 75-74 (9 over) in the first two rounds, was going to miss the cut, his third straight.
Mark Hubbard is a DQ after the second round of the Cadence Bank Houston Open due to a violation of Rule 4.1c.
Hubbard knowingly added a 15th club at the turn and used the club several times without declaring it out of play.
The U.S. Open at Winged Foot’s afternoon group includes Xander Schauffele and Jon Rahm.
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In what has been an unconventional year in sports, Winged Foot Golf Club might provide a sliver of normalcy for the U.S. Open.
An unfamiliar spot on the calendar? Sure. But the venue promises a familiar, firm and unflinching test for the world’s best players.
The 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot’s West Course yielded a field scoring average of nearly 5 over par per round – the toughest venue on the PGA Tour schedule that season by almost three full strokes. There were only 12 rounds in the 60s for the week, and just eight when the Open was held there in 1974. The minuscule birdie average per round of 1.76 at Winged Foot in ’06 has been eclipsed only by two majors since then – the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst (1.63 birdies per round) and the 2008 British Open at Royal Birkdale (1.74).
It’s been more than a century since the last U.S. Open contested in September. In 1913, young amateur Francis Ouimet pulled off one of the greatest upsets in golf history, defeating British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in a playoff. The performance was immortalized in the 2005 film, “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”
Fans will not be on the grounds at Winged Foot, but as we saw at last month’s PGA Championship, tension is still palpable in the cauldron of major-championship golf, even without crowds. Maybe this U.S. Open, too, will create drama worthy of the silver screen.
Jon Rahm hits his approach to the 2nd green during the final round of The Northern Trust golf tournament at TPC of Boston. Mark Konezny-USA TODAY Sports
Jon Rahm (Thu., 1:27 p.m. ET, 1st tee)
No Spaniard has ever won the U.S. Open, but after briefly reaching the world’s No. 1 ranking this summer, Rahm is poised to break through with his first major championship win. Why not at Winged Foot?
Driving force
Five of the past seven U.S. Open winners ranked either first or second that week in total driving, and 13 of the last 20 ranked in the top 10 in driving distance. Rahm has been among the Tour leaders in strokes gained off the tee since turning pro in 2016.
Trending upward
Through six career major championship starts, Rahm has a scoring average of 72.5 and zero top-10 finishes. His recent form in the majors is a different story: 20 of his last 22 rounds have been par or better. He finished T-13 at the PGA in August.
Improved short game
With maturity has come a more well-rounded Rahm. In 2020 he is on pace for his best year yet in both strokes gained around the green and putting. He’ll need it – Rahm ranked a paltry 47th in the field in strokes gained putting while finishing in a tie for third in the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.
Xander Schauffele tees off on the 3rd during the third round of the Travelers Championship golf tournament at TPC River Highlands. Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports
Xander Schauffele (Thu., 1:38 p.m. ET, 10th tee)
Since 2014 there have been only two players with a dozen or more rounds played at the U.S. Open and a cumulative score under par. Two-time champion Brooks Koepka is one, and Schauffele is the other.
PRESSURE PUTTER
Schauffele led all players in strokes gained putting per round at the U.S. Open the previous three years. He’s averaged 7.4 one-putts per round in his Open career, as well – best of any player this decade.
KNOCKING ON THE DOOR
Does it seem as if Schauffele always contends in majors? Well, he does. In just 12 career major starts, Schauffele has finished in the top 10 six times. He finished tied for 10th at TPC Harding Park.
POWER AND PRECISION
Since 2017 no player has hit more drives longer than 300 yards at the U.S. Open than Schauffele (88). He has an average approach shot proximity of just over 31 feet in that span, too, ranked third best. It’s a nice combination.
Editor’s note: Golfweek partnered on this story with 15th Club, a firm that works with players, media entities, manufacturers and tours around the world in telling the true story of golf performance.
A data-based look shows three players to keep an eye on at 2020 PGA Championship at Harding Park.
A three-peat in sports is rare. In the history of major championship golf, the achievement has been nearly nonexistent.
Consider that arguably the two most accomplished men in the sport’s history, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, never won a specific major three straight years. None of the five men to win the modern career Grand Slam achieved the feat.
The last player to win any of the four majors in three straight years was Peter Thomson, who won three of his five British Open titles in 1954, ’55 and ’56. Those three championships were held on different courses, but at least the tournament was contested in the same place on the calendar.
That cannot be said for Brooks Koepka’s pursuit of three PGA Championships in a row.
Should Koepka win at TPC Harding Park – scheduled for Aug. 6-9 – he will become the fourth player in the men’s game since 1900 to win one of the professional majors three straight years. He’ll have done so with the event held in August, then May, then in August again – each year in a different time zone. Whether that makes it more impressive is debatable, but undoubtedly it would make it unique.
Koepka has become the game’s biggest force in major championships. Over the past three years, he leads all players in rounds led (13), top-five finishes (seven) and scoring average (69.3) across the majors. Koepka is gaining more than three full strokes on the field per round in that stretch, nearly a full shot per round more than his nearest competitor.
Koepka is a combined 70 strokes under par in the majors over the last three years. Since 1995, the only player with a better three-year cumulative score to par in the majors was Tiger Woods, who was 92 under in 2000 through 2002. In his last 10 major starts, Koepka has more wins (four) than finishes of worse than sixth place (two).
Brooks Koepka (Photo by Brian Spurlock/USA TODAY Sports)
Brooks Koepka
No man has won the PGA Championship three straight years in the stroke-play era. Koepka can become the first if he continues the stellar ballstriking that carried him to victories at Bellerive in 2018 and Bethpage Black in 2019.
Srokes gained long game: This category combines a player’s performance off the tee and approaching the green. Nobody has been better at that in the PGA Championship recently than Koepka – he leads everyone in that stat since 2016.
Birdie barrage: Koepka has racked up 98 birdies (or eagles) in the PGA Championship since 2015, eight more than any other player.
Leading man: Koepka has led or been the co-leader following 13 major championship rounds since 2017, more than twice as many as anyone else. Jordan Spieth and Kevin Kisner are tied for second with six apiece.
Rory McIlroy (Photo by Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports)
Rory McIlroy
The last time the world’s best players competed at TPC Harding Park, it was McIlroy who came out on top. At the 2015 WGC Match Play, McIlroy beat Gary Woodland in the final to claim his 11th PGA Tour title.
Number one: The top spot in the world and Harding Park go hand in hand. In 2005, Woods won the WGC held there while No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking. In 2009, Woods (No. 1 again) went 5-0-0 to lead the U.S. Presidents Cup win. And in 2015, McIlroy won the Match Play as the top player in the OWGR.
Ballstriking travels: McIlroy has been No. 1 or No. 2 on the PGA Tour in strokes gained tee to green since the beginning of last season.
Scoring opportunities: Every win in McIlroy’s PGA Tour and European Tour career has come with a score double digits under par. The average winning score at the PGA Championship the past 30 years is -10.9, the lowest of the four majors.
Rickie Fowler (Photo by Brian Spurlock/USA TODAY Sports)
Rickie Fowler
He has eleven top-10 finishes in major championships, the most of any player without a victory since the start of 2011. Now 31 years old, Fowler is still two years younger than Phil Mickelson was when he broke through at the 2004 Masters.
Major presence: Since the start of 2014, only five players have a better scoring average than Fowler in majors (70.6). All five of those players are major champions. Is Fowler next?
Gaining strokes: Only two players have averaged two or more strokes gained per round in the majors since 2017: Fowler and Koepka.
California love: It would be fitting for Fowler to get his first major win in his home state of California. The last California-born player to win a major in the Golden State was Woods at the 2008 U.S. Open.
– Golfweek partnered on this story with 15th Club, a firm that works with players, media entities, manufacturers and tours around the world in telling the true story of golf performance.Gwk
This article originally appeared in Issue 3 – 2020 of Golfweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Eenie Els said he’s using 15th Club, a team of golf professionals, data experts and software engineers who apply intelligence to data.
MELBOURNE, Australia – Ernie Els might be sitting on the biggest secret in golf since Ben Hogan.
For those scoring at home, Hogan’s secret was in the dirt; as for Els, his secret he says is safe “until Sunday night,” but he’s already revealed that he’s using 15th Club, a team of golf professionals, data experts and software engineers who apply intelligence to data and helped 2018 European Ryder Cup captain Thomas Bjorn to win back the Cup.
It is a golden age for number crunchers in sports — the book and Oscar-nominated movie “Moneyball” gave advanced analytics mainstream acceptance. It slowly has infiltrated golf, a game overrun by numbers and statistics, and “stats guys” are becoming as important to tour pros as swing instructors and fitness trainers are. They parse statistics to create better training plans and arm the golfers with game plans for each week. Since 2016, both Ryder Cup captains have had their own stat team.
“It’s just the way the world is going these days,” said International Team assistant captain Geoff Ogilvy. “I think with so much information we have, you’d be silly not to access that. There’s been good results from other guys, other teams, and others doing it this way. So far, so good. I think everyone really is liking the process, if you like.”
Indeed, they are. The International Team, which has a 1-10-1 record in the Presidents Cup, grabbed a 6½-3½ lead after Day 2. Els has the unenviable task of trying to unite players from nine countries and five different continents. He instituted a series of team gatherings as early as the 2018 U.S. Open, and created a new International shied as a team logo. (It’s the backdrop on his iPhone case.) But the most notable move has been his reliance on data analytics in forming his pairings rather than going more on gut and feel and the so-called “eye test.”
The old method essentially was a formula of pairing existing friendships, players from the same country or else based on past experience.
Captain Ernie Els at the 2019 Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne Australia. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
“The numbers haven’t shown exactly what I expected. It’s funny. A lot of the personalities I wanted together; the data shows they are not compatible,” Els told pgatour.com. “To convey that to the players has been tough. As you can expect, certain players want to play together — but I can show them if it is not compatible. Now the good thing is the guys are taking that in and actually listening to me whereas in previous years guys were quite adamant who they wanted to play with.”
Els paired five of his rookies with five veterans in the first four-ball session, putting Adam Scott with Ben An and Louis Ooshthuizen with Abraham Ancer, for instance, and turning them into formidable teams. But something in the data – so far it’s a secret – led Els to recast all five of his pairings for foursomes. He will send out repeat four-ball pairings on Day 3 in Scott-An and Hideki Matsuyama-C.T. Pan.
“Preparation, it is the old cliché. You just have got to prepare, have a good plan and try to install that in the team,” Els said. “We are not as deep as they are so we know we have had to come up with some good pairings.”
“As far as the team, everyone’s bought in completely,” Ogilvy said. “Everybody believes that they are with the right guy and everybody’s out in the right groups and the captain’s got a plan.”
Golf’s deep dive into advanced statistics got jump started with the creation of the Strokes Gained statistics in 2011, and others have followed in mining the data collected every week on ShotLink, the PGA Tour’s real-time scoring system that uses sophisticated measuring devices to track every shot by every player. That data can reveal a player’s strengths and weaknesses, provide structure to practices and evaluate how a player’s game stacks up with a particular tournament venue. U.S. Captain Tiger Woods said he has “delved into” advance analytics, too, saying, “you can see tendencies and you can see things that you probably didn’t see prior to that, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to turn it over to the athletes.”
So far, the players Els has entrusted to play together based on data have taken the ball and run to a 3-point lead.
