When it comes to predicting the winner of the PGA Championship, I could go a lot of directions. As I usually do. Like a toddler hopped up on too much popcorn and cotton candy at the circus, I eventually get around to throwing up on my shoes, usually minutes after the elephant walk. But this is what happens when you let someone emotionally unstable and scientifically challenged use “statistics” to make a prediction at a major championship. Sort of like hiring a philosophy major to explain Poisson’s ratio and its effect on turbulent air flow in golf ball design.
As you know, aside from a curious diversion a couple of months three years ago, I am woefully inept at selecting the winner of a major championship. But back then I was prognosticating major championships long before the world of sports was ruled by Fan Duel, DraftKings and ESPNBet. Had I been picking “winners” in the current era, I would have been laughed out of a job the moment I selected Graham DeLaet to win the 2014 PGA (the Canadian came closer to winning the Stanley Cup than the Wanamaker Trophy). Now, like chronic cystitis or an adult-onset peanut allergy, it’s hard to shake me, come major season. So Depend undergarments and EpiPen at the ready, let’s forge ahead (which, as it turns out, is fairly similar to how most golf dates at The Villages get started, but I digress).
They say the PGA Championship often ends up with the deepest field of any of the major championships. That’s because aside from the 19 club pros (and the mayor of Clubface City, Michael Block) dotting the field, the championship includes mostly golfers whose job it is to make money by shooting low scores. College kids and sketchy pub owners can’t qualify their way into this big show like they can at the Opens, nor is it a members-only garden party like the Masters. What you have is a full-field tournament that feels like a really stout PGA Tour event back when PGA Tour events weren’t closed-shop money grabs missing the money grabbers who left for LIV Golf.
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Fitting then that the PGA Championship is being played at Quail Hollow, a long-standing PGA Tour site since 2003 lauded for its stout challenge, its championship CV and its catchy closing stretch known as the Green Mile. (Sidebar: That’s also the nickname given for track practice on Saturday morning after Friday night’s prom.) Indeed, a fairly valid prediction would be to do as everyone already has done leading up to this year’s championship. Pick Rory McIlroy. He’s coming off an epic Masters win to clinch the career Grand Slam, and he’s already won three times this year and four times at Quail Hollow in his career. McIlroy winning this week at Quail Hollow seems as obvious a suggestion as pointing out that playoff hockey is too short and playoff basketball is too long. That may or may not be your opinion, but if it isn’t, you’re wrong. As Shane Ryan capably notes here, “he’s 55 strokes further under par than any other player,” so as they used to say to the pretty albeit flighty models before they walked on stage at Deal or No Deal, “case closed.”
Not so fast, my friend. While yes, you could focus on McIlroy’s four wins at Quail Hollow as the foundation for any prediction, I prefer to focus on four other wins to guide my most misguided of selections. Because, for as venerable a venue as the Queen City’s flagship layout might be, it’s also brought with it some less than elite names among its roster of champions. I think the PGA Championship winner this go-round might be less likely to be a McIlroy than it is a James Hahn, Sean O’Hair, Derek Ernst or Joey Sindelar. That’s right over the two decades of PGA Tour events played at Quail Hollow that fearsome foursome has won as many times as McIlroy. All of which seems appropriate for the PGA Championship whose list of winners includes names that look like the horses racing on the undercard on a rainy Thursday in March at Aqueduct. Shaun Micheel. Y.E. Yang. Rich Beem. Mark Brooks.
While I’m not sure those Quail Hollow dying quail winners have a definitive characteristic, statistically it seems they all performed more than adequately in the area of driving. As it turns out, the strongest statistical area of these no-name winners heading into Charlotte in the years they won was strokes gained/off the tee. I’m not saying their driving games were strengths, they just weren’t epic weaknesses. Unlike say, their respective championship pedigrees, heading into those career-highlight victories.
Rory McIlroy would be the obvious pick to win the PGA at Quail Hollow, but going obvious is for wimps.
Emilee Chinn
Now, certainly, long and straight wins a lot of places, but at Quail Hollow it feels a lot like purchasing a dream home with lottery winnings: You can buy a lot without asking how much it costs. So to arrive at this year’s winner, my method (madness) was simplistic: Find the average rank in strokes gained/off the tee for the law firm of Hahn, O’Hair, Ernst and Sindelar in the week leading up to their wins at Quail Hollow. Then, use that number to find the player whose current ranking in strokes gained/off the tee matches that number.
It’s not that such a cack-handed algebra doesn’t make sense (clearly, it doesn’t), it’s that the maths (as the Brits like to say) give us a number (69.5) that lies squarely between two of this year’s competitors: Viktor Hovland and Jacob Bridgeman. While I would have been well within my intellectual rights to tab Hovland to claim his first major championship after a career re-set victory at Valspar earlier this year, the man from Oslo who talks about space aliens and his release pattern on the downswing with equal honesty and trepidation lacks that frisson of milquetoastiness that I seek for this year’s PGA champion.
Were Bridgeman a wine, he’d be clingy and lugubrious, lacking not only a tingly aftertaste but a taste at all. In short, hints of Derek Ernst with an overall Sean O’Hair acidity, marred by indecipherable flecks of James Hahn. The only thing saving him is an infectious Joey Sindelar good-natured self-awareness to pair with a whole lot of what we’ll comfortably refer to as “nothing remarkable.” Whereas Rory McIlroy is Opus One and Harlan Estate, Bridgeman drinks like the kind of wine they include in the gift basket for the mother of the bride’s room at the Fayetteville Days Inn. (But he is coming off a top-four finish last week, so “Mazel!”
We haven’t had a true long-shot major winner in quite a while, so we’re due for Jacob Bridgeman.
Douglas P. DeFelice
Take Jacob Bridgeman to win the PGA Championship. Or if you must, Rory McIlroy. Either way, pour me another. That’s going to be the only way any of this makes sense.
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com