A super foursome dominated the PGA Tour season in style.
Should you be partial to giving names to years, may we suggest that for the 2022-2023 PGA Tour edition you consider: “Superlatives for the Super Foursome.”
Catchy and maybe a tad corny, but we dare say it doesn’t rate as embellishment. Not when you study the body of works produced by the “Super Foursome” – a.k.a. Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Viktor Hovland. We present them in that order because that’s how they presently sit atop the Official World Golf Ranking, in positions 1-4, respectively (as of November 3).
Begin with the fact that they were the top four players on the PGA Tour moneylist (the order went Scheffler, $US21 million; Rahm, $16.5m; Hovland, $14.1m; McIlroy, $13.9m). Then toss in the combined 11 wins they accumulated, including the Masters for Rahm, the Players Championship for Scheffler, and the Tour Championship for the circuit’s ultimate prize, the FedEx Cup for Hovland.
Oh, and did we mention that whereas the front of the season clearly belonged to Rahm (he won four times in his first 10 starts, punctuated by the green jacket at Augusta National), Hovland pulled the curtain down on the 2022-2023 season in brilliant style.
How’s this for a sampling: after opening the three-tournament FedEx Cup Playoff series with a 72, here were his next 11 scores: 64-65-69-69-68-65-61-68-64-66-63. Combined, he was 46-under for those 11 rounds and after a T-13 in the Fed Ex St Jude Classic, Hovland won both the next two playoff tournaments, the BMW Championship and Tour Championship.
Hovland’s prize was the FedEx Cup, the individual quest every player covets. But it’s not as if his colleagues in the “Super Foursome” came away empty handed when 2022-2023 was over with.
Not when their combined prizemoney totalled in the neighbourhood of $US64 million. And not when they had a combined 49 top 10s and these other impressive sidelights:
- Scheffler, for instance, piled up a whopping 17 top-10 finishes in his 23 starts. Twice he won, on two other occasions he was second and five times he was third.
- For McIlroy, how’s this for leaving the 2022-2023 stage in style – top 10s in each of his final seven tournaments?
- Rahm not only won his first Masters, but he finished top-10 in two other majors (US Open, Open Championship).
- As for Hovland, his victories (Memorial, BMW Championship, Tour Championship) in marquee tournaments did wonders for his world ranking (he was outside the top 10 for most of the season). But if you want to savour something even sweeter, try this: Hovland was under par for 72 holes in 21 of his 22 strokeplay events; in the other he was level-par.
Oh, such consistency and such brilliance
from the start of the season to the close. If golf fans were entertained by this foursome winning 11 times in 48 weeks, or 23 percent of the tournaments, they might be wondering if there might be an explanation.
Here is a thought: Give credit to the PGA Tour’s decision to embark upon a new-look schedule in 2022-2023. With 12 tournaments given “elevated” status and top players asked to play in all of them, plus eight others – a minimum of 20 starts – what you had was a philosophy that players bought into.
“What (commissioner) Jay [Monahan] asked was for [elite] players to make a commitment to get together more often to make the product more compelling,” McIlroy said at the start of the 2022-2023 season.
You could easily argue that by playing more frequently against each other, the best players in the world stayed sharp, remained on top of their games, and thrived on the challenges. We documented how masterful the top four players in the world were, but there is evidence up and down the line-up that other world-class players had premiers stretches of play in 2022-2023.
Start with this little nugget: not only did Scheffler and Hovland make the cut in each of their 23 starts, so too did Xander Schauffele, currently ranked No.6 in the world.
Impressive stuff, to know three of the world’s top six players were in possession of such perfect attendance. But it didn’t drop off, either, with Rahm, McIlroy and No.5 in the world, Patrick Cantlay. In their combined 59 starts they totalled just five missed cuts.
Neither Cantlay nor Schauffele won, which is sort of a surprise, given how nicely they played. Schauffele had 11 top-10s in his 23 starts, Cantlay 10 in his 21.
That these six names – Scheffler, McIlroy, Rahm, Hovland, Cantlay, Schauffele – factored so prominently in so many tournaments might lead you to believe they owned the stage at all times. Statistically speaking, that might be said of Scheffler. He did, after all, place first in a whopping 12 categories – including some all-important ones (scoring average, ball-striking and money). But the superlatives filtered elsewhere through the PGA Tour roster.
Former world No.1s Justin Rose and Jason Day won for the first time since 2019 and 2018, respectively, and quality players with loyal followings – Rickie Fowler and Lucas Glover – also returned to the winner’s circle. Fowler for the first time since 2019, Glover winning not only winning once, but doing it back-to-back, a situation that had him fighting back tears at the FedEx St Jude Classic.
Of course, the tears shed in Memphis by Glover didn’t corner the market on heartfelt triumphs. There was a memorable three-week stretch in June that left PGA Tour fans in awe.
A huge favourite in front of rabid countrymen, Nick Taylor slam-dunked an eagle putt from downtown to win the RBC Canadian Open over Englishman Tommy Fleetwood.
The next Sunday, unheralded Wyndham Clark won the US Open, just a few weeks after he had earned his first PGA Tour win at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, North Carolina. And what came next was a Travelers Championship script Keegan Bradley had been wanting to write for 12 years.
“I can’t even describe what that felt like,” Bradley said.
He was talking about a stellar final-round performance to finish 23-under and win at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut, in front of tens of thousands of pure New Englanders who implored their “hometown” kid to bring it home.
Truth is, that quote could be used to describe any of a few dozen weeks of a 2022-2023 season. Superlatives were simply everywhere – and by the best of the best, too.
