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Tour Championship
Author: Ian Hudson 20/09/2011
September 2011: 22nd - 25th USPGA Tour: THE TOUR Championship presented by Coca-Cola , East Lake GC, Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Last year Jim Furyk holed a putt worth over 11 million dollars to win the Tour Championship and FedEx Cup Play-off series. That life changing event could well happen again to another player this week in the last event of the Play-offs.
The Tour Championship is contested by just the top 30 players in the standings after the BMW Championship last week. Several players could still win this year's bonus and it could come down to the final green again.
This end of season mega-rich event does not involve a cut and all players are guaranteed a very large cheque. The remainder of the US Tour this season comprises the Fall Series in which players are trying to earn their card for next year. Tiger Woods did not qualify for the Play-offs and there is a chance he could appear in one of these consolation events.
From 1998 the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta hosted the Tour Championship in even years. Since 2004 it has been the permanent home so there is plenty of course form to assess. There are just two par fives and the usual quota of short and medium length holes.
Accuracy rather than power is the requirement here on this old-style course. It pays to get the ball on the fairway to allow approach shots to be played under control. Approach shots have to be controlled to land beneath the hole as most of the tricky greens slope from back to front.
Putting is obviously important as anybody who wants to win any tournament has to hole their fair share of putts. The key, however, is finding the greens in the correct number of shots and traditionally players who excel in this area of the game score well on the relatively short course.
The small field differentiates this tournament from all the others in two respects. Firstly, tee times are not significant as all the players begin their rounds in a spell of just two hours. Secondly the place terms are one quarter the first four, not the usual first five that is common for regular tournaments.
The outcome of the FedEx Cup is again dependent on the final tournament of the series. Five players are still in line for the massive bonus but all they have to do is win this week's Tour Championship. Webb Simpson has played better than anyone over the last two months, including two wins and enough points to head the standings.
Luke Donald is the favourite to win the tournament and still has an outside chance of winning the Money List and European Order of Merit. He's the only player on tour with more top 10s than Simpson. He recorded his 12th top 10 of the season at the BMW Championship last week. He recovered from an opening 75 by making just three bogeys over the final three rounds, including none on Sunday.
Donald controls his own destiny and he would be my idea of the player to face that extravagantly expensive putt on the 18th green at East Lake this Sunday. He has risen to number one position in the world rankings without winning a major. Some pundits have questioned the validity of a system that allows a player to be statistically the best player in the world without winning one of the four Grand Slam tournaments.
However there's no doubting the Englishman's consistency over the last two years. He has won just one event on the US tour in 2011 but enters the Tour Championship in great form. Nine of his last eleven rounds have been in the sixties and he has had two straight finishes in the top four.
Donald's skills profile suggests he can score well on this week's course. He is in the top 50 for both driving accuracy and greens in regulation so he scores well for finding fairways and greens in the correct number of shots. It's also worth bearing in mind that he is in the top five for total putts and that combination of skills gives him a great chance to win a cool eleven million this week.
Sportingways Golf betting tip
Luke Donald at 13/2 with PaddyPower