Having taken just a week off after the all-star FedEx Cup had brought the curtain down on the 2021-22 season, the PGA Tour rolls back into action with the low-key Fortinet Championship launching the new wrap-around “year” in California.
Fortunately it will be out-with-the-new and a return to the old calendar-year format in 2024 and meanwhile we head off to Napa, a region more famous for wine-growing than golf, with Max Homa defending at the Silverado Country Club.
It’s the second edition of a six-year Fortinet sponsorship of a tournament that used to be called the Safeway Open when 2009 Open champion Stewart Cink, caddied by son Reagan, ended an 11-year win drought at Silverado in 2020.
Homa is the only competing member of the US Presidents Cup team taking on the Internationals at Quail Hollow next week in what looks like a mismatch thanks to LIV Golf taking away what little chance the underdogs had by signing arguably their two greatest assets, Open champion Cam Smith and Riviera winner Joaquin Niemann – not to mention Abraham Ancer, Marc Leishman, Louis Oosthuizen, Branden Grace and Carlos Ortiz.
While accepting how difficult it is to defend a trophy, the underrated Homa has to be the man to beat. At 22nd in the men’s world golf rankings, only Hideki Matsuyama ranks above him at Silverado and he played a blinder for fifth at East Lake the last time we saw him. Before that he’d bagged a third tour victory at Wells Fargo in a breakout year in which he finally started to realise how good he was and deserving of sitting at golf’s top table.
While Matsuyama, sixth here last year and a winner in Hawaii at the start of 2022, seems the main danger, there are plenty of golf’s newer generation hungry to get their share of the PGA Tour’s enhanced prize money of $8m.
It’s less than two weeks since Justin Suh captured the Korn Ferry Tour Championship and with it the No. 1 spot on that satellite circuit. This 25-year-old Californian was an outstanding amateur and it took him a couple of years to get used to the pro game but he has arrived, so watch him…
..
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Golf Monthly RSS Feed…