PGA TOUR: Cameron Champ leads Fall Swing’s most dominant players
By Bill Felber
Like Woodland, Finau is an established figure approaching star-level status who is playing the fall tour because, hey he’s a golfer and that’s what he does. He’s averaged 30 starts annually since joining the tour in 2015. That’s true road-warrior status.
That being the case, the only real surprise is that he didn’t win any of his four fall starts. He did come close, losing at the WGC-HSBC Champions to Xander Schauffele in a playoff, after Schauffele’s Sunday 68 made up three strokes on Finau.
Finau’s other three appearances yielded ties for 16th, 26th and 36th at the Mayakoba, CJ Cup and Shriners respectively. In none of those did he post a score higher than the four-round field average.
Ninth in the Official World Golf Ranking, Finau’s game is multi-dimensional. He is a prodigious hitter, averaging 315.3 yards off the tee, fourth longest on tour in 2018. He translates that to +0.52 Strokes Gained Off the Tee per round, the 19th highest total on tour.
Like many budding stars, Finau’s next step is to carry his improvement over to the game’s most prestigious events, the majors. He’s getting there. For the first time in 2018 he played in all four of them, and he landed top-tens in three: tied for 10th at the Masters, solo fifth at the U.S. Open and tied for ninth at the Open Championship.
Taking all of that into consideration, it would be easy to interpret Finau’s fall tour showing as the first step toward a momentous 2019 season.