Matt Kuchar: Dominant Sony Open victory revitalizes in Honolulu

Matt Kuchar continues his comeback season with a dominant four-stroke victory at the Sony Open.

Matt Kuchar didn’t just win the Sony Open in Hawaii on Sunday. It was the most statistically dominant victory of the PGA Tour season to date. It also continued one of the tour’s best feel-good stories, as one of the game’s biggest fan favorites seems to have found a new energy on the course.

Kuchar won with a four-round total of 258, four strokes better than runner-up Andrew Putnam. He put together a pair of opening 63s and backed those up with weekend 66s, losing sole possession of his Saturday lead only briefly on the front nine Sunday.

It translated to a performance that was 2.92 standard deviations better than the four-round field average of 271.06 on a par-70 Waialae course that played as hospitably as a course in paradise ought to play. The previous most dominant performance on tour this season was Cameron Champ‘s four-stroke win at Sanderson Farms with a score that was 2.69 standard deviations better than the average for that week’s field.

Beyond that, it made Kuchar only the second player with multiple PGA TOUR victories this season, joining Xander Schauffele in that distinction. Kuchar also won at Mayakoba in November.

In most respects, Kuchar’s victory should hardly come as a surprise. It is the ninth of his career. It is also uplifting. Let’s state the obvious; everybody loves Matt Kuchar, who appears approachable almost to the point of being a goofball about it and smiles at the merest hint of a rationale for doing so.

But he is 40 now, an age when golfers’ games can begin to slip. In some obvious respects, Kuchar’s had begun to. During the 2016 season, he ranked 36th in Strokes Gained Off The Tee and 45th in Strokes Gained Approaching the Green; by 2018, he had fallen to 150th and 61st respectively. His victory at Mayakoba was his first in four years.

More from Pro Golf Now

Those numbers aren’t disastrous, but they do suggest a player in his decline phase.

Perhaps the obsequies are not yet in order. With his performance in Hawaii, Kuchar jumped more than 50 places, to 77th in this season’s Strokes Gained Off The Tee chart and 44 places, to 26th, in Strokes Gained Approaching The Green.

He may be 40, but Kuchar was his vintage self in Honolulu. Entering the tournament with a negative Strokes Gained score off the tee for the season, he picked up nearly eight-tenths of a stroke on the field with precision tee work.

It was the hallmark of a steady, solid wining performance that is easily summarized by comparing his seasonal Strokes Gained numbers with his work at Waialae. On a per round basis, here they are:

Season Sony

Off The Tee -0.02 +0.79
Approaching +0.56 +1.38
Around Green -0.15 +0.34
Putting -0.81 +1.76
Total -0.42 +4.27

Kuchar improved his average performance by 4.69 strokes per round. Among the contenders, none came within a stroke per round of that sort of improvement. And since Kuchar entered the tournament with a 70.68 stroke average, the third lowest of any of the players who would finish among the top 10, his win was pretty much inevitable.

For the record, only Bryson DeChambeau (69.55) and Marc Leishman (70.16) had lower stroke averages among the top ten finishers. DeChambeau failed to better his established Strokes Gained standard, while Leishman did so, but only by about one-quarter the amount Kuchar did.

The record shows that while Kuchar helped himself by keeping the ball long and in play off the tee, his best asset was his consistency. Again looking at Strokes Gained, he was in positive numbers in all four major categories measured both against the field and against his own prior performances.

Jordan Spieth: Comeback effort falls short at Sony Open. dark. Next

Among players in the top ten, he was one of only three who could say that, the others being Hudson Swafford and Brian Stuard. But they both began with significantly higher seasonal stroke averages – 71.22 for Swafford, 72.48 for Stuard – meaning that beating their personal standards didn’t net them as much raw value as Kuchar did by bettering his 70.68 average.

Home/PGA