Texas Open: Top 10 power rankings at TPC San Antonio
Other than his caddy payment fiasco, it’s been a pretty successful 2019 for Kuch. The 40-year-old advanced to the finals of the WGC-Match Play where he ran into Kevin Kisner who was a buzzsaw.
Kuchar went 2-0-1 in group play with wins over Si Woo Kim and J.B. Holmes and a tie with Jon Rahm. In bracket play he downed Tyrrell Hatton, Sergio Garcia and Lucas Bjerregaard.
It was a continuation of 2019 where in eight starts he has a win at the Sony Open, a T4 at the Phoenix Open and seven top-30s and no missed cuts.
The PGA Tour veteran is very familiar with TPC San Antonio.
He’s played the Texas Open each of the last seven years and is 7-for-7 making the cut. A T51 last year (71-72-73-72) was actually his worst result on this course. He does have a T4 in 2014 and a T13 in 2012 to fall back on.
Kuchar ranks first on Tour in greens in regulation and is top-40 on Tour in all strokes gained categories except for putting. He’s perennially a top-50, if not top-25, putter on Tour, so if he can even just improve from 141st in strokes gained now to, say, 80th, imagine what damage he could be doing right now.
“It’s a demanding driving golf course as well as approaches,” Kuchar said of the Oaks Course in 2014. “I think approaches are really tough. You’ve got a lot of big fall-offs around the greens. The greens have a lot of movement in them.
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“So, I think from a ball-striking perspective, particularly off the tee I feel like that’s one of my strengths is keeping myself in play, giving myself a lot of chances and been doing a good job of that this week.”