Andrew Landry: From zero to hero in one week
By Bill Felber
Andrew Landry finished near the bottom at the Sony, but one week makes a big difference on Tour.
The PGA Tour commits gallons of ink to publicize the notion; which happens to be a stone-cold fact, that on any given week anybody can win. This week they can confine themselves to two words: Andrew Landry.
Landry won the American Express Championship at LaQuinta Sunday with a four-round score of 262, 26-under par. He walks away with the $1 million-plus winner’s share of the $6.7 million pot.
That victory was built on a shaky final nine holes that saw him squander a six-shot lead in four holes, then recover with birdies on the 17th and 18th. Across those final nine holes, Andrew Landry made just one par.
More from Pro Golf Now
- Golf Rumors: LIV set to sign Masters Champion in stunning deal
- Fantasy Golf: Grant Thornton Invitational DFS Player Selections
- Brutal return leaves Will Zalatoris looking towards 2024
- Stars You Know at World Champions Cup Starts Thursday at Concession
- Fantasy Golf: An Early Look at the 2024 Masters Tournament
His four-round card worked out to 66-64-65-67. On a dominance rating, it measured 2.92 standard deviations superior to the field average, surpassed all season only by Joaquin Niemann’s victory at last September’s Greenbrier.
How unlikely a winner was Landry? Consider his performance just last week ago at the Sony Open in Honolulu. You won’t have to consider it for long. At Waialae, Landry shot 77-76 for 153 and missed the cut … by a dozen shots.
Landry knows about missing cuts. His four rounds at the Amex were the 19th through 22nd of his season, and his first, second, fourth, and fifth-best among those 22. He had made eight previous starts, surviving the cut in only one, a tie for 23rd at the Safeway Open.
And it’s not like those missed cuts have been especially dramatic. They’ve come by an average of four shots. Entering the FedEx his 72.176 stroke average ranked 200th among the 233 players on Tour.
So what turned the light bulb on this particular week. As routinely happens on Tour, putting had a lot to do with it. Putting skill is the joker in the card deck that is the Tour’s weekly poker game, wandering weekly from player to player in a seemingly random fashion, and often anointing the winner.
This week Andrew Landry drew the putting joker and used it to fill an inside straight. At 1.455 putts per green in regulation, he led the field in that birdie-producing skill. The FedEx is one of those multi-course events where the Tour does not keep full Strokes Gained data, but let’s assess Landry’s putting skill this way: For the entire season, he ranks 224th in Strokes Gained Putting.
From 224th to 1st is generally considered a good week.
On that fascinatingly streaky back nine, Landry led comfortably before bogeying 13 through 15 to let Abraham Ancer creep within one of his lead. Then Ancer rolled in a tying birdie at the par 3 island 17th to tie Landry. It appeared for all the world that the wheels had come off on what was on course to be one of the great week-to-week turnaround scripts of the tour’s season.
Good thing nobody tore up that script. Twenty minutes later at the same 17th, Landry shot an iron within seven feet of the cup and calmly rolled in the putt to regain his lead.
Then on the 18th, needing a par, he ripped a 283-yard drive to the dead center of the fairway and followed with a 145-yard 9-iron within three feet of the pin. It left a can’t miss birdie and Landry didn’t.
The win was not Andrew Landry’s first: he won the 2018 Valero Texas Open. Since then, however, Landry’s 45 starts had resulted in two top 10s offset by 21 missed cuts. He won more money Sunday than during all 33 of his previous 2019 and 2020 starts.
But that’s life on the PGA Tour, whereas they say anybody can win. You just have to hang around long enough.