A week-long, field-wide frolic at the idyllic Sentry TOC
By Bill Felber
If you’ve ever wondered what PGA Tour pros can do when they play under idyllic conditions, they just showed you.
Idyllic? Try the Plantation Course at Kapalua on Maui. Idyllic? Try no tradewinds all week. Idyllic? Try a winners-only format, which is what the Sentry Tournament of Champions is.
Idyllic? Try a course softened by rains to the point that the pros played under lift, clean and place rules for the first three rounds.
The result of all this idyllic condition was a week-long birdie-fest that was probably unprecedented in Tour history.
Turn the world’s best loose in a playground and that’s what you get…idyllic.
Cameron Smith edges out a win at Sentry TOC
The winner was Australian Cameron Smith at a Tour record 34-under par. That was good enough to edge out World No. 1 Jon Rahm by the margin of Smith’s final three-foot putt. Rahm finished second at 33-under.
Matt Jones was third at a mere 32-under, a score that would have won literally every official PGA Tour stop ever played since the invention of the golf ball…except this one But to devote too much time idolizing the performance of Smith, or Rahm, or Jones is to risk missing he bigger, and even more idyllic, picture.
After all, despite his record performance, Smith’s win – at 258 — still amounted to a margin of just 2.34 standard deviations better than the week’s field average, which was 20-under 272. On the PGA Tour, a score that is 2.34 standard deviations superior to the field only ranks as average dominance by a champion.
No, to truly grasp how idyllic things were this week at Kapalua, one must consider the full, top-to-bottom 39-player field.
Let these numbers roll around in your brain for a while.
- On 33 percent of the holes played this week, the field made a score of birdie or better. That’s an average of six birdies (or better) per player per round.
- By contrast, scores of bogey or worse only reared their ugly head on seven percent of the holes. That’s about 1.25 bad holes per round.
- For reference, coming into the Sentry, the Tour as a whole scored birdie or better on 22.5 percent of holes this season, while making bogey on 12.7 percent of holes.
Keep in mind the Sentry numbers are full-field data points. If you wanted to run with the top 10, even those figures were not idyllic enough.
The top 10 guys – that’s 25-under or better – averaged a birdie or eagle on 40 percent of the holes they played. I’ll do the math; that’s 7.2 sub-par scores for every 18 holes completed.
Bogeys? What bogeys? The field’s top 10 only recorded 37 of them – and only two scores worse than bogey — all week. That’s less than one bad hole per top 10 finisher per round.
As to the pulsating head-to-head weekend battle between Smith and Rahm, there was – as the one-stroke final margin suggests –little to choose. As the Strokes Gained data below shows, Smith was the better driver but Rahm had the superior iron game. That’s usually, but not always, pivotal at Kapalua, which is an iron player’s course. Here are their numbers
Smith Rahm
SG Tee 3.996 2.640
SG Approach 2.718 5.253
SG Around 1.690 1.709
SG Putting 6.464 4.266
The numbers also suggest that at the end of the day this was a putting contest. If so, Smith’s victory should come as no surprise. Last season he ranked top 10 in Strokes Gained putting, and he was top-of-the-field in that category at Kapalua as well.
At Kapalua, then, the greens were also idyllic.
It might also be said that Smith beat Rahm because he was superior on a usually innocuous two-hole stretch of the front nine, holes No. 5 and 6. And that’s saying something considering that Rahm played the 532-yard par 5 fifth in four-under par for the week
But Smith did him one better…okay, two better. Rahm may have notched a daily birdie at No. 5, but Smith interspersed his two birdies with a pair of eagles, bringing him to six-under for the week on that hole alone.
He also played the 439-yard par 4 sixth in three-under, another two strokes better than Rahm. So on that virtually invisible two-hole front nine stretch, Smith built a four-stroke advantage over World No. 1. That’s idyllic raised to a championship – and Tour record – level.