Opinion & Analysis
Golfers most likely to catch fire at the end of 2014
We’ve had glimpses of meteoric play on the PGA Tour this season—namely Jimmy Walker, Bubba Watson and Martin Kaymer—but nothing that’s struck as sustainably brilliant.
In that sense, there’s some disappointment with how the golfing year has transpired. Henrik Stenson’s run over the last five months of the 2013 season easily reigns as the best stretch of golf in the past calendar year.
Two majors and a few months of golf still remain. Are we in for another Stenson-like performance (or greater) from the golfing professionals?
Here are the five most likely players (with two wildcards) to replicate, or at least approach such a performance.
Wildcards
Brendan Steele
Steele won in his maiden PGA Tour season and would have been a prime candidate for Rookie of the Year if not for Keegan Bradley’s insanely successful maiden campaign. Steele maintains more than thrives on Tour, steadying his diet with a few top-10s and a half-dozen top-25s per year without really threatening to do more. But he has a lot more game than the average viewer gives him credit for. At times in 2014, he’s appeared on the verge of a career year—basically reaching his season averages in top-10 and top-25s before April—and rekindling the fire with back-to-back top-fives in the final weeks of June.
Maybe he’s not quite seasoned enough yet for a rapid jump, but he’s an under the radar candidate for a breakout in the near future.
Thorbjorn Olesen
Objective measures are the name of the game here, but golf is downright sociopathic when it comes to removing logic from the experience. So going with one player purely on gut is appropriate then, right?
Olesen, who goes by his middle name because it’s cooler than Jacob, has struggled in 2014. Seven made cuts in 16 starts isn’t pretty. He currently wouldn’t qualify for the FedEx Cup Playoffs or the DP World Tour Championship. He also tends to produce his best stuff—at this point one win and a number of high finishes—early in the season rather than late.
Nothing points to an end-of-2014 run for Olesen, except for his perceived superstar-level ability. It’s a guessing game when this monster will be unleashed; here’s a blind toss that it is quite soon.
Five to Watch
Keegan Bradley
When he isn’t pouring ice water on his head—and doing so poorly, apparently—Bradley produces at a steady rate on the golf course. The 28-year-old’s 2014 campaign has been rather dull to the moment, with a solid, but unspectacular five top-10s and 10 top-25s in 20 PGA Tour starts. And Bradley only really threatened to win on two occasions, at Bay Hill and the Zurich Classic.
Nothing appears amiss in Bradley’s game, but there’s no doubt a certain spark is absent. Expect that to change in the coming months. For one, the native of New England feels he plays his best golf in the summer. His results moderately back him up too, as two of his three wins came in the summer months.
This is also a Ryder Cup year and Bradley currently sits 18th in the standings. Nobody is more motivated to qualify for the team than Bradley, whose bounce-off-the-walls energy married perfectly with the high-intensity atmosphere of the event in his 2012 debut.
Above all though, Bradley is extremely overdue for another win, and likely multiple ones. Victories have more to do with luck and circumstance than anyone will admit. Looking solely off win totals, Bradley was at his best in his 2011 rookie season, when he scored two titles, and has regressed since with one victory in 2012 and none thereafter. Yet the reality is the direct opposite, with Bradley demonstrably improving each year. He contends more consistently as time goes on, and there are no signs the lack of wins is attributable to a growing aversion to Sunday pressure—luck and circumstance intervene. (This putt likely kept Bradley out of the winners’ circle in 2013. It was well struck, and probably deserved to go in. It didn’t, and Bradley’s chances at victory significantly dropped after a good stroke.)
The putter is an issue, as the 28-year-old switched to a shorter non-anchored flatstick for the Memorial Tournament and has admitted that the impending ban on the anchored stroke constantly weighs on his mind. But Bradley made it clear his change at the Memorial was only a trial period, and he appears to be committed to staying with the belly through the rest of this season. Don’t be surprised if he anchors down a couple of victories before 2014 is finished.
Charley Hoffman
This has to happen at some point, right?
The Hoffman paradox continues to roll on, as the formerly mulleted fellow remains one of the most consistent yet frustrating players in the game. Hoffman has reached $1 million in earnings every season of his PGA Tour career (except for 2008, when he grossed $945,702) and refuses to fall victim to a blow up campaign.
But he’s always been capable of so much more.
The Hoffman hype originates back to his incredibly productive first thirteen months on the PGA Tour and regained steam following the stomping he laid on the field at the 2010 Deutsche Bank Championship. A star is yet to emerge.
The potential is there, but why will this chained-down pattern break in the remainder of 2014?
Well, it’s been quiet, but Hoffman’s played the best golf of his career the past several months. With a T3 at the Quicken Loans National, the 37-year-old garnered his fifth top-10 of the season, tying his single-season high for top-10s already. With 10 top-25s, he’s one off his career high there.
Of course, Hoffman has long been dogged as a guy who lights up the course on Thursday and Friday and fades on the weekend. There is some truth here, as he’s alternated between poor and adequate in this aspect.
But he’s become a great weekend player in the 2014, as he ranks 53rd in third round scoring average and 37th on the final day.
Hoffman is a great ball-striker who literally hates putters. When functional though, the flatstick works for him from time to time, as he’s placed 81st or better in strokes gained putting three of the last five seasons and currently sits at 39th in 2014.
Hoffman can’t wait much longer to breakout before age starts to erode his high upside. Now, under no outside pressure and with fantastic form coupled by a more robust weekend output, this is Hoffman’s best chance to pounce.
Justin Rose
Not going out on much of a limb here considering Rose’s recent victory at the Quicken Loans National. Even if it was more of a “I stumbled into the trophy and they let me keep it” sort of deal than a flourishing triumph.
Still, the result is the latest in a flurry of great showings. Since missing the cut at Bay Hill in March, the Englishman committed to his best impression of 2011 Luke Donald, racking up six top-15s in seven starts, half of which are top-fives.
To complete the gag, Rose not only needs to continue that string, he needs to add a few more wins to his slate before 2014 is out. Despite winning at least once every year since 2010, Rose and his game are too polished and all-around great to be satisfied with six victories in five years.
Praise for his ball-striking prowess is incessant, but correct—especially with his irons. Rose’s short game has a kick to it too, as the Englishman tends to be an above-average putter and chipper. The last two years, his flatstick let him down with finishes of 129th and 133rd in strokes gained, but he appears to have remedied the problem in vaulting to 72nd so far in 2014.
Rose has no consistent weaknesses and a few quite potent strengths. How that hasn’t translated into many multiple-win seasons or any three-plus victory campaigns is somewhat perplexing.
Rose made a good decision resting at the beginning of the season because of shoulder tendinitis. In his return, his game hasn’t skipped a beat. His driving and approach play have regressed some, but it appears those are starting to trend back toward his normal elite level. Add the confidence of a major champion to the mix, and maybe we’re finally in for a dominant Justin Rose campaign.
Paul Casey
The story with Casey is that it’s never been enough. Even as his game coalesced into elite form in the later 2000s—from 2006-2010 he averaged nine top-10s a season, won seven times combined on the European and PGA tours and ranked as high as No. 3 in the world—his much-hyped skill was supposed to net him major championships, which he acquired none of.
As has been documented in no short order, Casey then took a nose dive. He actually won early in 2011, but rarely contended the next two years—with just six top-10s between 2011 and 2012—and plummeted to No. 169 in the world at one point.
There’s no doubt his form is returning though. His 2013 was lackluster, but he did return to the winners’ circle at the Irish Open. This year, his name has really re-familiarized itself with the first page of the leaderboard, as he’s gotten out well in the earlier and middle stages of a few tournaments. His issues revolve around carrying over his good playing through Sunday.
Really, Casey’s results from 2006-2013 are remarkably similar to Henrik Stenson’s production from 2005-2012. We know what happened next with Stenson.
That’s not to say Casey will be your FedEx Cup and Race to Dubai champion in 2014. But his talent probably outshines Stenson’s and his pitfalls are a little more understandable considering they were mostly attributable to an extraordinarily unfortunate series of ailments, including rib, shoulder and toe injuries (seriously, since when do golfers get turf toe??) and a difficult divorce.
There’s only one top-10 to his name in 2014, but that really doesn’t do justice to what Casey has flashed this season. It appears there’s a learning curve with sustaining hot bursts of golf when you’ve been out of the spotlight for years, exactly the growing pains Casey experienced these past several months.
He’s prone to snap out of it soon, and as we learned with Stenson, when an immense talent can’t be held down any longer, he’s subject to a crazy good run.
We saw what Casey still had over 36 holes at Muirfield Village, expect to witness much more of that over 72.
Sergio Garcia
This man has been burning it up on the golf course this season, only most people haven’t noticed. Following a productive, but stormy 2013, Garcia’s hardly wasted a round this year. The according results are subtly spectacular. In addition to a victory in Qatar back in January, Garcia’s record includes seven more top-10s, with five of them top-fives and three of them top-threes.
In all honesty, the Spaniard caught fire at the beginning of the year and the flame has gained progressively throughout the season, to the point it might be a danger to the citizenry if it wasn’t metaphorical. And there’s further room to grow.
While fantastic, Garcia’s play is highly inefficient in producing victories. When couching Garcia’s golf in terms of himself versus the field in 2014, few do better. In his events the 34-year-old bested 83.83 percent of his opponents, a defeat rate that ranks third best in the entire game.
It’s surprising then that Garcia hasn’t fallen into more than one victory this season. And it’s not based on any deep-seated inability to close, as Garcia holds 19 career wins between the European and PGA tours.
If inefficiency is bothersome, recent history shows El Nino will soon alleviate the concern. Late in 2011, Garcia concocted two immaculate weeks of golf and won events in consecutive weeks, the first by 11 strokes. He almost duplicated the feat in 2012, capturing the Wyndham Championship and holding the 54-hole lead at the Barclays the next week.
If Garcia continues this form, I don’t see how he can’t at least triple his current season victory total. He leads the PGA Tour in Adjusted Scoring Average, and that’s not even the circuit he won on in 2014! So the only way to stem the tide is for his play to drop off, but his immediate past implies that as the season comes to a close, Garcia will perform at the same or a higher level.
At the very least this is the safest bet on the list. Garcia is both the most likely to come through and the least likely to implode. Whatever his emotional vagaries, the Spaniard’s scores don’t drastically fluctuate. Unless you pick him to win the Masters, he almost unilaterally refuses to miss cuts.
Total lost weekends since the beginning of 2011: four. Yes, four. In nearly four years.
Garcia is no novice at making people look dumb, but this a smart investment for a player who has somehow slipped into an underrated gem.
As the editor-in-chief of this website and an observer of the GolfWRX forums and other online golf equipment discourse for over a decade, I’m pretty well attuned to the grunts and grumbles of a significant portion of the golf equipment purchasing spectrum. And before you accuse me of lording above all in some digital ivory tower, I’d like to offer that I worked at golf courses (public and private) for years prior to picking up my pen, so I’m well-versed in the non-degenerate golf equipment consumers out there. I touched (green)grass (retail)!
Complaints about the ills of and related to the OEMs usually follow some version of: Product cycles are too short for real innovation, tour equipment isn’t the same as retail (which is largely not true, by the way), too much is invested in marketing and not enough in R&D, top staffer X hasn’t even put the new driver in play, so it’s obviously not superior to the previous generation, prices are too high, and on and on.
Without digging into the merits of any of these claims, which I believe are mostly red herrings, I’d like to bring into view of our rangefinder what I believe to be the two primary difficulties golf equipment companies face.
One: As Terry Koehler, back when he was the CEO of Ben Hogan, told me at the time of the Ft Worth irons launch, if you can’t regularly hit the golf ball in a coin-sized area in the middle of the face, there’s not a ton that iron technology can do for you. Now, this is less true now with respect to irons than when he said it, and is less and less true by degrees as the clubs get larger (utilities, fairways, hybrids, drivers), but there remains a great deal of golf equipment truth in that statement. Think about it — which is to say, in TL;DR fashion, get lessons from a qualified instructor who will teach you about the fundamentals of repeatable impact and how the golf swing works, not just offer band-aid fixes. If you can’t repeatably deliver the golf club to the golf ball in something resembling the manner it was designed for, how can you expect to be getting the most out of the club — put another way, the maximum value from your investment?
Similarly, game improvement equipment can only improve your game if you game it. In other words, get fit for the clubs you ought to be playing rather than filling the bag with the ones you wish you could hit or used to be able to hit. Of course, don’t do this if you don’t care about performance and just want to hit a forged blade while playing off an 18 handicap. That’s absolutely fine. There were plenty of members in clubs back in the day playing Hogan Apex or Mizuno MP-32 irons who had no business doing so from a ballstriking standpoint, but they enjoyed their look, feel, and complementary qualities to their Gatsby hats and cashmere sweaters. Do what brings you a measure of joy in this maddening game.
Now, the second issue. This is not a plea for non-conforming equipment; rather, it is a statement of fact. USGA/R&A limits on every facet of golf equipment are detrimental to golf equipment manufacturers. Sure, you know this, but do you think about it as it applies to almost every element of equipment? A 500cc driver would be inherently more forgiving than a 460cc, as one with a COR measurement in excess of 0.83. 50-inch shafts. Box grooves. And on and on.
Would fewer regulations be objectively bad for the game? Would this erode its soul? Fortunately, that’s beside the point of this exercise, which is merely to point out the facts. The fact, in this case, is that equipment restrictions and regulations are the slaughterbench of an abundance of innovation in the golf equipment space. Is this for the best? Well, now I’ve asked the question twice and might as well give a partial response, I guess my answer to that would be, “It depends on what type of golf you’re playing and who you’re playing it with.”
For my part, I don’t mind embarrassing myself with vintage blades and persimmons chasing after the quasi-spiritual elevation of a well-struck shot, but that’s just me. Plenty of folks don’t give a damn if their grooves are conforming. Plenty of folks think the folks in Liberty Corner ought to add a prison to the museum for such offences. And those are just a few of the considerations for the amateur game — which doesn’t get inside the gallery ropes of the pro game…
Different strokes in the game of golf, in my humble opinion.
Anyway, I believe equipment company engineers are genuinely trying to build better equipment year over year. The marketing departments are trying to find ways to make this equipment appeal to the broadest segment of the golf market possible. All of this against (1) the backdrop of — at least for now — firm product cycles. And golfers who, with their ~15 average handicap (men), for the most part, are not striping the golf ball like Tiger in his prime and seem to have less and less time year over year to practice and improve. (2) Regulations that massively restrict what they’re able to do…
That’s the landscape as I see it and the real headwinds for golf equipment companies. No doubt, there’s more I haven’t considered, but I think the previous is a better — and better faith — point of departure when formulating any serious commentary on the golf equipment world than some of the more cynical and conspiratorial takes I hear.
Agree? Disagree? Think I’m worthy of an Adam Hadwin-esque security guard tackle? Let me know in the comments.
@golfoncbs The infamous Adam Hadwin tackle ? #golf #fyp #canada #pgatour #adamhadwin ? Ghibli-style nostalgic waltz – MaSssuguMusic
Episode #16 brings us Cliff McKinney. Cliff is the founder of Old Charlie Golf Club, a new club, and concept, to be built in the Florida panhandle. The model is quite interesting and aims to make great, private golf more affordable. We hope you enjoy the show!
Last week, I came across a reel from BBC Sport on Instagram featuring Scottie Scheffler speaking to the media ahead of The Open at Royal Portrush. In it, he shared that he often wonders what the point is of wanting to win tournaments so badly — especially when he knows, deep down, that it doesn’t lead to a truly fulfilling life.
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“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport,” Scheffler said. “To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point?”
Ironically — or perhaps perfectly — he went on to win the claret jug.
That question — what’s the point of winning? — cuts straight to the heart of the human journey.
As someone who’s spent over two decades in the trenches of professional golf, and in deep study of the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the game, I see Scottie’s inner conflict as a sign of soul evolution in motion.
I came to golf late. I wasn’t a junior standout or college All-American. At 27, I left a steady corporate job to see if I could be on the PGA Tour starting as a 14-handicap, average-length hitter. Over the years, my journey has been defined less by trophies and more by the relentless effort to navigate the deeply inequitable and gated system of professional golf — an effort that ultimately turned inward and helped me evolve as both a golfer and a person.
One perspective that helped me make sense of this inner dissonance around competition and our culture’s tendency to overvalue winning is the idea of soul evolution.
The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has done extensive research on reincarnation, and Netflix’s Surviving Death (Episode 6) explores the topic, too. Whether you take it literally or metaphorically, the idea that we’re on a long arc of growth — from beginner to sage elder — offers a profound perspective.
If you accept the premise literally, then terms like “young soul” and “old soul” start to hold meaning. However, even if we set the word “soul” aside, it’s easy to see that different levels of life experience produce different worldviews.
Newer souls — or people in earlier stages of their development — may be curious and kind but still lack discernment or depth. There is a naivety, and they don’t yet question as deeply, tending to see things in black and white, partly because certainty feels safer than confronting the unknown.
As we gain more experience, we begin to experiment. We test limits. We chase extreme external goals — sometimes at the expense of health, relationships, or inner peace — still operating from hunger, ambition, and the fragility of the ego.
It’s a necessary stage, but often a turbulent and unfulfilling one.
David Duval fell off the map after reaching World No. 1. Bubba Watson had his own “Is this it?” moment with his caddie, Ted Scott, after winning the Masters.
In Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, reflecting on his 2011 Super Bowl win, Rodgers said:
“Now I’ve accomplished the only thing that I really, really wanted to do in my life. Now what? I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing? Did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’”
Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
Eventually, though, something shifts.
We begin to see in shades of gray. Winning, dominating, accumulating—these pursuits lose their shine. The rewards feel more fleeting. Living in a constant state of fight-or-flight makes us feel alive, yes, but not happy and joyful.
Compassion begins to replace ambition. Love, presence, and gratitude become more fulfilling than status, profits, or trophies. We crave balance over burnout. Collaboration over competition. Meaning over metrics.
Interestingly, if we zoom out, we can apply this same model to nations and cultures. Countries, like people, have a collective “soul stage” made up of the individuals within them.
Take the United States, for example. I’d place it as a mid-level soul: highly competitive and deeply driven, but still learning emotional maturity. Still uncomfortable with nuance. Still believing that more is always better. Despite its global wins, the U.S. currently ranks just 23rd in happiness (as of 2025). You might liken it to a gifted teenager—bold, eager, and ambitious, but angsty and still figuring out how to live well and in balance. As much as a parent wants to protect their child, sometimes the child has to make their own mistakes to truly grow.
So when Scottie Scheffler wonders what the point of winning is, I don’t see someone losing strength.
I see someone evolving.
He’s beginning to look beyond the leaderboard. Beyond metrics of success that carry a lower vibration. And yet, in a poetic twist, Scheffler did go on to win The Open. But that only reinforces the point: even at the pinnacle, the question remains. And if more of us in the golf and sports world — and in U.S. culture at large — started asking similar questions, we might discover that the more meaningful trophy isn’t about accumulating or beating others at all costs.
It’s about awakening and evolving to something more than winning could ever promise.
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Mike
Jul 14, 2014 at 8:41 am
I might keep one eye on Tiger Woods, too…
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