Connect with us

News

WGC-Bridgestone: Taking their talents to Akron

Published

on

By Stan Kosinski

GolfWRX Contributor

The PGA Tour travels this week to Northeast Ohio for the World Golf Championships — Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club.

The field, highlighted by seven-time winner Tiger Woods, includes the top 50 players in the Official World Golf Rankings, the members of the 2011 United States and International President’s Cup teams, official tournament winners from the Federated Tours since the 2011 Bridgestone Invitational, including the Japan Golf Tour Championship (2012), the  Bridgestone Open (2011), the JBWere Masters (2011), the Dimension Data Pro-Am (2012) and the Thailand Golf Championship (2011).

Notable players this week include defending PGA Championship winner Keegan Bradley, K.J. Choi, World No. 1 Luke Donald, Jason Dufner, 2012 Open Championship winner Ernie Els, Rickie Fowler, Jim Furyk, Sergio Garcia, Bill Haas, Phil Mickelson, Hunter Mahan, 2012 Masters Champion Bubba Watson and defending champion Adam Scott.  This year’s U.S. Open Champion, Webb Simpson, will again not participate as he decided to remain home with his wife and newborn daughter for the second event in a row.

The idea for a series of events which would include the very best players and courses from around the world surfaced at the 1996 President’s Cup.  Golf’s five professional governing bodies, the PGA Tour, European Tour, Japan Golf Tour, PGA Tour of Australasia the and Sunshine Tour reached an agreement then on several key elements in order to create several new international events beginning in 1999, forming the International Federation of PGA Tours to develop these tournaments. Jeff Maggert won the first event held at La Costa Resort Accenture Match Play on the 38th hole of the 36 hole championship match. Maggert chipped in for birdie to beat fellow American Andrew Magee.

In the World Golf Championships Era, no other player has dominated these events like Tiger Woods. Beginning with his first win at the 1999 NEC Invitational (now the Bridgestone Invitational), Woods has 16 official titles in the World Golf Championships, which equals 22 percent of his 73 career wins.  He has won the Bridgestone Invitational a total of seven times (1999, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009).  With another win this week he would tie Sam Snead’s record of winning one event a total of eight times. Needless to say his record shows that he is very comfortable on this stage and on this golf course.

Firestone Golf and Country Club is in Akron, Ohio, and was originally designed by Bert Way in 1928.  The course was later remodeled by Robert Trent Jones in 1960 and offers a total of 54 holes to it’s membership, the North Course, the West Course, and the South Course, which hosts the Bridgestone Invitational.

The South course measures 7400 yards from the Championship tees with a course rating of 76.1 and a slope of 132.  The par-70 layout was ranked 18th out of 51 courses in difficulty on the PGA Tour in 2011.  Featuring 82 bunkers and three water hazards, tight fairways, and greens that will be running about 13 on the stimpmeter come tournament time, Firestone is always a test for the world’s elite players.  The pros will also have to once again contend with the 667 yard par five 16th, dubbed “The Monster”.  It is a hole where the tournament can be won, or lost, with a single errant stroke. Get ready for some unbelievable shot making and high drama once again at the Bridgestone Invitational.

Click here to see hundreds of WITB photos and galleries from the 2012 WGC

And click here for more discussion in the “Tour Talk” forum.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Dominika

    Nov 5, 2012 at 1:42 am

    The one time I had a perfect (for me) round of golf I ncieotd that the game seemed extremely simple. The rest of the time, I wonder how it can be so complicated to try and reproduce that simplicity. Zen golf gets to the root of this and offers a path there, and the opportunity to have that round at any time. Joseph Parent’s advice applies to all levels of golfers and is a guide to consistent and reproduceable results. It is one of those rare books on golf that doesn’t fill your head with things to consider while you play, it does the opposite by showing you how to clear your head and in doing so clear away the obstacles that prevent us and our bodies from naturally performing the way we are capable of. I expect that the short time it took me to read this book will have a long-lasting effect on the way I will play golf from now on, and I am in the process of reading it for a second time.

  2. Troy Vayanos

    Aug 1, 2012 at 3:24 pm

    I love this event as it’s like another major golf tournament with most of the worlds best players on show.

    Be very interested to see how Adam Scott plays after the British Open and hoping he does very well.

    Tiger Woods will be hard to beat back on home soil and has a fantastic record in this event.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

News

Testing Lorem Ipsum

Published

on


What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Continue Reading

News

2026 PGA Championship betting odds

Published

on

Scottie Scheffler leads the betting ahead of the second major championship of the year, with the World Number One a +345 favorite to get his hands on a second PGA Championship.

Rory McIlroy who won the Masters back in April is a +800 shot to complete half of the calendar slam at Aronimink Golf Club this week, while Jordan Spieth can be backed at +5900 to become a career grand slam winner.

Here is the full betting board for the 2026 PGA Championship courtesy of DraftKings.

Scottie Scheffler +345 – (Check 0ut his WITB here)

Rory McIlroy +800 – (Check out his WITB here)

  • Jon Rahm +1300 
  • Cameron Young +1500
  • Bryson DeChambeau +1700
  • Xander Schauffele +1850
  • Matt Fitzpatrick +1950
  • Ludvig Aberg +2000
  • Tommy Fleetwood +2600
  • Collin Morikawa +3500
  • Brooks Koepka +3900
  • Justin Rose +4300
  • Russell Henley +4600
  • Si Woo Kim +4700
  • Justin Thomas +4800
  • Robert MacIntyre +5300
  • Patrick Cantlay +5300
  • Viktor Hovland +5400
  • Tyrrell Hatton +5500
  • Jordan Spieth +5900
  • Sam Burns +6000
  • Hideki Matsuyama +6200
  • Adam Scott +6400
  • Rickie Fowler +7000
  • Chris Gotterup +7400
  • Patrick Reed +7400
  • Min Woo Lee +7800
  • Ben Griffin +8000
  • Sepp Straka +8400
  • Shane Lowry +9000
  • Akshay Bhatia +9200
  • Maverick McNealy +9200
  • Joaquin Niemann +9200
  • Jake Knapp +9200
  • Jason Day +9600
  • Kurt Kitayama +10000
  • J.J. Spaun +10000
  • Harris English +10500
  • Nicolai Hojgaard +11000
  • Gary Woodland +11000
  • David Puig +11000
  • Michael Thorbjornsen +12000
  • Jacob Bridgeman +12000
  • Keegan Bradley +12500
  • Corey Conners +14000
  • Alex Fitzpatrick +15000
  • Sungjae Im +15500
  • Sahith Theegala +15500
  • Harry Hall +15500
  • Alex Noren +16000
  • Thomas Detry +16500
  • Marco Penge +16500
  • Kristoffer Reitan +17000
  • Alex Smalley +17000
  • Wyndham Clark +17500
  • Sam Stevens +17500
  • Keith Mitchell +17500
  • Daniel Berger +18500
  • Ryan Gerard +20000
  • Nick Taylor +20000
  • Rasmus Hojgaard +21000
  • Dustin Johnson +21000
  • Pierceson Coody +23000
  • Aaron Rai +24000
  • Jordan Smith +24000
  • Angel Ayora +24000
  • Bud Cauley +25000
  • Matt McCarty +26000
  • Jayden Schaper +26000
  • Brian Harman +27000
  • Taylor Pendrith +27000
  • Ryan Fox +27000
  • J.T. Poston +27000
  • Cameron Smith +29000
  • Ryo Hisatsune +29000
  • Michael Kim +29000
  • Max Homa +29000
  • Denny McCarthy +29000
  • Tom McKibbin +30000
  • Rico Hoey +32000
  • Matt Wallace +32500
  • Ricky Castillo +33000
  • Haotong Li +33000
  • Michael Brennan +34000
  • Max Greyserman +36000
  • Stephan Jaeger +37500
  • Christiaan Bezuidenhout +37500
  • Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen +39000
  • Aldrich Potgieter +40000
  • Andrew Novak +42000
  • Patrick Rodgers +42500
  • Daniel Hillier +42500
  • Max McGreevy +46000
  • Billy Horschel +48000
  • Chris Kirk +48000
  • Ian Holt +49000
  • Casey Jarvis +49000
  • William Mouw +50000
  • Steven Fisk +50000
  • John Parry +50000
  • Nico Echavarria +52500
  • Garrick Higgo +52500
  • John Keefer+55000
  • Matthias Schmid +57500
  • Austin Smotherman +57500
  • Sami Valimaki +60000
  • Andrew Putnam +60000
  • Lucas Glover +62500
  • Daniel Brown +62500
  • Jhonattan Vegas +75000
  • Emiliano Grillo +80000
  • Mikael Lindberg +85000
  • Adrien Saddier +100000
  • Bernd Wiesberger +100000
  • Elvis Smylie +110000
  • Stewart Cink +130000
  • Kota Kaneko +130000
  • David Lipsky +150000
  • Chandler Blanchet +150000
  • Andy Sullivan +150000
  • Joe Highsmith +180000
  • Adam Schenk +200000
  • Travis Smyth +200000
  • Davis Riley +225000
  • Martin Kaymer +400000
  • Brian Campbell +400000
  • Padraig Harrington +450000
  • Kazuki Higa +450000
  • Jordan Gumberg +450000
  • Ryan Vermeer +500000
  • Austin Hurt +500000
  • Tyler Collet +500000
  • Timothy Wiseman +500000
  • Shaun Micheel +500000
  • Y.E. Yang +500000
  • Michael Block+500000
  • Mark Geddes+500000
  • Luke Donald+500000
  • Bryce Fisher+500000
  • Jimmy Walker +500000
  • Jason Dufner +500000
  • Jesse Droemer +500000
  • Jared Jones +500000
  • Garrett Sapp +500000
  • Francisco Bide +500000
  • Zach Haynes +500000
  • Paul McClure+500000
  • Derek Berg +500000
  • Chris Gabriele +500000
  • Braden Shattuck +500000
  • Ben Polland +500000
  • Ben Kern +50000

Continue Reading

Tour Photo Galleries

Photos from the 2026 PGA Championship

Published

on

GolfWRX is on site for the second major of 2026: The PGA Championship from Aronimink in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.

The tournament’s location, just outside Philadelphia, and its status as a major championship mean GolfWRXers are in for a treat: WITBs from a strong field, custom gear celebrating the PGA Championship, and the rich culture of the City of Brotherly Love — we have noted a relative absence of cheesesteak-themed items thus far this week, but most of the rest of the usual suspects are well represented.

Check out links to all our photos below.

General Albums

WITB Albums

Pullout Albums

Continue Reading

Announcement

Our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use have been updated as of January 29th, 2026. Please review the updated policies here Privacy Policy | Terms of Use. By continuing to use our site after January 29th, 2026, you agree to the changes.

WITB

Facebook

Trending