Short hitter’s dream day, emergency caddie magic, Netflix drama

Welcome back to the Monday Finish, where we think of February as the Harbour Town of months; a little shorter than the competition but full of trouble. To the news…

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GOLF STUFF I LIKE

The winner you didn’t see coming.

Imagine, for a moment, you’re in the shoes of a particular player this past Sunday afternoon in the Mexico Open at VidantaWorld.

Good news: You’re in a playoff to win on the PGA Tour!

Some bad news: Your opponent is 20-year-old rising star Aldrich Potgieter. He’s unscarred and unafraid. You? You’re about to turn 32. You’ve earned your PGA Tour card and you’ve lost it and, after 150-plus starts in the minor leagues, you’ve earned it back. You know the preciousness of this opportunity and you know the consequences of a misstep. It’ll be tough to play free.

Some more bad news: Your opponent’s swing speed is 17 mph faster than yours. His ball speed is nearly 30 mph higher. He carries his tee shots, on average, 51 yards longer than you do. He hits 59 percent of his tee shots longer than 320 yards while you clear that threshold less than four percent of the time. He is arguably the longest driver on the PGA Tour. You are arguably the shortest.

Some more bad news: You’re playing a par 5.

Some more bad news: Even though you are one of the straightest drivers in professional golf — your “good drive” percentage is over 90, ranking second on Tour — now your tee shot is slicing so far right of the fairway that it’s almost certainly headed out of bounds. A tee shot out of bounds means you’ll re-tee hitting three which means, really, your goose is cooked.

Who are you? You’re Brian Campbell, southern California native and Illinois graduate. You’ve spent the better part of a decade bouncing between the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour and back to the Korn Ferry Tour. You’ve remained relatively anonymous because you’ve never quite played your way out of anonymity; you’ve never finished inside the top 10 in a PGA Tour event, never cracked the top 100 in the world and less than two years ago you’d fallen outside the top 1000. A strong 2024 season on the KFT got you back to the big show and now you’ve gotten yourself to the brink of a career-changing victory. Until this sliced drive, of course…

But then something wild happens: Your ball crashes into the woods and then it crashes out. You’re fine. You have a second chance. Pros often say that you need some luck to win, that you need a few bounces to go your way. They’re not usually this literal.

A few minutes later — one clutch wedge and one clutch putt later, to be specific — you’re a PGA Tour winner. You react like you’re in a daze. Your girlfriend reacts with the appropriate enthusiasm; perhaps she’s process that this changes everything.

“All I wanted to do was see him smile with the trophy and that was my dream,” she says.

“I thought I was going to throw up at multiple times during the day,” you admit a few minutes later, speaking to media. You add this: “It means everything. And honestly, I have no idea what’s going on right now, I just need to soak this in.”

This doesn’t matter even a lick to you, but you’ve spoiled the weekend for an entire legion of betting sharps who’d tapped Potgieter as a perfect course fit. Not a lot of guys were picking the short-knocker to win the course built for big hitters, after all. But that’s why they play all 72 holes — or 74, in your case.

Editor’s note: Winning when nobody bet on you? That’s golf stuff I like.

WINNERS

Who won the week?

Brian Campbell won the first PGA Tour event of his career, the latest and biggest leap in what has been the best stretch of his professional career. There were signs when he finished runner-up at multiple Korn Ferry Tour events last season; now we’ve got proof. This guy can do some special stuff.

Angel Yin won the Honda LPGA Thailand; she started Sunday’s final round with a five-shot lead, fired seven-under 65 and still won by just won over hard-charging rookie Akie Iwai, who closed with 61. The win was her second and moved her up to No. 12 in the world.

And Jacques Kruyswijk won the Magical Kenya Open, the first DP World Tour title of the South African’s career.

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NOT-WINNERS

These guys are good, too.

Isaiah Salinda shot a Sunday 65 in Mexico, tying for low round of the day, to finish third — the best result of his young PGA Tour career.

“Top-10s are huge out here. That was kind of my primary role going into today is just to lock up a top-10 and get into next week [the Cognizant Classic] and hopefully Players and Bay Hill and all those events,” he said.

Joel Dahmen shot 65 on Sunday, too. He’s made just two cuts in five starts this season but has made the most of ’em with two top-10s including Sunday’s T6, taking full advantage of his last-minute charge.

Another guy to shoot 65 on Sunday: amateur Jose Luis Ballester. The Arizona State star made his first cut on the PGA Tour start (in his fourth start) and wound up T17.

On the LPGA Tour, Akie Iwai proved just how low she can go, shooting 62 in the first round and 61 in the final round en route to a runner-up finish.

And a trio of Thai women — Jeeno Thitikul, Patty Tavatanakit and Moriya Jutanugarn — rounded out the top five at their home event.

ONE DUMB GRAPHIC

Drive for show…

SHORT HITTERS

Netflix moments.

Full Swing comes out on Netflix at midnight Tuesday. I’m in it! With limited spoilers (I’ll keep it very light but feel free to skip to the next section) here are five things to get fired up about.

1. An unexpected amateur

Ludvig Åberg is front and center in the first episode, and it’s terrific getting some real time with golf’s newest star. But amateur Neal Shipley is an unexpected delight. He’ll make you laugh and he’ll make you feel and he’ll take you inside a different corner of Augusta National; this is exactly the sort of access this show can provide that would be impossible elsewhere.

2. A partner in crime

Shane Lowry’s friendship with Rory McIlroy takes center stage in Episode 2 and while McIlroy is his typical insightful superstar self it’s actually Lowry who commands the episode; the high point is when he’s asked whether he’s protective of McIlroy and gives a thoughtful answer that speaks to something bigger than their Zurich Classic partnership.

3. An unexpected (non-)crime

Scottie Scheffler’s arrest was the wildest moment of the 2024 golf season — this is a chance to hear from Scheffler, to watch previously unseen footage of the arrest and to relive an impossibly unlikely sequence of events.

4. A photo finish

The best gameplay of the season came at the U.S. Open, where [I don’t think this counts as a spoiler] Bryson DeChambeau and McIlroy tangled all the way to the final green. Netflix definitely wants this show to have broad appeal, but for big-time golf fans this may be the peak of the season — getting new angles and perspectives on something you’ve already seen is more than enough excitement.

5. A courageous fight

The best episode of the season is No. 6, which showcases Gary Woodland‘s fight with a brain tumor. It feels weird to put this in a list like this as something to “look forward to” but as cameras accompany Woodland from his home to his tournaments all the way into his doctors’ offices you root for this longtime pro in a much more important battle than anything he’d face on course.

ONE SWING THOUGHT

Brian Campbell on punching back.

Why’d Campbell feel immediately proud of his win? The first word he turned to was grit. And then he explained why.

“I almost stopped golfing about two years ago. I was at second stage. I made a quad on a par 3 and thought I shot myself out of Q-School. Then somehow managed to fight back the next day and shoot a really nice number, got myself back in it enough to get to final stage. That led to last year and I had a really strong last year. It’s crazy how quickly things can change and I’m so blessed to be in this position.”

ONE BIG QUESTION

What does a caddie mean?

Angel Yin’s typical caddie Michelle Simpson went down with an illness shortly before her opening round. Who’d she turn to?

“My bag is quite heavy. My friend who is my manager, she tried and she almost fell over. She weighs as much as the golf bag, so there was no way that was going to happen. We were kind of desperate,” Yin said. Instead they stumbled on an emergency replacement who just happened to be an expert.

Sakchai “Tom” Sirimaya was the name of Yin’s fill-in, per Golf Channel. And what a fill-in!

“Tom was like, ‘Oh, I’m a professional caddie.’ He caddies on the Japanese Senior Tour and Asian Tour,” Yin said. “You really can’t pick someone that good just out of nowhere, and so he was on my bag.”

You already know what happened next; Tom got a front-row seat to Yin’s 30-birdie barrage. She got her second career victory.

My question, then, involves fill-in caddies. There are plenty of times that golfers get fill-ins and play unremarkable tournaments, of course. But there are also enough instances of pros playing top-tier rounds with fill-ins — think Bob MacIntyre’s dad caddying him to victory in Canada last season, Fred Couples‘ new caddie bearing witness to a winning 60, Tommy Fleetwood’s local caddie getting him on the podium at Augusta, Max Homa winning in South Africa with a buddy on the bag, Matt Kuchar winning with his fill-in caddie at Mayakoba, Sungjae Im winning in his friend’s first week on the bag, Martin Trainer winning with a first-timer, all the way back to Sergio Garcia winning with a local caddie at the 2012 Wyndham Championship. Is this statistically significant? I dunno. I dunno how I’d even figure that out; I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.

One take from this would be something like “caddies don’t matter.” I think caddies actually matter a ton. But I think they matter in mysterious ways. It’s hardly a calculation of pure golf knowledge. And so getting a new caddie or a fill-in caddie or a complete change of pace could make you take accountability or snap out of bad habits in a way that you might not otherwise. Sometimes NBA teams miss their starting point guard for a couple games and everybody else elevates their game to fill that void; it doesn’t mean the team is better long-term without that player, just that professional athletes sometimes benefit or elevate from a little change of pace.

The question, then, is this: how do you know who’s gonna make a good fill-in caddie vs. a dud?

ONE THING TO WATCH

Timothée Chalament on being a great.

I love when athletes talk about wanting to be great. It signals commitment and it signals confidence; it’s alpha-dog stuff. It was cool, then, to see Timothée Chalamet bring that energy to the acting world in his acceptance speech at the SAG Awards on Sunday. After winning his first major acting award for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

“I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he said. “I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight. I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I’m deeply grateful. This doesn’t signify that, but it’s a little more fuel. It’s a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much.”

Not just Lewis but Jordan, too. Chalamet knows ball. He wants to be great. What an electric combo.

NEWS FROM SEATTLE

Monday Finish HQ.

I skipped town this weekend for a bachelor party and it was awesome. Not in a way that I’m bragging about some wild party but more in a way that it was absolutely energizing seeing a group of old buddies. I grew up in Massachusetts and am still in touch with plenty of friends from high school and college but there are stretches of the year where that distance feels really significant; getting the band together for a couple days of nonsense goes a long way to filling up the gas tank. (Hence the beauty of golf trips.) Even if the early-morning Sunday flight hit like a ton of bricks.

Call your friends, people. We’ll see you next week!

Before you go, a quick request: If you like the Monday Finish, subscribe for free HERE to get it in your email inbox!

Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.

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