The Florida Swing Begins With The WGC-Workday Championship At The Concession Golf Club

Matt Marriott. Getty Images.

Welcome to the World Golf Championships-Workday Championship, a real mouthful of a tournament. In recent years, this event was played at Chapultapec Golf Club in Mexico, and served as a bridge of sorts between the California and Florida swings during the PGA Tour's winter schedule. Because of the international complications that arise with that whole COVID thing, Mexico is out and Concession Golf Club in Bradenton, FL is in. Which is a bit of a bummer because I enjoyed the change-up that was Chapultapec. You only get that type of high altitude and ¡SILENCIO! signs from the marshalls a couple times a year. But Concession is a course that has not hosted a PGA Tour event as of yet, and that's always exciting. It did host the 2015 NCAA Championships where skinny boy Bryson Dechambeau beat out the likes of CT Pan and others, but other than that nobody really has a leg up on course experience this week. More on Concession shortly.

Typically in these weekly preview blogs I do a short recap of the previous year's tournament and recent winners. I'm posting that information here, but given that this tournament is being played in an entirely different time zone than last year, take note that this information is merely trivial.

I will, however, take this opportunity to talk a bit about World Golf Championships, as I know there's a good handful of folks who have really caught the golf bug in the past year and may not be too familiar with the concept and what these tournaments mean. So let's sit down for a history lesson.

Essentially, WGC's are a series of tournaments that officially began in 1999 in an effort to incentivize and bring the world's best golfers together for more than just the 4 majors. While golf has been an international sport for centuries, the sport was really dominated by 2 areas of the world until the mid 20th century - the United States and the UK. It wasn't until the 50's and 60's that you started to see some guys like Peter Thomson of Australia and Bobby Locke and Gary Player of South Africa establish themselves as global superstars in the game. 

Behind them came Seve Ballesteros, who helped re-establish European golf after decades of global dominance from Nicklaus, Palmer, and Player. Prior to Seve joining the scene, the Ryder Cup had been strictly USA vs Britain (which included Ireland for a short time as well). Seve helped the rest of Continental Europe to be included in the Ryder Cup and inspired a resurgence in the European Tour. International guys like Bernhard Langer (Germany), Greg Norman (Australia), Nick Price (Zimbabwe), Ernie Els (South Africa), and Vijay Singh (Fiji) all enjoyed great worldwide success in the 80's and 90's, putting golf in a great position to grow the game globally.

Then some young cat named Tiger showed up. Tiger was an impetus for the WGC's for a lot of reasons. First, he was an electric personality that had captured eyeballs everywhere for the way he dominated. That much is clear. Second, his mixed racial background endeared him to people in all corners of the world. But perhaps most importantly, Tiger led a huge surge in revenues and prize purses, and having the world's best players compete on the same stage a few more times a year beyond the 4 majors was a no-brainer of a moneymaker.

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And so the WGC's were born in 1999. The PGA Tour and the European Tour would co-host a series of events in conjunction with the handful of other major world tours (the Australasian Tour, the Sunshine Tour from South Africa, etc). Originally it was 3 events - the WGC-Match Play, the WGC-Invitational, and the WGC-Championship. In 2009, the WGC-HSBC Champions was added in China.

These are all limited field events, typically around 60 to 75 players. It's generally the Top 50 players in the Official World Golf Rankings that qualify, along with some of the very top standings leaders on the smaller international tours. For the 3 stroke play WGC events (this being one of them), there is no cut, which means this is a guaranteed payday. Any of these guys could step up to the tee, hit their first tee shot, and immediately withdraw and collect a paycheck. And let me tell you, the paychecks this week are FAT. There is $10.5M to be handed out, with $1.8M going to the winner.

That type of guaranteed dough is why 48 of the world's top 50 have elected to tee it up this week. Only Tiger (prayers) and Paul Casey are out. The strength of the field in these events are a big reason why these events are so highly regarded - winning one of these is essentially a tier below winning a major (and probably the PLAYERS). You can't just fall backwards into playing in this tournament. You have to earn your way in. Jordan Spieth is a 3-time major winner, has played some great golf the last 3 weeks, and still was well short of qualifying. Rickie Fowler and Phil Mickelson (who's playing the Champions Tour event this week instead) didn't even come close. These tournaments are resume-builders because these guys are the best of the best.

By the way, guess who's won the most of these things by a MILE.

The Course

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images courtesy of BlueGolf

The Concession Golf Club was built in 2006 as a co-design between Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin. These two are infamous for a moment of sportsmanship at an otherwise contentious 1969 Ryder Cup at Royal Birkdale. Story goes a little something like this.

The Americans were kicking Britain's ass at their own game for years. They had won 12 out of the last 13 Ryder Cups and Jacklin had only 2 months earlier become the first British golfer to win the Open in 18 years. Although it wasn't necessarily the Americans winning those Opens (Australian Peter Thomson won FIVE in that stretch), the British side was out to prove something at that Ryder Cup and turn the tide. Captain Eric Brown instructed his team not to help locate their opponents' balls, and the Americans responded with antics like standing ridiculously close to the Brits as they putt. Just some real petty, diabolical shit when it comes to the common courtesies of golf that would have been AWESOME theater if it happened with the TV coverage and Twitter era these days.

Anyways, the Cup came down to the final singles match between Nicklaus and Jacklin, which was all square going to the 18th hole. Because the Americans won the 1967 Cup, all Nicklaus needed was to halve the hole for them to secure a 16-16 tie and retain the Cup. Each missed birdie putts, and Nicklaus sank his 4 footer to secure the tie and ultimately the Cup. However, Jacklin still had a 3 foot putt to earn the first ever Ryder Cup tie, which I suppose was a feather in the Britain side's cap. Nicklaus elected to pick up Jacklin's marker and concede the putt in an act of sportsmanship, which has since become known as "The Concession". It may have infuriated American captain Sam Snead, but it also sparked a decades-long friendship between Nicklaus and Jacklin and brought us this sweet golf course we'll see this weekend.

The Concession is a par 72 measuring nearly 7,500 yards and is often regarded as the most challenging course in the state of Florida. Florida is a state where you can hardly walk down the street without falling onto a golf course and has tough tracks like Medalist, PGA National, TPC Sawgrass, among numerous other private courses. Slope ratings only go as high as 155 and that is exactly the rating here, meaning that this course would eat me, you, and just about anyone not in this tournament for lunch. 

There's water on 12 holes which is obviously a danger in itself, but the real challenge here is the greens. Paul Azinger likened these greens to mini-Augusta National greens, which is always exciting to hear. My research tells me greens will be firm and fast, likely running close to a 12.5 on the stimp. There's not much to go off of regarding what style of player this course might fit, but it feels like positioning on approaches and ability to scramble around the greens will be key, much like it is at Augusta. Given the designer, there's also been course comparisons made to Muirfield Village, so looking at leaderboards at the Memorial might be a betting angle to look at.

There's four par 5's, one of which (#13) is considered to be reachable by everybody, two of which (#3 and #17) is considered to be reachable by some depending on conditions and positioning, and one (#7) that will tend to be a 3 shot hole for everybody. The par 3's are also monsters, with three of them measuring well over 200 yards. Long iron city baby.

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Here's a gallery of photos including one of every hole to get you tuned up.

Best Hole - 8th hole, 374 yard Par 4

Photo By: Jeremiah Khokhar

Photo By: your boy via Google Maps 

Everywhere I looked the 8th hole was considered the signature hole and was regarded as one of the best par 4's in the state of Florida. Who am I to argue? It's said to be inspired by Muirfield Village's 14th hole. It's a short par 4 with a late dogleg right and a small green with water protecting the front and right. The green slopes hard towards the water on the right side, so I'm sure we'll see some challenging pin positions on that side during the week. 

The Weather

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Predictably gorgeous. Little more wind as the weekend goes on but nothing over the top. I'll be about 100 miles south in Bonita Springs this weekend for a golf trip so I'm fired up as hell to see it.

TV Coverage

Thursday: Golf Channel 1-6 ET

Friday: Golf Channel 1-6 ET

Saturday: Golf Channel 12-2:30 ET, then NBC 2:30-6 ET (NO COVERAGE GAP!!!!!)

Sunday: Golf Channel 12-2:30 ET, then NBC 2:30-6 ET (NO COVERAGE GAP!!!!!) 

Here's your featured groups on PGA Tour Live:

Thursday: DJ/Koepka/Berger and Rory/JT/Homa

Friday: Reed/Hovland/DeChambeau and Rahm/Matsuyama/Finau

The Trophy

Hector Vivas. Getty Images.

Above you'll see the trophy used in Mexico, and I assume that it will be the same except for the insignia on the bottom as the WGC trophies tend to have a very consistent style and design, as modeled by the GOAT below:

Scott Halleran. Getty Images.

Quite frankly… I love it. Love the clayish matte-like finish, love the variety in colors and designs… love everything about these trophies. They have their own distinctive brand when you see them where you say THAT RIGHT THERE is a WGC trophy when you see one. Very global feel. I'm not sure yet which is my favorite but I will tell you that this is a strong 8.8/10 trophy up for grabs this week.

Players to Watch

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Can I just say all of them? What a treat it is to get a high quality field like this for a 2nd straight week. Dustin Johnson is the betting favorite at the Barstool Sportsbook at +550. He was in a position to make a move at Riviera on Sunday but faltered with a final round 72 to finish T-8. Says a lot that a T-8 is below his average finish of about 4th in his last 12 starts. As shown by the graphic above, he's won all 4 WGC events, including this event thrice. This tournament getting moved from Chapultapec was probably more of a loss for DJ than anyone, as he'd won 2 of the 4 tournaments played there. I rode DJ last week and got burned on him missing Top 5 by a shot so I'm going to lay off this week and probably regret it.

Now seems like as good a time as ever to buy low on Justin Thomas at +1800. I know I've picked him a handful of times including at Augusta in November, but this feels like a place where ball-striking and short game prowess will give him an edge. He's had some mediocre results the past 2 weeks as he learned Saturday night at Scottsdale that his grandfather had passed away and very understandably seemed out of it Sunday when he came into the day a shot ahead of eventual champ Brooks Koepka. Among JT's 13 career wins, numerous were short field/no cut events, including two WGC Invitationals, a BMW Championship, and two Tournament of Champions. I don't expect you'll see a price like +1800 on JT very often so get it while you can.

I'm also going in on Viktor Hovland +2200. He's posted some really strong results lately and nobody has seemed to notice. He won at Mayakoba in December when few were paying attention and has followed that up with T-3, T-31, T-2, T-6, and a backdoor T-5 last weekend. He also hasn't missed a cut in 11 months (not that that's a factor this week, he's just remarkably consistent). He strikes the ball as good as anyone on Tour, the only thing that would concern me is that he's been brutal around the greens most of his short career. He even admitted as such after winning Mayakoba. But he's actually gaining .180 strokes per round around the greens this season, a stark improvement from -.243 last season. His results wouldn't be what they are if that wasn't the case. Most of the market is around +1800 and +2000, so you're getting a good value (as always) at the Barstool Sportsbook. I'm in on the Hov.

Other Plays

JT Group B +300

Hovland Top 10 +225

Xander Schauffele Top 5 +250 - Another remarkably consistent ball-striker. Played the 2015 NCAA Championships here so he has at least seen the course.

Matthew Fitzpatrick Top English +450 - Played great last week and plays well in these types of settings. 

Robert MacIntire Top British & Irish Player +1200 - Under the radar youngster who has quietly climbed to #43 in the world. T-6 at the Open a couple of years ago and think he'll become more of a well known name before long. Love the lefty. Take Robbie Mac.

Tony Finau +1600 to win - (WARNING: This is merely a FOMO pick. Been chasing that Tony win for like 5 fucking years and there's just no way I'm going to miss the boat. Especially not after last week. This pick will be a mainstay here for the foreseeable future, ride or don't.)

Get well soon Tiger. And enjoy Concession Golf Club.