This weekend is the kick-off of the 2011 PGA Tour campaign. Yeah, golf is already back. It hardly feels like they were gone. Anyway, the opening tournament is the Hyundai Tournament of Champions and a few notables -- Phil Mickelson, Martin Kaymer, Lee Westwood and Rory McIlroy -- are sitting this one out.
The Plantation Course at Kapalua is once again the site for this year's tournament, having hosted the season opening event since 1999.
Last year with a scoring average of 69.884, it played as the easiest course on Tour all year. Of course, a part of that is is the smaller field but it's also a par 73 -- often the difference between winning and losing on Tour is how they players perform on the par fives -- and has a lot of downhill, downwind holes.
It's entirely possible -- likely even -- that the longest drive anyone on Tour hits this year will be at number seven, a par four that's list at 516 yards but plays downhill and downwind. Last year Steve Stricker -- of all people -- registered the longest drive of the year with a 424-yard bomb.
In fact, 18 of the 30 longest drives in 2010 took place somewhere at the Planation Course, with 10 of them coming on number seven.
On to the picks. Each week I'm going to give a foursome pick, plus one long shot. While I won't rule out the possibility of picking one of the favourites in my foursome, I will tend to lean more heavily towards those that may not be the first that come to mind.
Jason Day -- 30-1. Fact: Australians have won five of the last seven tournaments. Fact: Day is coming off a year where he won once -- the HP Byron Nelson Championship -- finished in the top-10 in a major (the PGA Championship) and was a serious threat to win the FedEx Cup with two top-fives in the PGA Tour playoffs. Combine the two and add in the fact that Greg Norman thinks Aussie's play so well at Kapalua because the wind is similar in Australia and it means the 23-year old Australian is a legit contender.
Anthony Kim -- 25-1. Kim was absolutely on fire just prior to thumb surgery last spring. He had seven straight top-25s with four of them being top-10s -- including a win, a runner-up and third place finish. Though he struggled after he returned in August, eventually he started to right the ship posting a tie for 25th at the WGC-HSBC Champions event in China. He also had success at Kapalua in his only trip there in 2009, firing a final round 67 to finish in a tie for second.
Ian Poulter -- 15-1. It was a very strong end to 2010 for Poulter who closed out the year with a 13th place finish in Shanghai, sixth in Singapore, a win in Hong Kong and a runner-up placement in Dubai, losing under dubious circumstances to Robert Karlsson in a playoff. The knock on Poulter's game has always been his ball-striking ability, or lack thereof, I suppose. But in 2010 he ranked 14th in driving accuracy and first greens in regulation on the European Tour, hitting 77.4 per cent of them -- a number that would have been the best mark on the PGA Tour by a landslide.
Ryan Palmer -- 50-1. There are a couple of reasons to like Palmer in this spot. One: he won the Sony Open last year in Hawaii, the first full-field event on Tour. And two: his ability to make putts from five-feet. In the last two years Geoff Ogilvy has won the tournament after making all 110 putts he faced inside five feet. Last year, Palmer ranked sixth on Tour, converting 89.25 per cent of his putts from five feet.
Longshot: Derek Lamley 150-1. While it may be strange to pick a player that had just three top-25 finishes all season in a tournament of only winners, all three of those finishes -- and four of his five top finishes overall -- came in the first three months of the season in 2010. That includes his victory at the Puerto Rican Open.
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