🎴 The Far East Was Far Out

📢 Fore, Please:

I’ve learned a lot about Australia in the last few weeks but there’s one thing that oozes here — love of sport. They are mad for sports. Rugby, footy, cricket, golf, soccer, american football, darts, basketball, whatever!

It’s crazy how many jerseys these people are wearing on a daily basis and every bar is packed with fanatics watching a sport that I couldn’t even fathom the rules to.

It’s no surprise that the LIV Golf events have done very well here and they are quite proud of their Australian Open. Inject me with an Australian Swing to start/end every year.

Rick

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 But First …

I’m going to continue our #OhtaniRaffle for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I’m raffling off two more Shohei Ohtani cards (both PSA 10s) with the proceeds going to the greatest organization in the world.

I raffled off the gold foil version of these cards a few weeks ago, which was won by David Byer. We raised over $550 for St. Jude which means we’ve donated over $4,000 in the last year to the cause. If you’d like to be involved, here are the details.

$1 = 1 Entry
PayPal: [email protected]
Venmo: @RickGehman

• Send as much as you want, no limits (it's charity!).

• Deadline: First Pitch of Game 3 (8:08 PM ET on 10/28)

• Will pull the winners via live stream ASAP after.

• Yes, you’re eligible for both.

• I’ll ship when I get back from Australia.

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Nico Echavarria: $6,400 | 135.5 PTS
Max Greyserman: $8,700 | 125.5 PTS
Justin Thomas: $9,500 | 121.5 PTS
Rickie Fowler: $7,600 | 113.0 PTS
Kurt Kitayama: $9,200 | 111.0 PTS
Yuta Sugiura: $6,100 | 103.5 PTS
TOTAL: $47,500 | 710.0 PTS

🏆 Rounds of the Week

1) +6.88: Seamus Power | R2 of the ZOZO Championship
2) +6.22: Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen | R3 of the Genesis Championship
2) +6.22: Todd Clements | R3 of the Genesis Championship
4) +6.13: Taylor Moore | R1 of the ZOZO Championship
5) +6.10: Sungjae Im | R3 of the ZOZO Championship

📝 Note: That was the 5th best round of Seamus Power’s career — out of 807 rounds.

🥵 Hot Start Then Hold On

It was an impressive victory for Nico Echavarria who beat out a strong field by getting off to a hot start and then defending off all challengers.

Nico gained 10 strokes to the field over the first two rounds and actually played “worse” every day of the tournament.

R1: +5.13
R2: +4.88
R3: +3.10
R4: +1.43

Outside of the opening round, where he gained 4.29 strokes putting, Nico was a losing putter for the week. This is a really cool example of a golfer just doing whatever it takes to get the job done. He had to go to bed in contention every single night and had Justin Thomas knocking on the door all weekend. He birdies two of his last three to close it out.

😇 Making The Most Of Every Opportunity

Echavarria is a two-time winner on the PGA TOUR. However, his profile doesn’t look anything like other two-time winners.

Since getting his TOUR card full-time in the fall of 2022, Nico has played 59 tournaments.

He has missed the cut in 35 of them (59.3%).
He only has (2) Top 10 finished as an individual.

If you’re paying attention, you realize that Nico has won both of his Top 10 finishes.

Above is such a fun list to look at. Every golfer with exactly two TOUR wins since the fall of 2022. It’s not often that Xander Schauffele and Davis Riley make the same list. This is example 34,292 of why golf is so weird (and winning is hard).

😴 The Sleepy Favorites

The top of the board in Japan was jam-packed with superstars but they failed to make any noise. Not even a peep!

The “Big Four” were Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Sahith Theegala and Hideki Matsuyama. I’m drawing the line there, because they were the only four golfers who were $10,000+ on DraftKings this week.

As a group, they lost a total of 7.824 strokes to the field, which is the second worst performance by a $10K+ group dating back to the start of the 2023 season. That’s only the fourth time that the $10K+ group collectively lost strokes to the field and the only time that all golfers individually lost strokes to the field.

🤔 The #AreTheyBack Boys

We’ve got a close eye on both Justin Thomas and Rickie Fowler who are both attempting to get back into the form that we would expect from them. Both had positive weeks in Japan, each earning Top 5s. Let’s look a bit deeper into their performances.

JT: Led the field in SG: APP (+8.04), picked up another 3 off-the-tee and another 3 around-the-green. He was a small loser with the putter. Honestly — this is a vintage JT stat line. I could randomly grab any tournament from the last seven years and there’s a good chance the metrics look just like this. Of course, he still cannot putt. But the rest of his game looks in-line with the best version of himself that we’ve seen.

Rickie: It’s more than just one event for Rickie as his entire fall has been great. His results of T16, T23 and 4th don’t even tell the whole story. He’s picked up ~8.5 strokes on approach in those 12 rounds and he’s been dominant on the putting surfaces. The fact that this aligns with recent equipment changes means that Fowler should be brimming with confidence right now.

🍵 Benny Has Been Brewing

It was Ben An who beat Tom Kim in a playoff last week at the Genesis Championship. We probably should have seen something like this coming.

He wasn’t great in the Presidents Cup but he’s played his own ball beautifully for the last few months. Dating back to The Open Championship, he has seven straight Top 35 finishes with all but one of those resulting in a Top 25.

He’s always been a menace with his driver but he took it to a whole new level by hitting driver off the deck from 290 yards to a few feet. Imagine even trying this on the 68th hole of an event in your home country while in contention. Then pulling it off!