Power Rankings: Shriners Children's Open

While history is made at every stop on the PGA TOUR, sometimes it’s also updated. It happened again on Sunday.

When Matt McCarty captured victory at the Black Desert Championship, Jason Gore no longer was the only golfer ever to have won a PGA TOUR event in the same season that he won three times on the Korn Ferry Tour, as he did in 2005.

Now it’s Tom Kim’s turn. For what the two-time defending champion of the Shriners Children’s Open is chasing, how TPC Summerlin is set up and more, continue reading below.

Ask any professional golfer – heck, any golfer – and the narrative always will be that winning is hard. That’s what makes what McCarty has achieved so remarkable, and that doesn’t even dive into the fact that all four of his wins have occurred across 10 starts. As the kids say nowadays, he is a dude.

What Kim achieved at the 2023 edition of the Shriners Children’s Open was dazzling in its own right because he successfully defended his 2022 title. Indeed, winning is hard, but that is even harder because of the specificity of the feat. Furthermore, because the 2022-23 schedule had been stretched in advance of the return to the current calendar-year cadence, a unique and timely layer to going back-to-back was that he won the same tournament twice in the same season.

Now, golfers who win consecutive editions of the same tournament aren't as rare as what McCarty just experienced – the last to do it on the PGA TOUR is Kim’s pal, Scottie Scheffler, himself a trailblazer as the first to successfully defend THE PLAYERS Championship – but it’s been 13 years since the last time a golfer has connected three in a row. With victories at the 2009, 2010 and the 2011 stagings of the John Deere Classic, Steve Stricker is the most recent to turn the trick. That’s Kim’s target at TPC Summerlin this week. See! There’s always something to chase.

Coincidentally, this also is the third year of the new Bermudagrass fairways and bentgrass greens on the par 71 situated about eight miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip. If you reviewed only the analytics that include a scoring average of 69.295 last year, you wouldn’t know that the changes were made. That’s the ultimate compliment in the context of fulfilling the objective.

Just as it ever was, hitting greens in regulation and pouring in putts is the set-'em-up-and-knock-‘em-down shootout in the West. Similar to Black Desert last week, putting surfaces at TPC Summerlin are sizable and governed to touch 12 feet on the Stimpmeter, but you won’t find any lava within sight this time. In its place are two cuts of rough, the longer of which allowed to stand 2-1/2 inches.

With every good plot there is an antagonist. While Kim might be peering at the other 131 in the field as his en masse, all entrants will be grappling with decidedly unusual weather conditions for at least the first two days. Sustained winds of almost 20 mph for the opening round are expected to freshen on Friday. Indeed, the roof is open. With it, daytime highs will plummet from right around 90 degrees early in the week to maybe not even 70 the rest of the way. Breezes will diminish gradually all weekend to set up for a sprint to the finish line.

ROB BOLTON’S SCHEDULE

MONDAY: Power Rankings
TUESDAY: Sleepers
WEDNESDAY: Golfbet Insider
SUNDAY: Points and Payouts; Medical Extensions; Qualifiers; Reshuffle