GOLF TOUR NEWS:WITH A quartet of European players in this week's Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, it could be that the three of them who aren't headed for Celtic Manor have the bigger point to prove.
Luke Donald is the odd man out.
For Paul Casey, especially, and Justin Rose this big-money event offers an opportunity to show what Europe will be missing in south Wales next week.
In truth, there is only a smidgen of curiosity about the Scot Martin Laird, who never figured in European captain Colin Montgomerie’s wild card deliberations.
Of the Europeans competing in Atlanta, Casey – who has booked a biking holiday in Canada for next week – is the only one who enters the final leg of the FedEx Cup knowing he has his destiny in his hands.
If Casey, who is fifth in the standings, captures the Tour Championship, which offers €1 million ($1.35 million) to the winner, then he will also scoop the real financial windfall of €7.7 million ($10 million) which awaits the overall FedEx Cup winner.
Matt Kuchar, Dustin Johnson, Charley Hoffman and Steve Stricker are ahead of Casey and, of course, should any of them win, then the FedEx Cup would also be theirs.
Mathematically, the huge financial bonanza is only guaranteed to the winner of the Tour Championship if he goes into the finale as one of those in the top-five; after that, the outcome depends on other players’ results.
Be that as it may, US Ryder Cup captain Corey Pavin has planned a team meeting in Atlanta for tomorrow with the nine members of his team – Kuchar, Johnson, Stricker, Jim Furyk, Hunter Mahan, Phil Mickelson, Jeff Overton, Bubba Watson and Zach Johnson – who are competing in the Tour Championship.
However, Pavin doesn’t plan to stay for the tournament. He intends to travel home to Dallas for the weekend before returning to Atlanta to catch the team’s charter flight to Cardiff.
Pavin, who was an assistant to Tom Lehman at The K Club in 2006, has taken his role seriously and has consulted a number of the US’s leading sports coaches – among them Doc Rivers of the Boston Celtics, Texas football coach Mack Brown and UCLA basketball coach Ben Howland – about motivation, management and athlete psychology in preparing for the match.
Donald, meanwhile, will be making his own way to Cardiff as the sole European member of Montgomerie’s team in action in the US Tour’s end-of-season showcase.
Although without a win on the US Tour in over two years, the Englishman’s recent run of form – 15th (Barclays), second (Deutsche Bank), 37th (BMW) – has moved him to seventh in the FedEx Cup standings heading into the final tournament.
