(Provided by Tennis World USA)
Predicting the winner of a golf tournament is extremely complicated, although there is always a bunch of players who, due to their playing time, have a serious chance of being in contention on Sunday. There are two clear favorites for the 2023 PGA Championship which are Jon Rahm and Scottie Scheffler.
Both are two almost infallible players from tee to green and are fine in the short game and in the putt. On average, nobody cuts more blows to the field in a tournament than the Spanish. The one from Barrika and the one from Ridgewood (New Jersey) largely capture the attention of the tournaments, something reminiscent of the sports dispute between Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh.
Pga Championship, schedule
The list of favorites does not end by far with the two of them. There will be plenty of talent on Oak Hill’s green mantle, but if several more players were to be elevated to the same category as Rahm and Scheffler, it would be tournament defending champion Justin Thomas, Jason Day, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Cameron Smith.
Day has earned his return to the elite after a long battle with injuries, especially with a back injury that he has acknowledged had embittered him to the point that he thought about retiring once some of his endorsement contracts ran out.
He has now just won the AT & T Byron Nelson and already has six ‘top 10’ in 2023. The ‘back to back’ does not usually happen often, but the Australian seems to have found his moment. For their part, the three ‘ogres’ of LIV (DJ, Koepka, Smith) arrive in very good shape.
The fact that we are talking about born winners cannot be overlooked in a tournament where the pressure is maximum. They have already shown they have plenty of boards to deal with this. Of course, Viktor Hovland, Patrick Cantlay or Xander Schauffele cannot be ignored, in a state that invites us to consider them favourites.
You also have to count on the unpredictable but talented Rory McIlroy, Colin Morikawa or Jordan Spieth. The great absentee, as we already know, is Tiger Woods, who had ankle surgery in April, for which he practically said goodbye to the entire season. The tournament has also lost Jason Dufner, the last winner of the PGA Championship at Oak Hill.
