The week after a closing sixty is, on the PGA Tour, a quieter week than the week before, and not because the calendar says so. The week after a closing sixty is the week the winner of the closing sixty takes off, and the week the players two pairings behind the winner of the closing sixty also take off, and the week the next thing on the schedule has to find its own gravity. The next thing on the schedule, this week, is the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth. The next thing after that is the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. Colonial is the small Tour stop sitting between the largest cheque-down-the-stretch finish of the spring and the biggest test of the summer. The field that has assembled for it, and the field that has assembled around the gaps in it, tells you both stories at once.
Who is not at Colonial, and what their absence says
Scottie Scheffler, the world number one and the player who runs his own scheduling decisions through a calendar nobody else can see, has not entered. Scheffler skipped Colonial last year as well, which is, on paper, an unusual omission for a Fort Worth resident who plays the place every winter, and which is, in practice, the answer to a question about how a player at the top of the world manages the front half of a season that ends with a U.S. Open. Scheffler will be at Shinnecock fresh. Colonial is the cost of that decision.
Wyndham Clark, who shot the eleven-under sixty on Sunday at TPC Craig Ranch and walked off the eighteenth at thirty under, withdrew from Colonial on Monday morning. No formal reason was given. The reason on the surface is that a player who has just won his fourth Tour title for the first time since the weather-shortened Pebble Beach in February 2024, and who has jumped from seventy-fifth in the world to forty-fourth in the doing of it, is owed a quiet week. The reason a layer below is that Shinnecock is twenty days away, and the player who has just produced a closing twenty-eight on the back nine has banked himself enough credit at home that he can spend it on rest rather than on a Fort Worth Thursday. Lanto Griffin has taken Clark’s spot in the hundred-and-thirty-two-man field.
Brooks Koepka withdrew the same afternoon. The Koepka decision is the one the Tour office actually announced an explanation for: three weeks on the road, a tie for fourteenth at the Byron Nelson, a planned break before the RBC Canadian Open in two weeks and the U.S. Open the week after that. Koepka has, since coming back from the knee surgeries that ended his 2023 in the way they did, treated the late-spring calendar as a thing to be rationed. The ration this year does not include Colonial. He will appear next at Hamilton.
The absences, when you line them up, are not three separate stories. They are one story told three times, in three different player accents. The story is that Colonial, in the calendar the U.S. Open writes, is the week the top of the field is allowed to skip without being asked about it. The week is now what is left of the week after the players entitled to a quiet one have taken theirs.
Who is at Colonial, and what the betting board says
Ludvig Aberg, who is making his Colonial debut and who has six top-ten finishes in his last seven Tour starts, is the favourite at ten-to-one. The favouritism is not entirely about Colonial, which Aberg has never played, and not entirely about any specific fit of Aberg’s game to the bermuda fairways and small bentgrass greens of Hogan’s Alley. The favouritism is, mostly, about the strokes-gained numbers Aberg has produced over the last thirty-six rounds. He sits first on Tour in total strokes-gained, first in tee-to-green, first in approach, and first in ball-striking over that window. Colonial is a course that, more than most stops on the calendar, rewards the player who can put a ball on a small green from a hundred and seventy yards. The favourite is the player most likely to do that, and the favourite this week is the player who is most likely to do that anywhere.
Russell Henley sits second at eighteen-to-one, which reflects, in part, that Henley is from Macon and lives in Atlanta and plays a brand of golf, accurate, undemonstrative, putter-warm in the right week, that the small greens at Colonial have rewarded throughout the course’s history. Ben Griffin, the defending champion, sits at twenty-two-to-one alongside Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler, and Robert MacIntyre. Thomas, who lives in Florida and has finished in the top fifteen at Colonial three of the last four years, is the player most often picked as a sneaky live one off the favourite. MacIntyre, who has had a quietly excellent spring and whose driver has been the steadiest of his early-summer clubs, is the European who would not be a surprise.
Seven of the world’s top twenty are in the field. They are Spaun at nine, Henley at eleven, Aberg at thirteen, MacIntyre at fourteen, Thomas at sixteen, and Griffin at seventeen, with the seventh being whichever name has moved into the bracket since the rankings refresh on Monday. The Texan absences leave the door open at the top of the leaderboard wider than it usually is. The door open at Colonial is, historically, the door that produces a champion the world ranking did not expect.
The course, the weather, and the small detail of the small greens
Colonial Country Club, the Perry Maxwell course that Ben Hogan won five times, is the Tour stop on which short and accurate beats long and crooked more reliably than on almost any other. The yardage is seven thousand two hundred and nine. The greens are small. The doglegs reward the player who can shape a ball from right-to-left off the tee on holes one, three, five, and eleven, and from left-to-right on holes four, six, and seventeen. The bermuda rough is, this week, a touch shorter than the course’s recent average because the spring has been a dry one in north Texas, and the wind is forecast to sit in the eight-to-twelve range each day with a heavier blow on Friday afternoon.
The small detail, on a course whose driving statistic on Tour is the smallest of any non-major stop on the calendar, is that Colonial is decided on the approach. The average green at Hogan’s Alley is four thousand five hundred square feet. The average green on Tour is six thousand. The shot from a hundred and seventy yards out is the shot on which a Colonial champion is found. The number on the strokes-gained: approach board, over the last thirty-six rounds, is one Aberg leads. The number is also one Henley sits comfortably inside. The number is the number to watch on Sunday afternoon.
What to take from the week
The week itself, for the player who has skipped it, is the week they are putting away in advance of a U.S. Open at a course that will ask them an entirely different question. The week for the player who is at Colonial is the week they are giving themselves a final pass at a Tour win before the calendar takes them to a place where the same eight-iron shot is worth twice as much. Both decisions are legitimate. Both decisions are the kind that the modern Tour, which has more cheques on offer at more events than at any previous moment in its history, asks its players to make.
The cheque is one and three-quarters of a million dollars to the winner. The points are five hundred FedEx Cup points. The number the players are quietly playing for, more than either of those, is the number on the world ranking that gets them onto the front nine pairings at Shinnecock Hills three weekends from now. That number, this week, is what will be in everybody’s pocket on Sunday afternoon at Colonial. The leaderboard will say one thing. The pocket will say another. Both, by the end of the month, will have settled.