The statistic that has been quoted in every preview of this week’s Charles Schwab Challenge is the one in which Ben Griffin, who arrives in Fort Worth as the defending champion, is bidding to become the first player since Ben Hogan to successfully defend a title at Colonial. Hogan did it twice, in the late nineteen-forties and again in the early nineteen-fifties. Nobody has done it since. The statistic is the kind of statistic that the broadcasters and the betting market and the player himself will be asked about every day this week. By Sunday evening the questions and the answers will either have confirmed the difficulty of the trick or extended the streak by another year. The shape of the difficulty is more interesting than the streak itself.
What Griffin actually has to defend
Griffin’s win at Colonial last May was the kind of week the small-greens, second-shot Tour course is built to produce. He arrived with no individual Tour win on his card, made the kind of cuts he had been making all spring, and went into the final round tied for the lead with Matti Schmid at thirteen under. He eagled the par-five first, birdied the second, and built a five-shot advantage that, by the time he reached the back nine in thirty-mile-an-hour gusts, was no longer a five-shot advantage but the working margin of a man who was learning what it felt like to lead a Tour event into the last few holes. He held on at one-over for the round, finished at twelve under, and beat Schmid by one. The seventy-second hole’s four-foot par putt, struck after Schmid had holed out for birdie from the deep stuff behind the eighteenth green, was the kind of putt that closes out a career-changing week or unwinds one. Griffin made it.
The win was the first individual Tour victory of his career and the closing punctuation on a stretch that had included a tie for eighth at the PGA Championship the week before, his first made cut at a major. He left Colonial with the tartan jacket the tournament gives the winner and with the kind of confidence the Tour’s middle band of players are made and unmade by.
Why nobody has defended at Colonial since Hogan
The reason Hogan defended twice and nobody since has defended once is, on the most useful reading, a matter of course architecture as much as it is a matter of fields and luck. Colonial in its current condition is a seven-thousand-yard test of second shots and bunker control. The fairways are narrow, the run-outs from the rough are minimal, and the greens are small enough that the second shot has to be struck with a degree of distance control and shape control the modern Tour player, on most weeks, is not asked to demonstrate. The course rewards the player who can move the ball both ways with a long iron and who can putt the small greens on the lines they sit on. The course does not reward the player who relies on length to overpower a par five or whose iron play is forgiving of a fifteen-yard miss.
The character of the test is the part of the explanation the statistic itself does not contain. Players whose game in any given year is shaped to the Colonial test win at Colonial. The same players’ games in the following year, shaped by a winter of swing work and equipment changes the modern Tour player is rarely able to resist, are rarely shaped to the same test in the same way. The defense bid, in other words, is the bid to arrive at the same course with the same swing twelve months later. The Tour, in the way it has trained its players to chase distance and to update their bags, is no longer producing many players whose games are stable enough to do that.
What this week’s field tells us
The field at Colonial this week has seven of the world’s top twenty, including Ludvig Aberg, who is the solo betting favourite at around eight to one, Justin Thomas, J.J. Spaun, Russell Henley, Robert MacIntyre, Hideki Matsuyama, and Griffin himself. The U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley is in the field. Brooks Koepka and Wyndham Clark have withdrawn, the former for reasons the Tour has not specified and the latter to manage the back that has bothered him through the spring. The shape of the field is the shape of a strong PGA Tour week between the year’s second and third majors. The shape is not what the field tells us. What the field tells us is that the player who wants to defend a title at Colonial does so against the kind of company a major-championship leaderboard would have produced.
The defending champion arrives at the season’s second-toughest course-fit test in front of a field that has, on the available evidence of the Players in March and the Heritage in April and the PGA Championship two weekends ago, the same six or seven players inside the top fifteen at the close. The defending champion’s task, on the maths the betting market has set, is the task of finishing inside that group. The market has Griffin priced at thirty to one. The market is reading the streak the same way the broadcasters are reading it.
What success would look like
If Griffin wins this week the article that is written on Monday will be about the four-foot par putt twice and about Ben Hogan once. The article will not be about whether Griffin is a player going to win a major or about whether the defense bid was a fluke or whether the course is breaking down. The article will be about the streak, which will have ended. The line about Hogan, which has held for seventy-three Charles Schwab Challenges, will have to be rewritten for the seventy-fourth.
If Griffin does not win the article on Monday will be about whoever did, and the Hogan line will travel forward one more year. Either way, the player who arrives at Fort Worth this week with the tartan jacket on the hanger is the player carrying a weight the previous champions have been unable to put down. The shape of the week, by Thursday afternoon, will tell us whether Griffin has the kind of game that travels and whether the course he won on last May is the kind of course that can produce the same answer twice.