After a Saturday soaking, the weather and golf turned splendid Sunday at the Barbasol
Your enjoyment level at the PGA’s Barbasol Championship this weekend at the Keene Trace Golf Club’s Champions course depended almost entirely on your expectations.
If you were banking on four absolutely fabulous days of weather to watch 72 holes of golf played by professionals, you were no doubt disappointed by Saturday’s deluge that produced starts, stops and bouts of suspended play. Totals for the tourney: Four inches of rain and more than 11 hours of weather delays.
On the flip side, you had to be thrilled by Sunday’s sustained sunshine that allowed enough catch-up opportunities to finish the state’s only PGA tournament on task and on time.
If you were expecting to see a group of recognizable names, now that the Barbasol’s dates were no longer in direct conflict with Britain’s Open Championship across the pond, you were probably disappointed in that area, as well.
Even an automatic berth in the British Open for the Barbasol winner wasn’t tempting enough to coax marquee golfers to the Lexington area. The fact that the Scottish Open, a tune-up for the Open Championship, was being played at the same time as the Barbasol didn’t help.
All that being said, if your Barbasol enjoyment level revolved around the simple pleasure of watching outstanding golf and a highly competitive finish, then you got your money’s worth, thanks to Trey Mullinax’s birdie putt on the 18th hole that gave the Birmingham native his first PGA Tour win.
A former teammate of Justin Thomas at Alabama, Mullinax boasted a couple of wins on the Korn Ferry Tour and a tie for second as his best finish on the PGA Tour before his 66 edged out tour veteran Kevin Streelman to the win on Sunday.
Before Sunday, the Barbasol story was the European invasion. As tournament director Darren Nelson pointed out leading up to the event, 50 golfers from the DP World Tour, the European tour, entered the Barbasol to (a) possibly earn a berth in the British Open or (b) also stick around in the states to play in the Barracuda Championship this weekend at the Tahoe Mountain Club in Truckee, California.
It was the Europeans who carried much of the weekend, starting with 24-year-old German golfer Matti Schmid, who played in college at the University of Louisville before returning home to play on the European Tour.
Schmid enjoyed a two-shot lead heading into the Sunday’s final round, which did not start for the leaders until they completed the third round on Sunday morning. He set a Barbasol record with 24 birdies through three rounds. Alas, Schmid blew up on the final day, shooting a 77.
Then there was Hurly Long — a 26-year-old and also from Germany — who played his college golf at Oregon (2014-15) and Texas Tech (2015-18) before joining the European Tour. Long finished fourth in the Barbasol.
Adam Svensson, a 28-year-old from Canada, actually led the Barbasol after two rounds. Now a Florida resident, Svensson played his collegiate golf at Division II Barry University in Miami before leaving school early to play on the Canadian Tour. He finished the Barbasol six shots behind the winner.
The Americans rose to the top in the final round, led by Mullinax and Streelman, the 43-year-old who was looking for his first win since the 2014 Travelers Open.
As for the future of the Barbasol, the PGA has committed to the event in Nicholasville through 2023. Aside from that, there is plenty up in the air.
The PGA is going to a calendar schedule for 2022-23, starting with fall events and running through the FedExCup playoffs. And starting next year, the fall portion of the schedule will include eight limited-field, no-cut events, with $20 million purses each, for the top 50 finishers in the prior season’s FedEx Cup standings. This appears to be in response to the LIV Tour poaching top-name PGA golfers for its limited-field, no-cut events.
As for the here and now, however, Mullinax summed up Sunday: “I don’t know any second-tier players out there. This is a great event and everybody playing in this event is an amazing golfer. And I wanted to win.”
And win he did.
If you were looking for excellent weather and golf, then Sunday at the Barbasol was the place to be.
