{"id":848,"date":"2011-03-21T05:50:02","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T12:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidhbarrett.com\/?p=848"},"modified":"2012-03-06T07:26:40","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T14:26:40","slug":"gary-woodland-transitions-from-little-known-to-potential-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/golf\/personalities\/848\/gary-woodland-transitions-from-little-known-to-potential-star","title":{"rendered":"Gary Woodland Transitions From Little-Known to Potential Star"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gary Woodland scored his first win at the Transitions Championship, and it's unlikely to be his last. Copyright Icon SMI. <\/p><\/div>\n

The Transitions Championship was won by little-known Gary Woodland. But this might be a case where the winner was little known only because he hasn\u2019t been around very long. I have a feeling we might end up getting to know Gary Woodland very well. <\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t a complete unknown heading into the Transitions. The 26-year-old Woodland made a bit of a splash with a playoff loss to another exciting newcomer, Jhonnatan Vegas, at the Bob Hope Classic in January, and he\u2019d added two more top-10 finishes since then. Insiders knew him as a long hitter in the Bubba Watson-J.B. Holmes-Dustin Johnson-Robert Garrigus class\u2014and also as a player who got a late start in serious competitive golf after spending a year playing Division II NCAA basketball. <\/p>\n

The 6-foot-1 Woodland did that at Washburn State in his hometown of Topeka, Kansas, before realizing that he\u2019d never have a future in the NBA but he might on the PGA Tour. At that point, he transferred to Kansas University, the only Division I school that had recruited him coming out of high school.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of took that negatively,\u201d Woodland said of the lack of other golf offers. \u201cI thought maybe I\u2019m not that good.\u201d But when Woodland told Kansas golf coach Ross Randall he would play basketball instead, Randall told him, \u201cYou\u2019re going to change your mind, you have a future in this game.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Kansas coach was a good judge of talent. Woodland won four collegiate events in three years at Kansas and a year-and-a-half later made it through Q-School. It might have been a little too early in his development. Woodland made only 11 of 26 cuts in a rookie season that was spread over 2009 and 2010 because of a torn labrum in his right shoulder that led to surgery and a medical extension. He lost his card and had to regain it at last winter\u2019s Q-School. <\/p>\n

Woodland learned that \u201cI can\u2019t come out here and hit the ball 900 yards and win,\u201d he said after his victory. \u201cI\u2019m learning you can\u2019t fire at every pin and hit driver on every hole. I did that in \u201909 and it didn\u2019t work out very well.\u201d <\/p>\n

That was reinforced last Sunday when his teacher, Randy Smith of Dallas (who also teaches Justin Leonard) told him that the players who win at Innisbrook\u2014site of the Transitions\u2014are generally conservative. So, Woodland hit only four or five drivers a round, hitting a lot of 2-irons off the tee for accuracy, and it paid off. <\/p>\n

What really paid off was putting. At the Bob Hope, Woodland felt that putting cost him the title. At the Transitions, he won it with a final-round putting display of which Brad Faxon would have been proud. In fact, Faxon was<\/em> proud of it, because he has helped Woodland with his putting. <\/p>\n

Woodland did not miss a putt from inside 20 feet on Sunday. And he won it by holing a 16-footer for a birdie and an 11-footer for a par on the last two holes, emerging with a one-stroke victory when Webb Simpson bogeyed the 18th. <\/p>\n

Here are the lengths in feet of Woodland\u2019s one-putts in the final round: 3, 4, 7, 5, 6, 14, 5, 13, 16, and 11. Besides that, he made a 12-footer from the fringe that was essentially a putt though it doesn\u2019t count that way statistically and also a couple of second putts in the 4-to-5-foot range. The only putts Woodland missed came from 27, 20, 50, 25, 26, and 21 feet. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s three-and-a-half strokes better than the Tour average from the distances he putted from. It doesn\u2019t get much better than that. It was a good thing, because Woodland\u2019s ball-striking was a little bit shaky in a round that included seven birdies and three bogeys and only a single par on the back nine\u2014that on the 18th. <\/p>\n

Oddly, Woodland normally doesn\u2019t putt anything close to that well. Even after his Transitions performance, he ranks only 97th in the Tour\u2019s total putting stat. He ranks 8th in driving distance (299.5 yards) and 15th in greens in regulation. <\/p>\n

When he came onto the Tour, Woodland figured that with an athletic background that included playing for two state high school basketball championship teams handling the nerves if he got into contention wouldn\u2019t be a big problem. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what Randy and I always talked about. It wasn\u2019t being in contention that I was ever going to struggle with, it was getting in contention,\u201d Woodland said. \u201cIt was learning how to play this game. Once I learned how to play, we thought we\u2019d be pretty good. The whole deal with me is learning how to play this game.\u201d <\/p>\n

At third on the money list in 2011, it looks like he\u2019s learning pretty well. But be forewarned, Woodland feels he still has a lot to learn. The fact that he\u2019s gone to Faxon for putting advice, picks Leonard\u2019s brain \u201cas much as I can,\u201d and says that he learns just from playing with top players shows that the Kansan is serious about soaking up as much knowledge as he can. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just tip of the iceberg right now. I\u2019m not anywhere near where I want to be,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Looks like it\u2019s time to add another young player to the list of potential future stars. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Transitions Championship was won by little-known Gary Woodland. But this might be a case where the winner was little… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":849,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2980,252524,9,7],"tags":[6069,6072],"class_list":["post-848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-pga-tour-2","category-golf","category-personalities","tag-transitions-championship","tag-gary-woodland"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2011\/03\/WoodlandTrans.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/davidhbarrett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}