MasterCard Championship

[Stanley]

Outright plays (total stake per play: 2pts)

Mark McNulty to win 12/1 e.w. @ Stan James, BetInternet, Victor Chandler, William Hill and BetFred
McNulty is certainly a fast starter on this Tour - he opened his 2004 campaign with a win in the Outback Steakhouse Pro-Am and he finished 5th in this event last year - and is capable of maintaining the pace - he won the Byron Nelson Trophy for the lowest scoring average on Tour last year. A multiple-winner in each of his two seasons on Tour, helped considerably by having the lowest final round scoring average on Tour, and it is that ability to win that earns him the nod over Tom Watson who has never won in Hawaii.

Tom Purtzer to win 33/1 e.w. @ BetInternet
Backed as a wire-to-wire winner in the 3M Championship last August, he also ended the season strongly with finishes of 2nd and 7th in the last two events and continued in the same form thereafter: he won the Australian PGA Seniors Championship when he went to Australia to visit his daughter, who was an exchange student at Sydney University. So with good form even in the off-season and finishes of 5th and 9th on this course in two attempts, he looks decent value at 33s.

Des Smyth to win 40/1 e.w. @ Expekt
And so does Smyth at 40/1. Here is a player who started the 2005 season with only conditional status on the Champions Tour, but won twice in his first three months. To add to his impressive 2005 season, he lost out on the Senior British Open only in a playoff to Tom Watson and finished the year with a wire-to-wire victory in the European Seniors Tour Championship. He is certainly a player who can beat anyone in this field and though he does not have any course form, the Irishman should be very adept to playing in the Trade Winds that will feature so strongly this week.

 

[Whalers Rule]

Curtis Strange 80-1 1 unit to win one top place top four at 1/4 ( total 2 units bet)

 

[Stanley]

Matchup plays (2pts):

Loren Roberts to beat Jay Haas -120 @ Centrebet
Siding with the player who finished 41 places ahead of his counterpart in the Sony Open last week. Roberts tends to play very well in Hawaii, whereas Haas has tended to avoid it and only played last week because his son was playing. That points to Roberts being better suited to this event over and above his greater consistency on this Tour.
(also available at Expekt and BetFred)

Wayne Levi to beat Bruce Lietzke -111 @ Expekt
Lietzke certainly had the better of this matchup towards the end of last season, winning their last five matches, but it is a different matter in early season. Levi prevailed in their first nine common events last year and that included two top-5 finishes in the first two events of the year. But it should be straightforward to oppose Lietzke at the moment anyway. He was never a player to practise at the height of summer so can be counted upon to be the most rusty player on view this week and it has shown in his finishes in this limited field event: 38th and 26th in the last two years.

May have more plays if Five Dimes release some lines.

 

[Stanley]

Further matchup play (2pts):

Ben Crenshaw to beat Pete Oakley -133 @ Five Dimes
This one should be finished early on Sunday. They played in 17 common events last year and Oakley finished ahead of Crenshaw only four times. And even though Oakley did play in this event last year and so has course experience, the only players that he beat were Gary Player and Arnold Palmer. Ben Crenshaw may not have been as competitive on this Tour as first expected, but he is still in a different league to Oakley.

 

[DOGS THAT BARK]

On same side as Stan on Levi/Leitzke

Leitzke has general dislike for wind and rain and both predicted

Fri 06-01-20 22:27 Levi Wayne - Lietzke Bruce
MasterCard Championship, 54 holes
Champions Tour 1 -112

 

[lostinamerica]

OUTRIGHTS:

Des Smyth(25/1) e.w. @ Bet365
- - Not a difficult call, whatever comes in the course of his further endeavors.

GL

**********************************************


Irish Independent
1/18/06


At an age when many sporting heroes have to blow the dust off their scrapbooks, Des Smyth is still adding new chapters to his.

Smyth will open his 33rd season as a professional in Hawaii on Friday when he joins an elite 36-man field in the first round of the MasterCard Championship.

This Bettystown boy turns 53 next month but he bristles with the energy, enthusiasm and hunger of a rookie.

While 2005 was by far the most lucrative year of Smyth's career, with $1.3m banked as he claimed his first two Champions Tour victories in the US and then won the Seniors Tour Championship in Europe, he's far from sated.

And if he looks forward with relish to the Ryder Cup in his role as Ian Woosnam's vice-captain at The K Club, Smyth also hopes to satisfy burning personal ambitions on the golf course in 2006.

After achieving 22 tournament wins, including eight on the main European Tour, two Ryder Cup appearances and six Irish PGA titles, Smyth is still driven by the desire to prove himself. And that's the principal reason why, at this stage of his life, Smyth is prepared to crisscross the Atlantic half a dozen times each year and live out of a suitcase for weeks on end to play on the Champions Tour.

If you're good enough, there's a lot of money to be made in the States and Smyth has amassed $2.8m in his first three seasons as a seniors player, not far short of the $3.32m (?2.7m) he won in his 29 years on the European Tour.

Yet the desire for father-of-three Des to feather the family nest for his retirement is not his only motivation.

"The dollars are very important and I'm not going to pretend otherwise," he says. "I'm a professional golfer and I don't have big contracts so the only way I am going to make big money is to win it on the golf course.

"I'm not a young kid on the block. There's no big company going to come in and say that I have the potential to win The Open so nobody is bankrolling me. I am bankrolling myself and playing in America for five or six years offers me the opportunity to make a few bucks.

"It's something I wanted to do," he goes on. "Not something I needed to do. I'd a good career on the European Tour and I'd always pensioned myself verywell, so I wasn't brokeor anything like that.

"But I wanted to go somewhere and prove what a good player I am. While I took a lot of pleasure from my longevity on Tour, I feel I didn't win as much as I should have done. I don't know why," he adds.

"I don't think I had the desire that these young lads have now. I came from a different background. Money wasn't that big a deal when I was growing up in Bettystown because nobody really had any.

"I'd always wanted to be a professional golfer so that was my focus. I was never thinking I was going to make a fortune out of it. I thought I'd make a decent living and I was happy with that.

"Then, as the years pass and the kids come along, you need to make a little more and you have to play better golf. Things become more focused and as time went on, the money got much bigger than I ever anticipated.

"I'd been so busy playing on the European Tour, it hadn't even occurred to me to play on the Champions Tour but when I won the Madeira Open at age 48, I was invited to play in the UBS Cup in the States. After hearing the fellahs over there talk about the Champions Tour and how much some of them were making, I decided to try a little bit of it myself.

"It had been my plan to play on the main European Tour for as long as I felt I was competitive yet the Champions Tour has given me an opportunity to compete against players that I used only meet at The Open or The Ryder Cup.

"They're all nice guys. That's the nature of golf. They're professionals in a humbling game but I knew there was only one way I was going to rate in their eyes. I was a good European Tour player but not a Faldo or a Seve, so I wasn't going to ruffle their feathers.

"Well, I wanted to go over there and ruffle feathers and I have," adds Des with obvious satisfaction.

Smyth's success last year was founded on a winter of intensive practice. "My preparation was perfect. I was sore from the year before when I didn't achieve what I believed I should have so I focused all my energy on preparing myself for a new season. I knew that if I performed like that for one more year, I was gone." The results were spectacular.

Smyth not only won three times but also took Tom Watson to the third hole of a play-off at the Senior British Open in Royal Aberdeen, 23 years after he'd finished fourth behind the American at Troon, his best finish at the greatest of golf's Majors. Smyth has led The Open, briefly poking his nose in front at Muirfield in 2002 before he, Tiger Woods and several other leading contenders were blown out of contention by a Saturday afternoon storm.

"I've always loved playing in The Open," says Des, who views the Ryder Cup with even more passion.

Smyth played in the 1979 and '81 matches and if names like Ballesteros, Langer, Faldo and Lyle featured on those teams, Europe's Ryder rising was still four years away.

Yet he still forged a strong emotional bond with the event at the Greenbrier and Walton Heath. "Once I sit down to watch the Ryder Cup, I'll follow every second and there's no way I can get up from that seat until the final shot had been played.

"I cried when Sam Torrance (a close pal) sank the winning putt at The Belfry in '85. I think all the Tour players who have ever taken part in the Ryder Cup have an emotional attachment to it."

And that's why Smyth's heart skipped a beat early last year when his son, Gregory, stuck his head around the kitchen door and said: 'Ian Woosnam's on the 'phone for you'.
Smyth explains: "There'd been a lot of speculation about the vice-captaincy but I didn't know if he was going to pick me, Christy (O'Connor Junior), Eamonn (Darcy) or someone else.

"I've played a lot of golf with Ian and his record speaks for itself. He got to No 1 in the world. He's a tough character and is not inclined to take prisoners when he has something in his sights. He'll be a good captain and the players will have great respect for him."

Woosnam has found a particularly able lieutenant in Smyth, whose experience, passion, knowledge, discretion and cool temperament would have made him an ideal candidate for the captaincy itself. Should an Irishman have led the European team at The K Club? "I dont think the time is right for an Irish captain," says Des.

"It's just the way it happens. I think we're happy with the way it's fallen now. I've no doubt there will be an Irish captain. It's a wonder there hasn't been one before now."

 

[Stanley]

Outrights - FINAL RESULT: 0-3; -6.00pts

McNulty 21st
Purtzer 17th
Smyth 13th

All three had good last rounds, but the interest in this market had long since waned. With the weather forecast at the start of the week, this was certainly not expected to be such a low-scoring event.

Matchups - FINAL RESULT: 2-1; +1.78pts

Roberts/Haas WON by 3
Levi/Lietzke LOST by 5
Crenshaw/Oakley WON by 10

Small profit on the matchups to offset some of the losses on the outrights, though should have covered them with Lietzke only finishing in mid-table.