We got a Monday finish in Boston, which means that I got an extra day to write the preview this week! Taking full advantage. I was trying to figure out if there was a joke about a German bank sponsoring an event in Boston, but I couldn’t think of any. No wonder Barclays isn’t the sponsor this week. Not that the players care cause they get a bunch of money either way!

About the Sponsor

Another freaking bank sponsoring a golf tournament. Though there is something interesting about this. What’s a German bank doing sponsoring a tournament in Boston? I looked into this a little and turns out it isn’t exactly an easy question to answer, and the answer usually comes down to, “Cause they had the money and wanted to sponsor a golf tournament.” Funny sign of the times where banks have marketing departments with money to spend. Like all the banks are pretty much substitutable, so we pick the one that has a golf tournament named after it.

Since there really isn’t much to say about German Bank, I’m going to make a comment about the oddness of Deutsche Bank’s intro section in wikipedia. Pretty much every intro section in the history of the world has the same class of information — that of the introductory kind. But Deutsche Bank’s starts off reasonably. The first 3 paragraphs (out of 6 total) talk about that it’s a bank located in some countries that does some banking things. Cool. Exactly what I needed to know. But after that, we get three more paragraphs about the leadership structure of the bank since 2011. And then it goes back to being semi normal and talking about revenue and money under management to close out the section. Basically what I’m trying to get at is that it’s really confusing as to what should go in the intro section to a bank, considering pretty much no one goes there looking for an overview.

Oh, and the page doesn’t mention anything about golf sponsorship. Maybe I should add some later.

About the Tournament

Remember how I said that I didn’t want to edit Deutsche Bank’s wikipedia page? Well I didn’t say anything about editing the DBC’s Wikipedia page! While researching using my favorite resource that apparently isn’t correct all the time, I noticed that it said that Deutsche Bank extended its sponsorship through 2012. Since that was three years ago, I figured I should update it. And now I can rightly say that Deutsche Bank will sponsor this event at least until next year according to pgatour.com, which I correctly cited.

The tournament started in 2003, taking over from the Air Canada Championship. It actually took me a while to figure this out, eventually having to got to the wikipedia page for the 2002 season and seeing which tournament was played the same week as the new DBC in 2003.

The main interesting point about this tournament is that it features a Monday finish because of Labor Day. The Friday-Monday nature of the event makes everything really confusing, at least for me. There’s one other tournament on tour that has a Monday finish (not talking about a US Open playoff). Name it and tweet it at us (@golfonthemind) and the first person to get it right gets a retweet and I’ll embed the answer in here after. I’m mostly doing this because I don’t know that off the top of my head and I don’t really want to google it to figure it out.

You know what else I didn’t realize until now? The winner gets just under 1.5 mil in prize money. I looked back and apparently that’s about what the winner gets for all the big tournaments during the season. 1.5 mil. That’s crazy. Only 10 years ago, Olin Browne won and got 990k for the victory. Going by that, I’ll say that in under 8 years, someone on tour is going to win 2 mil for a week’s work.

About the Course

TPC Boston (haven’t had a TPC in a while thankfully) was designed and finished in 2002 by one Arnold Palmer, who must have really sucked it up since it had to be redesigned in 2007 by Gil Hanse (he’s the guy doing the Olympic course for next year if you didn’t know).

TPC Boston also features the easiest par 4 on the whole PGA Tour. The 298 yard, the drivable 4th hole played (in 2013 at least) to with a stroke average of 3.588.

I’ll be honest, the course does look pretty cool on tv. Despite its flatness, the mound bunkers and fescue areas combined with the random patches of forest and dried out end-of-summer grass makes for a cool look. Check out a bunch of cool photos and a tour of the course here. That’s also where I got the image for the 4th hole above it anyone comes trying to accuse me of not giving photo credit.

Last Year

Chris Kirk (who unceremoniously missed the cut last week after coming back from injury) was your winner last year at TPC Boston. Being 10 shots off the pace after the first round, Kirk didn’t make a bogey in his final 36 holes and held on to win by 2. Also notably in second, was Billy Horschel, who would win the final two events of the year and claim the FedEx Cup. No wonder, if you finish the season 2nd, 1st, and 1st, I think you deserve to win.

What to Watch For

Players on the Bubble — I feel like it’s a little redundant mentioning that 30 players will be eliminated from the FedEx Cup at the end of this event. Their seasons’ll be over, at least in the minds of the PGA Tour since the tournaments start up again in a few months. No matter how cheesy watching the bubble is, it is kind of fun when you get a player on the last hole who needs to make a birdie or a putt to make it to next week (pretty sure Camilo did that last week). Just a fun thing to watch out for.

Players on the Bubble — The Presidents Cup bubble that is! The DBC is the last week that players can use to auto qualify for the PC. Which means that Captain Jay Haas really wants his son Bill to jump into the autos so he doesn’t have to justify picking him or not.

Not Sergio — Semi-notably missing this week is our favorite Spainard, who also said “adios” to the Barclays last week. Not injured, and apparently just wants to rest has had a little criticism for not showing up. Well the blame for that can only fall on the PGA Tour and their point system since they’re the ones who made it possible to win the FedEx Cup without playing in all of the events. Can’t blame Sergio for playing by the rules.

#1 Ranking in the world — Not a year ago, Adam Scott held the top spot in the world. Now he sucks, and there are three others vying for that spot. Rory, Spieth, and Day. Each of them could claim it from Rory, so Monday’ll be even more interesting.