After his win at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, Tyrrell Hatton is up to eighth in the Official World Golf Rankings. That’s pretty impressive, whichever way you look at it, but when you consider that 15 of the occasions – 14 LIV events and the Team Cup – he’s teed it up in the past 12 months have offered no world rankings points whatsoever, it’s even more impressive.
The decision to join LIV can’t have been easy. Hatton admitted that the week prior to signing on the dotted line had been one of the most stressful of his career, but he said all the right things, remained respectful to the DP World Tour that had given him the platform to make his name in the sport, and has since supported the Tour by playing more than the requisite events to keep his card.
As a three-time previous Ryder Cup player, he was always going to be on Luke Donald’s shortlist for Bethpage and, barring a complete loss of form in the coming eight months, almost certain of his place in the team, but he opted to play in the Team Cup regardless. It did him no harm, of course, as he showed in Dubai a week later, but even still, he could easily have said “thanks, but no thanks.”
And regardless of what you think of LIV as a golf league, there is little doubt that the European team will need LIV golfers in the fold if they are to have any chance of scoring a first away victory since Medinah in 2012.
Jon Rahm will be integral to those hopes, as will Hatton, and the Englishman has gone a long way to securing his position in the team already having already won the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship along with the Dubai Desert Classic and posted a runner-up finish in Abu Dhabi back in November.
The ideal scenario for Donald would be to have Rory McIlroy, Rahm, Hatton, Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland all qualify automatically, thus allowing him to make the most of his six captain’s picks to bolster the squad. But Rahm is going to have to do it the hard way by performing well in the major championships. You’d still expect him to do so, but Hatton taking a big leap forward is just what the doctor ordered.
Hatton will still need to accumulate more Ryder Cup points over the year, but you also feel that the time is right for him to stand up and be counted in the major championships. He does have a top-10 finish to his name in each of the four majors, but six top-10s in total and just one top-five – T5 at the 2016 Open at Royal Troon – is scant return for somebody who’s making a habit of getting over the line in bigger events.
He’s not flashy, he moans, he curses, he’s prone to outbursts of anger and occasional destruction of property, but he’s got the all-round game that should show up well at just about every venue, especially those that are set up toughest. His short game is exquisite, and when it comes to rolling the rock on the greens, there’s arguably nobody better. Even the putts that don’t go in seem to be struck on line but defied by the gods – at least that’s the way he looks at it anyway.
And as McIlroy put it, Hatton doesn’t care what you, I or anybody else thinks of him. You need a thick skin to be a professional golfer, to be working in an environment where successes are usually few and far between, so having that sort of attitude can be worth a couple of strokes on certain weeks.
And that’s also an attitude that’ll serve him well in the cauldron that Bethpage promises to be.
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