Where do you even begin with Wyndham Clark?
Clark is a four-time PGA Tour winner, including a major championship victory at the 2023 U.S. Open.
He opened the season with a string of fairly average results. While he consistently made cuts, most of his finishes fell in the 30th-to-50th-place range. Then came the Masters, where he posted a respectable T21 finish.
The very next week, he teed it up at the RBC Heritage. Despite the lack of elite results leading into the event, the betting market still showed him no respect. These were his odds:
I’ve said this many times before, but in golf betting, I generally prefer backing proven winners rather than chasing first-time winners. Picking a player like Bud Cauley to break through for his first PGA Tour victory is much harder than identifying an established winner who’s been in contention before and knows how to close the deal.
Clark rewarded that thinking with a solid T16 finish at the RBC Heritage.
More importantly, I felt the market was still undervaluing him. The best players in the world are often priced in the 10/1 to 20/1 range, and Clark’s odds were significantly longer despite owning four PGA Tour victories and a major championship.
Sticking with that conviction paid off in a big way. Just a few weeks later, I hit the winning ticket when Clark fired a final-round 60, blowing away the field and capturing the tournament in dominant fashion.
Next, the odd makers must have lost their mind again in the Memorial with these odds and he finished 3rd!
I was out of town for the RBC Canadian last week so I missed his T11th, but here were his pre tournament odds for the Open which I ride my players until they break.
Has he won yet? No.
Right now, Clark sits at -230, with Scottie Scheffler looming at +570. And if there’s one guy you don’t want chasing you down on a Sunday, it’s Scottie Scheffler.
Is it worth throwing $100 on Scottie at that price? Probably. But that’s not really the point of this post.
The point is that this outcome wasn’t impossible to see coming. Not every winner has to come out of nowhere.
I also think majors are a different animal than regular PGA Tour events. A tournament like the RBC Canadian Open can absolutely be won by a first-time winner such as Bud Cauley. But when it comes to majors, experience matters more. The pressure is different, the setups are tougher, and proven winners tend to separate themselves from the field.
If he doesn’t win, I will be disappointed, but at least I know that I’m not stupid all the time. That’s more important than money to me.
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