Early 2015 PGA Championship Storylines to Start Following Now

The 2015 PGA Championship is like a St. Andrews encore. The links-style golf along the shores of Lake Michigan make this renewal of the fourth major a fitting bookend to the season.

It’s never too early to start following the storylines, not to mention the players as they prepare in their own small ways for a trip to one of the more challenging courses. The last time the field came to Whistling Straits, Dustin Johnson famously grounded his club in a stealth bunker and Martin Kaymer went on to win his first of two majors.

In any case, with the PGA Championship a solid two weeks out, let’s examine some storylines through the long lens.

Read on for updates on Jordan Spieth, Tiger Woods and the most famous ankle in the world.

Will Bubba Watson Win a Major Outside of Georgia?

Jon Super/Associated Press

Bubba Watson needs another major and not just another green jacket. He needs a PGA Championship to cement his bid as one of the greatest golfers—certainly one of the greatest lefties—to ever play the game.

Kyle Porter of CBS Sports is in accordance with this line of thinking, writing back in June, “Is there a chance that Watson could go down as one of the, say 20 best golfers ever? What if he wins two more green jackets and a PGA Championship? Five majors and probably close to 15 wins in this era? That's big boy stuff.”

Watson has eight wins including two majors. That puts him in very rare territory. Only 32 golfers in the history of the game have won more tournaments who have also won two or more majors. Thirty-two!

When you think of the greatest golfers of the day, Watson doesn’t exactly pop into your head the way Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose, Adam Scott or Jordan Spieth do. Even Rickie Fowler enters the prefrontal cortex a bit sooner than Watson, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Maybe because, of late, Fowler has shown he can hang with the big boys in the majors when Watson is as likely to be hacking his way through yard-high rough as he is to be donning grass-green jackets.

Keep an eye on Watson. As he approaches 10 career wins and maybe a third major, he’ll soon be an instant recall as one of the best of the post-Tiger era.

Which Adam Scott Will We See at Whistling Straits?

Peter Morrison/Associated Press

The last hurrah for Adam Scott’s belly putter fast approaches and while his play through some of the minor tournaments has been forgettable, Scott’s game elevates when on the biggest stages.

If you draw a line through his tied-for-38th performances at the Players Championship and the Masters, his average finish in WGC and major tournaments is 7.5. Throw those two un-ignorable efforts back into the stew and that average finish jumps up to 17.7, but statistics, as you know, can be used by the savvy purveyor to get a message across.

Say you drop from 100 to 80. That’s a 20 percent fall. But if you go from 80 back up to 100, that’s a 25 percent increase. What a world! Thanks math!

That pointless digression aside, Scott has finished tied for fourth and tied for 10th in the last two major tournaments. He has been reunited with Steve Williams, the same caddy who carried his bag to a 2013 Masters jacket.

Those were the days. Scott was, for a time, the world No. 1 player. Then along came Rory McIlroy’s 2014 summer fling, and it sent Scott reeling to the solitude of the Aboriginal outback.

The Aussie ranks fifth in driving distance (309.6) and second in greens-in-regulation percentage (73.17), marred only by his dismal minus-.710 strokes gained: putting (189th).

Cleaning that up, as he has in the most recent majors, makes him a threat at Whistling Straits.

Is This the Time for Sergio Garcia's First Major?

Jon Super/Associated Press

Aside from Jordan Spieth, few golfers have performed as well as Sergio Garcia at the majors in 2015. With his run through the Masters (T17), the U.S. Open (T18) and the Open Championship (T6), he has an average finish of 13.7 in all three.

That’s impressive, very impressive. Now he heads to Whistling Straits, a course along Lake Michigan that has a links style that suits his ball-striking sensibility.

“I think—I mean, I love the courses, the links game,” Garcia said in Jon McCarthy’s Toronto Sun story.

Garcia was referring to St. Andrews and the Open Championship on the whole, but Whistling Straits provides a similar user interface. And with the rise of Spieth, Rory McIlroy’s frayed ATFL and Tiger Woods’ swing crises, Garcia has avoided the usual scrutiny that follows his non-winning of majors.

He’s a player—and storyline unto himself—worth following as the PGA Championship nears.

Which Side of the 'Line' Is Phil Mickelson Now?

Is Phil Mickelson officially over the hill? A winner of 42 tournaments including five majors, Mickelson, 45, may be on the side of the fence where a top 10 is his best finish in major golf.

That line, nebulously drawn in the dirt, becomes far more cemented with each passing day. Keith Van Valkenburg of ESPN.com wrote:

"

On the line's other side, golf is mostly about sentiment and ceremony. Occasionally, there are flashes of what once was, thrilling reminders of the man you used to be. But the cruel truth is, it does not last, not over four full days. It's almost impossible to cross back, to find yourself on the other side of the line. You can get a day pass that lets you revisit your golfing prime. Maybe even two or three. But it's bound to expire, sometimes in the cruelest manner possible.

"

Mickelson flirted with Open Championship contention before he sailed a tee shot to the outer reaches of a hotel balcony. It was an ambitious flirtation, but that's what he did a few years ago when he won the Open from off the pace.

He, maybe more than any other golfer, is capable of showing that once-potent prowess, especially around the greens. He did finish alone in second at the PGA Championship a year ago and knows how to tighten the screws for the big tournaments. Can he pipe his shots and keep the ball in the narrow fairways of Whistling Straits?

If so, then we’ll know which side of the line 45-year-old Mickelson really is on.

Does Dustin Johnson Care for Greatness?

It’s getting harder and harder to take Dustin Johnson seriously in a major tournament. This makes it all the more frustrating to see such ball-punishing power off the tee and finesse on the greens, fail to coalesce into something memorable...at least positively memorable.

Thursday’s and Friday have been spectacular, but in six weekend rounds in the majors he has shot just one under 70.

Most recently two 75s in back-to-back rounds at St. Andrews sent him barreling down from the lead to a tie for 49th. That’s like an oil spill.

Robert Damron, a former PGA Tour player, wrote on FoxSports.com:

"

In my mind, Dustin may not want to be a major champion badly enough. Yes, he has made tens of millions of dollars in golf and has nine wins on the PGA tour, but his off-course life seems a little crazy for someone who wants to win at the highest level of his sport. We all know of the two alleged drug suspensions from the Tour, but he has lost two majors by simply not paying attention.

"

One included the grounding of his club at the 2010 PGA Championship on the final hole of regulation. That cost him a shot at the playoff.

His inexplicable three putt on the final hole at Chambers Bay kept him out of another playoff.

You could even add his mental lapse of not marking his ball on the 14th green at the Open Championship (after a weather delay), which led to another bogey. 

Where’s Johnson’s head at? He’s impossibly robotic most of the time and it’s hard to know, just like Damron said, how much Johnson truly wants to be great.

The talent is there, but in golf that may only be 25 percent of the game.

When Should We See Rory McIlroy Again?

Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

As far as ankles go, there are none more famous in the world as Rory McIlroy’s. His ATFL (which sounds like a now-defunct arena football league), otherwise known as the anterior talofibular ligament, ruptured while playing a sporting game of European football with his mates prior to the Open Championship.

The injury forced his withdrawal from the Open and, if he’s wise, he’ll sit out the remainder of the season. He already withdrew from his title defense in the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and more could come.

Sean O’Flaherty (great Irish name…), McIlroy’s manager said in the International Business Times, "Rory is in great spirits. He's at home in Belfast. He's positive and happy and looking forward to working through the process of getting back. I am not a doctor. All I know is that until Rory can have the relative movement. He won't be going near a practice ground."

This injury is not to be trifled with, and he should take the requisite time to let it heal plus two more months. The lower body, as you know, is the foundation to any great golf swing. If the lower body is the slightest bit unsound, the entire kinetic chain gets kinked like tangled Christmas lights.

We’ve seen in the recent past what lower-leg injuries force a golfer to do. So much of Tiger Woods’ swing changes are lacquered in “to get better” rhetoric. More accurately, the torque he put his body through forced his body to adopt newer swing patterns so he can keep playing.

If McIlroy’s not careful, he could be heading down a direction from which he can’t entirely return. He’s 26, and injuries—nagging or serious—won’t be as easy to recover from. Such is the nature of athletics.

I’d rather miss McIlroy for the remainder of 2015 than be forced to see an 80 percent McIlroy for the next two to three years because he rushed back to the tee box.

Will Jordan Spieth Rebound from Near Miss at St. Andrews?

David J. Phillip/Associated Press

Jordan Spieth, for a time, appeared nearly invincible heading to the Open Championship. When he needs to drop a nuke, there’s no one better behind the bombsight. He did it in the U.S. Open to keep pace with the leaders and he did it in the Open Championship.

To date, he rolls in 28 percent of his putts from 15-25 feet, that’s a little better than one in every four putts from that distance.

“He's certainly as good as it gets in the game today from 10-25 feet,” writes CBS Sports’ Kyle Porter. “And when you note that Spieth hits out of the fairway, on average, to about 30 feet from the cup, it's not difficult to see why he's won two of the first three majors of the season.”

We won’t speak of him missing short putts like he did in the Open, but you get the sense that Spieth Mode won't spontaneously combust, but that’s the question he must answer at the PGA Championship.

He doesn’t do one thing really well. The only thing that is otherworldly about him is more abstract than concrete: He’s clutch. That’s how he won the first two majors in 2015 and nearly charged into the playoff at the Open Championship.

As he heads to Whistling Straights, his performance in victory or defeat will go a long way toward proving whether he has the ability to bounce back from unheralded disappointment the way Rory McIlroy did in 2011 when he shot 80 on Sunday at the Masters and then returned to win the U.S. Open.

Cue the Tiger Woods Watch

Steve Helber/Associated Press

This week Tiger Woods surfaces from a now typically disastrous round of golf at St. Andrews for the Quicken Loans Invitational, where he plays host to a field of no-longer-intimidated-by-Woods golfers.

So upon returning from Scotland, Woods immediately hit the range and began working on that battered and bruised game, right?

“I didn’t touch a club for a week,” Woods said in Brian Wacker’s PGATour.com story.

OK, so maybe he doesn’t have the mental—and physical—acuity of a 21-year-old with one major looking to prove that he wasn’t simply burning hotter than his Sunday reds as was the case back in 1997.

He did pick up a club, though, right?

“When I geared back up...” he said.

Phew.

“I started doing tome testing and found a couple little things," he said, "but it wasn’t anything major, which was nice. Some of my swings just weren’t quite right and I worked on a few things and feel pretty good now.”

We’ve heard this since the ball dropped in Times Square, so until then commentary like this feels like crying wolf to a golf public that is cordially entertained by Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and others.

We’ll be waiting for when Woods surfaces from the neck-high chaff and when he does (if he does), hopefully we’ll be rewarded for our patience with visions of trophies, majors and Golden Bear flirtations.

Say hi on Twitter @BrendanOMeara.