The 2021-22 season has been discouraging for Tony Finau’s Utah-based followers, who rejoiced in his breakthrough victory in a playoff event last August. That win in the Northern Trust broke his apparent curse of frequently contending for tour titles and ending up disappointed.
Since then, though, he has never come close to winning, while enduring by far the roughest half-season of his tour career. Finau has missed the 36-hole cut in four of his 11 starts. Statistically, he’s one of the tour’s worst putters.
“I haven’t had the start to the FedEx Cup season that I’ve wanted, but the game feels solid,” Finau said on the “Be Right!” podcast in early March. “I’ve learned a lot about my game in the events that I’ve played this calendar year.”
Finau’s performance in his last event prior to the Masters was encouraging, but only in the context of his disappointing season.
The golfer who posted 47 top-10 finishes in his first seven years on the PGA Tour finally cracked the top 30 in a full-field tournament this season, tying for 29th place Sunday in the Valero Texas Open. Halfway through the schedule, the West High School graduate and part-time Lehi resident is 145th in the FedEx Cup standings, well below the top 125 qualifiers for the Playoffs in August.
There’s some evidence, both recently and in Finau’s past, for a turnaround starting in April. Considering his history in pro golf’s four major tournaments, the 2021-22 season remains salvageable.
Finau’s ball-striking, especially his iron play, usually has been excellent, but not good enough to overcome his short-game issues. He’s tied for No. 196 among 209 qualified players in “strokes gained: putting,” using a formula that determines if any shot is better or worse than the tour average. He ranks 169th in performance “around the green,” from within 30 yards.
Those are frightening numbers going into the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club, where chipping and putting are demanding. The consolation is that Finau showed improvement last weekend in San Antonio, making four birdie puts between 7 and 12 feet in the final round. That came after he made eight birdies in defeating U.S. Ryder Cup teammate Xander Schauffele in the Dell Technologies Match Play Championship the previous week, although he failed to advance from group play to the round of 16.
Finau also has a strong record in the Masters. He has placed in the top 10 in each of his three April appearances at Augusta National, while also making the cut in the 2020 event that was staged in November during the pandemic. Last year, Finau posted top-15 finishes in the PGA Championship and the British Open, while missing the cut in the U.S. Open.
“It feels a lot better now than it has the last couple of months,” Finau said this week. “I’m happy about that. Major season is here, and I’ve played some nice golf around this place, so it’s nice to be back here and feeling good about the week.”
The majors usually have evoked Finau’s best efforts, and they carry extra value in the standings. So the second half of his 2021-22 could become an entirely different story than the first half. While having earned about $26 million on the tour, plus endorsement money, and owning big homes in Utah and Arizona, Finau has struck down any notion that he lacks motivation after working to attain his first victory in five years.
The win “actually made me more hungry to get better and try to do it again,” he said before the Sentry Tournament of Champions in Hawaii in January. “I definitely don’t take it for granted. I know how hard that second win came and I put a lot of work into just getting better, and that’s where my attention will be.”
Finau faces a long climb to make the top 30 in the FedEx Cup standings and qualify for the Tour Championship for a sixth straight year. Merely qualifying for the Playoffs in August via the top 125 is a sufficient challenge at the moment. Making a fourth straight U.S. team for international competition (the Presidents Cup, in North Carolina in September) is unlikely.
Yet even the worst-case outlook for his season is fairly reassuring. Finau’s win provides him a PGA Tour exemption through the 2022-23 season, and maintaining a top-50 position in the Official World Golf Ranking (he’s No. 22) would give him starts in the 2023 majors.
The OWGR uses a two-year, revolving formula that will continue to reward Finau for his victory last summer in New Jersey. He’d just like to perform at that level, starting this week in Georgia.
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