Matt Kuchar picks up Gary Woodland as a partner in the World Cup Golf in China
The American representative at this year’s World cup in China, Matt Kuchar has finally picked up the much-awaited teammate who will be launching the American bid in the upcoming event. Kuchar has decided to pull in the Transition Championship winner Gary
Woodland on the two-member team and will be hoping to overtake the rest of the teams in the event.
“I’ve chosen Gary Woodland to be my partner in the World Cup. He’s been a guy that I think a lot of his game,” Kuchar said Tuesday at The Barclays. “I’m pretty excited to have a guy that plays as well as he does and hits it as far as he does as my partner,
I think there’s a lot of upside to that.”
Currently ranked number 38th in the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR), Woodland will be playing alongside world number 12 Kuchar, hoping to impress the skipper with a better performance on a comparatively alien turf.
Kuchar thinks the young gun is in just the right form to pull in some stunning performance especially after a successful year so far on the home turf. Woodland has won two professional events in his short career after he turned professional in the year 2007.
Woodland won the Transitions Championship by one stroke over Webb Simpson and posted other runner-up finish at the Bob Hope Classic where he lost to Bill Haas on the Playoff.
The 27-year-old Washburn University Graduate later switched over to University of Kansas before he turned professional. He has posted some of the strongest finishes in major events in 2011, not only making through the halfway cut but also pulling in Top-30
finishes in all the four major events in the year. His best finish in a major came at the PGA Championship where he finished for a joint 12th.
Kuchar, who is hoping to defend his title at the Barclays this week, has also performed amazingly well throughout the current season. He also commended Woodland’s strong putting skills and hoped that they will prove to be an added advantage in the event.
“I think I can be the steady one that makes a lot of pars and watch him just make golf look pretty easy,” he said.
The World Cup Golf, now renamed as the Omega Mission Hills World Cup, will be returning after a gap of one year. The annual event was turned into a biennial event from 2010 and it was announced that the event will be held after every one year keeping in
view of the calendar of PGA and European Tours. The 2009 event was won by the rampaging Molinari duo; Edoardo Molinari & Francesco Molinari of Italy, who defeated the Swede and Irish teams in the final round. The event is scheduled to start from November 24.
The World Cup, which was initially known as the Canada Cup, started off in the year 1953 and has been renamed and relocated several times to its current status. It was founded by a rich Canadian industrialist John Jay Hopkins who hoped to promote world peace
and harmony through the event on the then Canadian Turf, a country which was trailing in international sports in those times.
In the course of time, Canada has now emerged as an attractive destination for the golfers from all around the world and has some of the finest courses in the western province of British Columbia and Ottawa. For the moment, the World Cup will be played in
one of the longest golf courses in the world, the Mission Hills Golf Club in China.
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