Earlier in the year it was the Americans who came over to the European Tour and dominated in the Middle East, with victories for Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau.
Now it’s the turn of the Europeans to relish being on American soil and emphasise their Masters credentials by planting Italian, Northern Irish and English flags the length and breadth of Florida.
First, there was Open Champion Frankie Molinari holing everything to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Then Rory McIlroy got back to winning ways at the Players.
Encouraging signs that in this second chapter the best may be yet to come for Paul Casey
Now, it’s Paul Casey, winning the Valspar Championship for the second year in a row in a decidedly un-Paul-Casey-like way, showing considerable craft and cool on a tense Sunday afternoon when he managed to hold on to the narrow one-stroke lead with which he began.
At 41, is Casey getting better with age? Let’s not forget he was a hell of a player when turning in a sterling performance at the 2006 Ryder Cup and progressing to world No 3 — behind a rampant Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson — in May 2009.
But if we regard his career in two parts, as before and after the lost years between 2012-14 when his game fell apart amid the effects of a nasty divorce and a series of injuries, there are encouraging signs that in this second chapter the best may be yet to come.
The Englishman came out on top in the Valspar Championship for the second year in a row
Content off the course with his second wife, television presenter Pollyanna Woodward, and their two young children, he looks in a different place mentally on it as well. Like Rory a week earlier at Sawgrass, he was smiling a lot more than we have seen before, relishing the challenge and accepting there would be mistakes on a difficult day, rather than getting frustrated by them, as in the past.
Alongside him, Casey now has one of the best caddies in the business in John McLaren, whom he poached off Luke Donald. The pair have worked tirelessly on improving Casey’s wedge play, and attitude, and the benefits are palpable in both areas. It’s a heck of a thing to defend a title successfully. You’ve got a lot of extra commitments and the burden of heightened expectation. The fact Casey was able to pull it off shows a mental resolve we haven’t seen very often from him before.
Can he win the Masters in a fortnight’s time? Funnily enough, it was a question I asked him the previous week at Sawgrass, while chatting casually after he’d missed the halfway cut at a place where he never does well. What struck me was not just the certainty of his response but its underlying honesty.
Casey has finished 6th, 4th, 6th and tied 15th in his past four appearances
