LUKE DONALD’S winning form at the Madrid Masters in week eight was enough to convince 25 of our managers that he was worth recruiting for the Wales Open, evidently confident that the English man would maintain his form. It was well-placed confidence, as it proved, with Donald winning €70,000 for his third-place finish.
Two managers, though, opted to part company with Donald after his Madrid triumph, perhaps sensing that he’d suffer the same fate as five of our tournament winners so far in the 2010 Golf Masters – YE Yang, Alvaro Quiros, Simon Khan, Jason Bohn and Rory McIlroy all missed the cut in their next outings.
On their return to action after Tour successes Tim Clark, Adam Scott, Jason Day and Zach Johnson fared only marginally better, none managing to make it in to the top 30, and while Marcus Fraser and Peter Hanson had respectable top-20 finishes when they next appeared after victories, neither seriously threatened to make it two wins on the bounce.
Apart from Donald, the only other tournament winners this Golf Masters season to suffer no significant after-effects were Phil Mickelson (second at Quail Hollow after winning the Masters), Jim Furyk (joint seventh at Quail Hollow after winning The Heritage) and Fredrik Andersson Hed (joint second at the PGA Championship after winning the Italian Open).
We’re reluctant to talk of the ‘hangover effect’ here because that, of course, could be taken literally and construed as a celebratory-champagne-guzzling allegation. And there are, needless to say, plenty of innocent reasons for why a player might struggle in his first appearance after winning on the Tour – exhaustion from talking to the media about his success being one.
Still, evidence of this hangover effect is why we’d stop short of disparaging the wisdom of Donald’s two ex-managers, they may well have been aware of these ugly statistics and thought it best to bring in new blood.
It is, though, a brave manager who fires a winner. We await with interest to see how many of Graeme McDowell’s 1,069 employers give him his P45 before the US Open.
