Gene Frenette: Maybe playing his old home course will bring spark to David Duval's game

If he had come into the PGA Tour Champions expecting to immediately live up to the standards of his previous golf life, David Duval might have bagged it by now and returned to the television booth. 

For someone who once seized the No. 1 world golf ranking from Tiger Woods, won both The Players Championship and The Open, and shot a final-round 59 to capture one of his 13 PGA Tour victories, this stat is infuriating: Duval has posted only one score in the 60s over his first 55 rounds on the Champions Tour.

But the low-key, pragmatic Jacksonville native, who will tee it up Friday in the Constellation Energy Furyk & Friends tournament at Timuquana Country Club, isn’t one to give up on his dream of hoisting trophies again that easily. 

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Duval, an Episcopal School graduate, reaped some of the game’s greatest rewards in his golfing prime, so he refuses to completely stress out while waiting for red numbers to show up regularly on his scorecard. 

“Golf is a very hard game,” Duval said Tuesday in a phone interview. “We all walk off the golf course every day we play thinking we left too many shots out there. 

“I’m trying to have the patience to let things fall into place. It’s kind of the only approach to have.” 

The harsh reality is Duval has plenty of experience with waiting on his game to come around. Once a slew of injuries — throwing out his back in 2000, accompanied by neck and wrist problems, along with vertigo — began sabotaging a career in his early 30s, his game never came close to recovering the form that allowed him to capture 11 Tour titles in 33 starts. 

By age 33, four years after winning the Open for his last Tour victory, he made only one cut in 20 starts. Another decade went by before Duval found a steady paycheck by working as a golf analyst for The Golf Channel and ESPN, receiving strong reviews for his carefully measured opinions. 

Once he turned 50 last November and became Champions Tour-eligible, the competitive juices started flowing again. Duval remains fully committed to becoming a relevant player on golf’s senior circuit, though his results are nothing close to that. 

Putts not dropping 

Through 19 Champions Tour events, Duval, who lives near Denver with his wife, Susie, and their two biological kids (Brayden, 17, now attends IMG Academy in Florida; Sienna, 15), hasn’t been able to put anything together. Other than being ranked 27th in driving distance (287.3 yards) and 29th in three-putt avoidance (3.14 percent), he’s not in the top 50 in any pertinent category. 

Duval is 86th on the Charles Schwab Cup money list ($81,156), second-lowest of any golfer playing a minimum 15 rounds this season. His No. 69-ranked scoring average of 73.04 is primarily a reflection of not seeing putts find the hole. 

“I’m trying to be as patient as possible, similar to so many people that play the game, practice it, amateur or whatever. I’m doing things I want to do well. It’s just not adding up to good scores. 

“I’m happy with the work I’ve done on my golf swing the last year and a half. My short game’s good. I’m rolling the ball good, but nothing is going in.” 

Last week’s PURE Insurance Championship at Pebble Beach was a textbook example of Duval’s frustration with not scoring. In the final round, he hit 15 greens in regulation and shot an even-par 72. Duval finished in a tie for 49th, so he’s still seeking his first top-25 finish since joining golf’s premiere 50-and-over circuit. 

“It was one of those rounds that with the number of greens I hit and the proximity to the hole, you’d think I would have shot 5-under or 6-under,” said Duval. 

Nobody is more surprised over his lack of scoring than father Bobby, a former Champions Tour player who won the 1999 Emerald Golf Classic in Pensacola on the same day that David captured The Players. 

“It seems like he has one of those double or triple bogeys in a round that’s going good and it just crushes the round,” said Bobby. “I’ve watched him play at courses around Denver and he’ll shoot 66 or 68. It’s mind-boggling that his scores are what they are.” 

Finding an elusive groove 

Maybe coming home and playing at Timuquana, where Bobby (a former golf pro there) taught his son the game that allowed him to achieve global fame, will serve as some kind of Duval revival.

Bobby thinks familiarity with the course will make David more comfortable, but until Wednesday’s pro-am, he hasn’t actually played the full 18 holes for several years.

David played nine holes at Timuquana in last year’s celebrity outing, but isn’t sure whether returning to his old playing grounds will provide any huge benefit. 

“It’s dramatically different and a much-improved version of what [Timuquana] used to be,” said David. “It’s one of those old-school Donald Ross courses that’s a blessing to play every day. But I don’t know if there’s any such thing as a home-course advantage in professional golf. 

“These guys can see a golf course once or twice and know it better than the best member of the club. That’s what they do.” 

Still, wouldn’t it be a fantastic story if Duval found some old magic this week in front of a hometown crowd? Nothing in his recent results suggests that will happen, but golf is wildly unpredictable and names you don’t expect to surface on any Tour leaderboard pop up all the time. 

That happened in the 2009 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. A player who made only six cuts in 22 starts that year moved into a tie for the lead with two holes remaining, only to finish two shots behind winner Lucas Glover and in a second-place tie with Phil Mickelson. 

Duval was that golfer. He shot an opening-round 67 at Bethpage and stayed in contention all four rounds, despite having finished outside the Tour top-125 the six previous seasons. 

He’s significantly older now and hasn’t tasted victory in an individual stroke-play event since November, 2001, where Duval won the Dunlop Phoenix tournament in Japan in a playoff over Taichi Tashima. He did win the PNC Father-Son Challenge event in 2016 with his stepson, Nick Karavites, one of three children from Susie’s previous marriage. 

With all the rust buildup from a decade of not playing competitive tournament golf — not the case for proven Champions Tour winners Vijay Singh, Ernie Els, Padraig Harrington, Miguel Angel Jiminez, Bernhard Langer, Steve Stricker and this week's tournament host, Jim Furyk — it could take a lot more time for Duval to get his groove back. 

Imagine if he recaptured some of that top form from yesteryear this weekend and got in contention on his old home course. Given what David Duval has been through the last 20 years, the golf gods probably owe him that much. 

Gfrenette@jacksonville.com: (904) 359-4549 

Gene Frenette Sports columnist at Florida Times-Union, follow him on Twitter @genefrenette