Kevin Stadler and Brandt Jobe graduated from Kent Denver High School, which happens to be located very close to the Cherry Hills Village area where David Duval has resided in recent years.
But while the three PGA Tour players share ties to that part of town, their golf games have been headed in decidedly different directions recently.
Stadler and Jobe have been rounding into near-peak form, while Duval is enduring another prolonged drought, the type that has plagued the former No. 1-ranked player in the world for much of the last decade.
Stadler (pictured above) and Jobe, both winners of the Colorado Open, came back from Puerto Rico Sunday with more than just a tan. Both Kent Denver graduates posted top-10 finishes in the Tour’s Puerto Rico Open, with Stadler placing seventh and Jobe ninth.
(Coloradan Derek Tolan, by the way, earned the first official PGA Tour check of his career, winning $17,780 for finishing 32nd in Puerto Rico.)
Both Stadler and Jobe are on a run of late.
Stadler, whose Puerto Rico showing was his best Tour finish since last May, has recorded two straight top-10s, and five consecutive top-25 showings on Tour. That’s lifted him into the top 50 on the Tour’s 2012 money list.
The key has been Stadler’s putting.
“I’ve putted a lot better than I have in the past four or five or six years,” he said Saturday. “… I feel like I’m actually going to knock them in for a change, and it’s happened so far. I’m making a good chunk of the 4- to 8-footers that usually kind of hold me back.”
As for Jobe, after missing his first four cuts of the year, he’s come on strong recently. The Colorado Golf Hall of Famer has placed 16th and ninth so far in March, winning almost $189,000 in those two weeks. That’s much closer to the form Jobe demonstrated last year, when he finished 51st on the Tour money list at age 46.
Both Stadler and Jobe are still looking for the first PGA Tour win of their careers, with Jobe having placed second four times and Stadler twice.
Duval’s career path, of course, has been markedly different. He’s won 13 times, but they all came in his 20s. Since the beginning of 2003, due to both poor play and injuries, the 40-year-old made just 54 cuts in 175 Tour events (31 percent).
“I would have served myself a lot better if I had taken a year off and got healthy,” Duval (pictured at left) told PGATour.com in early December during the final stage of Tour qualifying. “As my body continued to not cooperate, it wrecked my golf swing, and that destroyed my confidence. It’s a bad spiral. It takes a lot to get out of it.
“I think my status would have been a lot different. I would have won a lot more tournaments, possibly another major or two. That was the mistake I made then.”
The last 12 months have been a particularly rough stretch. In that time, Duval has survived just four cuts in his last 23 Tour tournaments. Going back to the end of last season, he’s missed cuts in his last eight events, including five in 2012.
It’s gotten to the point that Golf World Monday, in its “10 Things We’re Talking About” on March 5, ran this headline: “Is Duval Done?”
In the short story, Golf World started by writing, “Have we finally reached a verdict on whether David Duval has irrevocably lost his form?” The magazine later added, “Is it over for Duval? Retirees tend not to play weekend golf. Neither does Duval, at least not often enough to suggest that better days are ahead.”
Duval, who no longer has full Tour playing privileges after finishing 152nd on the 2011 money list, has shown periodic signs of a resurgence in recent years, but they’ve been few and far between. He finished second in both the 2009 U.S. Open and the 2010 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, and has thrown in a couple of other top-10s since the beginning of 2009. But it’s been a tough run in recent months as Duval hasn’t shot in the 60s in an official Tour event since early October.
Duval, of course, has endured plenty of hard times with his game over the last decade, so wondering if he’s “done” at age 40 may be going a bit far.
“I feel like winning golf tournaments is still in me, or I wouldn’t be doing this,” Duval said in December.
