This was perhaps the strangest week of the Golf Masters season so far. On the course, two men closely linked with the 2003 British Open, Thomas Bjorn and Ben Curtis, had four-shot leads during the final rounds of our counting tournaments - the Smurfit European Open and the Cialis Western Open - but each failed to win.
Bjorn blew up in a manner that made his mini-collapse at Royal St George's look like a good day's work. The Dane plummeted to tied 33rd at the K Club and picked up just €14,625 in Golf Masters bonus money, compared to the €150,000 that went to the unlikely champion, Kenneth Ferrie.
That was bad news for Bjorn's 306 managers, and particularly for last year's overall winner, Paul Sheehan. His Hooker selection could hardly be more appropriately named and remains the highest-placed team to include Bjorn, but instead of rising to 16th overall on the back of a Danish victory, all those right-to-left tee-shots sent them spinning down to 58th.
Curtis's iron play almost matched Bjorn's driving for ineptitude; he hit only three of the last 14 greens in regulation at Cog Hill. From four in front of Jim Furyk he fell to five behind, but at least some extraordinary putting kept him in third place and lessened the pain for his 244 managers.
For the record, Curtis holed 60 out of 62 putts from nine feet or less during the week and earned each of his employers €70,000. Mind you, no team including Curtis ranks inside our top 500, a good indication of how punters rate the 2003 Open champion.
So for Golf Masters purposes Furyk's win was hugely more significant than Curtis's defeat. The new Western Open winner was dropped by eight managers after his Barclays Classic loss to Padraig Harrington the week before, but he was recruited by 13 more, meaning he now appears in 549 teams, including 12 on our top-50 leaderboard.
No team has benefited more from Furyk's recent run of good results than Tony Murnaghan's Scorpions, who brought him in for David Howell four weeks ago. With Howell out injured, Furyk has earned €213,250 in that time, allowing the Scorpions to claw their way to the top of the standings and build a €52,876 advantage over the anonymously managed Team 23279. In the week Tiger Woods became the first player through the $50-million career prizemoney barrier, the Scorpions became our first team with over €2 million for the season.
Nineteen of the top 50 teams dipped into the transfer market last week, so only Conor Croke's Team 23932 and Desmond Heather's Ache 1 still have all 10 transfers available. Both fell 13 places this week, so maybe a single switch to take out their lone idle player would have helped.
In contrast, Colin O'Mahony's Bad Boys 2, Justyne Murnaghan's Simple Minds, Tom Cassidy's Hilton Greens and Brendan Farrell's Team 27148 are all transferred out. With 13 tournaments including two majors and three bonus events still to come, the odds must be stacked against any of those teams taking our first prize of €20,000.
