Hadwin fighting for his job at the Open

Bob Weeks

TSN Senior Reporter

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Under normal circumstances, Adam Hadwin would be heading to the Open Championship, thinking of competing for the Claret Jug, racking up points for the Presidents Cup, or getting ready for a push into the FedEx Cup playoffs.

This year, he’s worried about keeping his job.

Hadwin enters the year’s last major in a precarious and unfamiliar position on the FedEx points list, sitting 115th. He needs to stay inside the top 125 to ensure he maintains his status for next season. Ending up lower than that mark would drop him into the Korn Ferry Finals, a scramble with 150 players fighting for 25 exemptions back on the PGA Tour. It’s not a spot any PGA Tour player wants to be.

“I’d love to say no, but yes, of course it does,” said Hadwin when asked if he worries about his position. “I’m very much a realist. I know where I’m at. I know where I stand. I know what I have to do, and I just haven’t been able to execute on the golf course.”

He’s had just two top 10s so far this season, the last one in May, and he’s missed the cut 10 times, as many as he had the previous three seasons combined.

The reason for the lacklustre play has been some significant swing changes that Hadwin has been working on since March. He and his coach, Mark Blackburn, have tried to strengthen his game and improve it for the future.

“This decision was made thinking about the long term,” Hadwin stated. “I had grown so inconsistent with the way I was swinging it and the most difficult part of it for me was every time we’d look at it on video, we’d say ‘Oh it looks good.’ But I wasn’t producing. I wasn’t getting the results I wanted.”

It was a frustration that grew as Hadwin, ever the perfectionist, couldn’t get his new swing and his scorecard to align. There were holes and rounds where everything flowed smoothly and others where the wheels seemed to fly off. But the positives have begun to outweigh the negatives.

“I was starting to see some shots that I wasn’t able to hit previously,” Hadwin stated. “That was a huge benefit to me and showed me that I was on the right track.”

A part of the improvement plan was to play better in the wind, to develop a more boring shot. It showed up at the notoriously breezy Honda Classic where the Canadian ended up tied for eighth. More recently a tie for 40th at the U.S. Open where some breezes factored in also buoyed his hopes.

Of course, it will be a necessity this week at Royal St. George’s where the wind is constant if not necessarily consistent in strength and direction. Hadwin is looking forward to testing his swing as well as his imagination as he enters his fourth Open Championship.

“I really enjoy it,” he said of links golf. “We don’t play it very much but when we do, it’s always fun, it’s always a challenge, we get to hit different golf shots. You’re not just grabbing a lob wedge at greenside and hitting out of rough. I really enjoy the creativity of it. I hope all this work will pay off at an event like the Open, being able to control my ball flight in the wind.”

The biggest task for Hadwin will be to try and swing freely and not be as hard on himself if every shot doesn’t come off perfectly. He demands a lot of himself, even when he’s playing well. It’s not easy shut out the ramifications to his job security that every bad swing delivers. He knows all too well that a good finish could go a long way towards locking things up for next year.

“The biggest thing I’ve got to do is find a way not to think about that,” he said. “It’s easier said than done. My job is on the line. I’ve basically got four weeks to go and prove myself that I can play out on the PGA Tour. It’s not a position I’ve been in recently, the last three or four years, so the feeling and some of the anxiousness is all new.”

Hadwin can make it all go away with four solid rounds at Royal St. George’s. What a great time it would be for the new swing to start paying off.