Illustration for article titled How to Remember What Bear and Bull Market MeanEverything you need to know for Round 1 of the 2020 Players Championship
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Tiger Woods isn't here. Jason Day is also hurting. Brooks Koepka's head is spinning. And Patrick Reed is still denying.
The Players Championship, the first big tournament and the unofficial fifth major of the PGA Tour season, is here. All but three of the top 50 players in the world are competing for a $15 million purse, with Woods being the most notable absentee as he continues to rest his ailing back.
Defending champion Rory McIlroy, ranked No. 1 in the world for the 100th week of his career, is the betting favorite to become the first player to win back-to-back Players Championship titles.
Here's everything you need to know about the first round of the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass:
Reed in noise-canceling mode
Patrick Reed isn't worried about fans heckling him at the notorious 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass during this week's Players Championship.
It probably won't be any worse than what Reed has heard before, especially during the past three months, since his infamous waste-bunker incident at the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas.
But the thousands of fans surrounding the par-3 "Island Hole" at the Stadium Course might be a little too close for comfort.
"I think the PGA Tour has done a great job on the security and the fans," Reed said. "I feel like, as a whole, the fans have been pretty good. You're always going to get a couple people here and there that are going to say something. That's normal, any sport you play."
Reed, an eight-time tour winner and the 2018 Masters champion, has been more of a target than most, after TV cameras captured him moving sand in a waste bunker during the third round of Tiger Woods' charity event in the Bahamas in December. Reed insisted he wasn't trying to improve his lie, but he was assessed a two-stroke penalty after the round.
Later that month, fans constantly heckled him during the Presidents Cup in Australia. His caddie and brother-in-law, Kessler Karain, got into an altercation with a spectator and wasn't on Reed's bag for singles matches the next day.
At the Sentry Tournament of Champions in Hawaii in January, a fan shouted "Cheater!" just as Reed's putt missed the hole during a three-hole playoff loss to Justin Thomas.
And then at last week's Arnold Palmer Invitational, according to the New York Post, a fan outside the ropes screamed, "I've got a rulebook in my back pocket, Patrick!" Security officials reportedly removed the spectator.
Fans aren't the only ones who have criticized Reed. PGA Tour star Brooks Koepka, during an interview with SiriusXM Radio last month, questioned what Reed was doing in the bunker in the Bahamas.
"Yeah. I don't know what he was doing, building sand castles in the sand," Koepka said. "But you know where your club is. I took three months off and I can promise you I know if I touch sand. If you look at the video, obviously, he grazes the sand twice and then he still chops down on it."
Reed, 29, says he is oblivious to the outside noise.
"For me, when I get behind the ropes and I get inside those ropes, it's, 'I have a job to do, and that's go out and play good golf and to have a chance to win on Sundays and to provide for my family and to go out and represent myself the best way I can,' and I feel like I've been doing that," he said.
Reed has largely done that with four top-10s in eight tour starts this season, including a victory at last month's WGC-Mexico Championship, which came with a $1.82 million payday.
"Well, winning always helps everything," Reed said. "But really, at the end of the day, the noise goes away once [media] decide it goes away. I mean, I feel like the players and all of us have moved on, but at the end of the day, all we can do is go out and continue playing good golf and doing what we're supposed to do."
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