Golf: Kuchar ready for major breakthrough

The pressure is growing on Matt Kuchar to win one of golf’s biggest prizes at the US Open this week as he starts to join the best player not to have won a major listings.

The 34-year-old American has been touted as a major champion since he won the US amateur championship in 1997, the year after Tiger Woods did so.

But after a bright start to his pro career when he won the Honda Classic in 2002, he has struggled at times to fulfill his potential, dropping down to the second tier Nationwide Tour briefly in 2006.

Gradually he has regained confidence that he can compete at the top level and this year he has won twice, at the WGC-Match Play and at The Memorial on June 2, the only US PGA player other than Woods to have won more than once.

That win — the biggest of his career to date along with the 2012 Players Championship — has seen Kuchar rise to a career-best fourth in the world rankings and installed him as one of the favorites at Merion Golf Club in suburban Philadelphia this week.

It is time, many believe, for him to join the likes of Webb Simpson and Keegan Bradley, two young Americans who have won majors for the first time in the last two years.

Kuchar is aware of what is expected of him, but he says it is not that easy to produce the goods.

“There’s a lot of us in that boat. And the best player to not win, I don’t know that I’m quite in that talk yet,” he said.

“I know that a lot of people have been yelling out that they have got me in their pools and they’re picking me this week.

“But we hear a lot of that talk every week. It seems to be a more popular thing for people to say now or shout out.”

It’s not that he feels short of confidence, the very opposite in fact. Kuchar says he is playing some of the best golf of his life and is ready to challenge for the biggest prize in US golf.

“I feel like in my golfing career I’ve made steps in the right direction. I’ve won regular tour events, won big tour events, won the Players Championship, won a Barclays. I won a World Golf Championship.

“I feel like I’ve kind of stepped up in the ranks of winning against the best players in the world.”

“It’s just that I think everybody that is teeing it up here has their eye on the prize.

“I kind of think that that is the beauty about the game of golf, unlike a sport like tennis where you get to the French Open and you kind of know it’s Rafael Nadal‘s tournament to win or lose.

“Here, it’s really anybody’s tournament to win.”

Kuchar will be firmly in the spotlight from the start on Thursday as he will play in a grouping consisting of the world numbers 4, 5 and 6 with Justin Rose and Brandt Snedeker.