Find Me a 100 Winner - Tom Pernice Jnr

Find Me A 100 Winner / Paul Krishnamurty / 30 October 2007 / Leave a Comment

Resort golfer can chase the birdies home for a big win

There's only a handful of plausible three figure winners amongst the limited field at Valderrama so I'm looking across the Atlantic for this week's selection, where the new PGA Tour Fall Series comes to its climax with the re-named Children's Miracle Network Classic.

Under its previous guise, this tournament proved a good place for longshot backers, with the last three winners all trading at three-figures before the event started. Currently trading around 100, I'm going for Tom Pernice Jnr.

Hopefully Pernice will give us a better run for our money than John Bickerton last week, who pulled out before the event started. The main focus of this event concerns the race to make the top-125 on the US money list in order to retain full playing privileges for 2008. Opinion is divided as to whether such pressure is an incentive to do better or a stressful hindrance for those around the cut line, but interestingly every Fall Series winner so far has been ranked between 70 and 125. At 109, Pernice looks just about safe and may just be a little more relaxed and confident back on a course where he has some good memories.

His best effort on these two resort courses came in 2005, when pipped in second place after Lucas Glover holed out from some very unlikely places over the final few holes. He's also made the top-20 on three other occasions here, confirming once again that this sort of easy, resort golf is his forte.

Both his previous wins came in tournaments where birdie-chasing was very much the order of the day, in the 1999 Buick Open and the 2001 International. Pernice is clearly in decent enough form having made the top-30 in his last three starts, and is expected to improve on that with some of the pressure lifted from his shoulders.