Wilco Nienaber can prove the best of four South Africans at this week's US Open according to Ben Coley, who picks out his best specials bets.
Golf betting tips: US Open specials
2pts Wilco Nienaber to be the top South African at 19/10 (General)
2pts Alex Noren to be the top Swede at 2/1 (bet365)
1pt double Nienaber and Noren at 7.7/1 (bet365, Betway)
Top South African
It's still difficult to get used to these new top South African markets, for so long dominated by Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel, and this week's is even weaker than was the case at the PGA Championship last month.
No Oosthuizen, Schwartzel, Branden Grace, Dean Burmester, Christiaan Bezuidenhout or Erik van Rooyen leaves us with just four players, none ranked inside the world's top 100, and that's undeniably sad for such a successful golfing nation.
WILCO NIENABER is among a bright new wave who will hope to restore South African pride and he looks a very worthy favourite to beat his three rivals, one of whom is a promising amateur who is yet to show what he can do at this level.
Aldrich Potgieter is as short as 7/2 despite this, which says plenty, but he can be readily opposed as can an out-of-sorts Thriston Lawrence, who battled well to make the cut at Oak Hill but remains a long way from his best from tee-to-green.
Should that continue, he'll likely struggle once more and that leaves the young and improving Deon Germishuys as Nienaber's likely rival. Germishuys ranges from 11/4 to 4/1 and there's a case for backing both him and Nienaber, but I'll stick to the big-hitting favourite.
That power at Nienaber's fingertips could prove decisive and Germishuys' recent improvement has come under very different conditions. He's also making his first start in the US, where Nienaber has made all three cuts including in the 2021 US Open, played here in California, and a tough PGA Tour event which was played under firm conditions.
If Nienaber can extend that sequence of cuts made to four then he ought to collect the money and with room to attack off the tee, he's the one to beat.
Top Swede
This time last year, opposing ALEX NOREN in this market helped land a nice winner with David Lingmerth at 4/1 and in general, it has paid to oppose Noren on the grounds that he's a poor driver who struggles badly under standard US Open conditions.
But there are two key factors which demand a change of policy in 2023: the nature of this golf course and the names he has to beat.
Lingmerth was a proven US Open performer with plenty of form on tough courses. In fact, he'd once beaten Justin Rose to win one of the tougher PGA Tour events on the schedule, one played at this time of year.
This time, Noren's fellow Swedes are Vincent Norrman, Simon Forsstrom, Jens Dantorp and David Nyfjall, the only just having turned professional, and this is a market Noren could win by achieving very little.
Forsstrom is a recent DP World Tour winner who remains in decent nick but this is a whole new ball game, as it is for Dantorp who shot 81-80 last time and 75-78 before that.
With Nyfjall yet to compete in a tour-level event outside of Scandinavia, the serious threat here comes from Norrman, who has played some nice golf this spring, remains of huge potential, and certainly drives the ball longer and better than Noren.
Still, after a missed cut in Canada, and on his major debut, it strikes me that it's a bit soon to be putting Norrman alongside or ahead of Noren in the betting, which several firms did, and I'd take that view virtually anywhere.
Then we come to the course. Yes, Norrman's power will be an advantage, but Noren will definitely enjoy the extra space he's afforded. Wild drives were the only fault in his performance in Sweden last week, but he's an expert in the ground game and this could be right up his street.
A former Scottish Open winner who was runner-up in the Dunhill Links and boasts a solid Open Championship record, Noren is bound to prefer this to likes of Brookline and Torrey Pines, and he merits a considerably shorter price than the general 15/8 and bet365's 2/1.
Top amateur
Plenty of fingers were burned when Gordon Sargent finished last of seven amateurs in the Masters, where he'd been heavily backed into 11/8 but made far too many mistakes for his eight birdies to matter.
This huge hitter, now the top-ranked amateur in the sport, has a similarly huge reputation which was further enhanced by another wide-margin win following Augusta, and I'd be far more inclined to buy into the hype now he's around the 9/2 mark.
Yes, there more than twice the number of amateurs in this field but most of them look up against it and Sargent is the most explosive of them. Michael Thorbjornsen rates the biggest danger but struggled in Canada while Preston Summerhays has missed the cut in all six tour-level starts, as has Nick Dunlap his two.
Sargent's only taste of this kind of competition came at the Masters and he can prove himself better than that.
Don't rule out a big performance from Wenyi Ding, though.
The Chinese is younger than the favourites but still holds an experience edge in tour events, where he's not only been making cuts but also showing up in the mix throughout the past nine months.
Wenyi was the halfway leader in Singapore, inside the top 25 in Saudi Arabia, Australia and Korea, and not far off in the KLM Open recently just as he was a prior International Series event on the Asian Tour.
A winner back home when just 16 and subsequently the first from China to capture the US Junior Amateur, which he did on the west coast at Bandon Dunes, he might just have a greater level of comfort than several of these together with stacks of ability.
At double-figure prices, he would make a nice cover shot alongside Sargent, but with just two major firms pricing up the market so far, neither features in the staking plan.
Top senior
Padraig Harrington featured towards the end of my outright preview (bravo if you got that far) and having promised to find another way to support him, I've found myself drawing up stumps despite this being the obvious market.
Harrington, who is playing well, was the top senior at the US PGA and may find this more to his liking. Once again I take the view that he can outperform Phil Mickelson, whose Masters effort stands in contrast to everything else he's done lately.
More humdrum stuff on the LIV Golf circuit suggests we shouldn't expect too much from Mickelson but whereas Harrington was upwards of 2/1 to beat him and little else at Oak Hill, the presence of Stewart Cink here throws a spanner into the works.
Cink was just behind Harrington in the Senior PGA Championship and has made his last three PGA Tour cuts, while his last win came in California. I would still lean towards the Irishman, but this looks harder to win than was the case in the PGA and at 15/8 he's the right sort of price.
Posted at 1400 BST on 13/06/23
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