Welcome back to The Five – where every week I’ll highlight five things that have piqued my interest in the world of professional golf. It could be things I saw Sunday or am looking forward to come Thursday. It could be interesting musings, storylines, statistics or historical markers that I’ve unearthed throughout the week. I hope to highlight a cornucopia of unique items for your entertainment.

There’s plenty to choose from following Wyndham Clark’s runaway victory at the Wells Fargo Championship and K.H. Lee’s pursuit of history at the AT&T Byron Nelson.

So, let’s get started.

Wyndham Clark and the linear career path

We’ve been spoiled in recent years. The career arcs of young stars like Collin Morikawa, Jon Rahm, and Jordan Spieth are not the norm. It’s almost become the expectation for top college and amateur players to immediately find success when they get on TOUR. Even the remarkable starts by Will Zalatoris, Cameron Young, Viktor Hovland and Tom Kim are unusual when compared to past eras.

Wyndham Clark’s win at the Wells Fargo is a more accurate representation of how careers tend to evolve – a slow progression over multiple years that features plenty of close calls and good golf before the first win finally comes. Clark’s win is the latest in a run of these types of winners on TOUR.

It took Clark 134 events to nab his first win. He’d been runner-up once prior, held a 54-hole lead twice before last week, and was in the midst of his best season on TOUR even before the win finally arrived. He and Beau Hossler came close to winning the Zurich Classic of New Orleans just two weeks earlier.

“Being in the position this time, I was like, well, we've done – we know what not to do,” Clark said. “I really learned from those experiences.”

It’s a much more linear path – one that someone like Morikawa skipped, winning in his first summer playing TOUR events and winning the 2020 PGA Championship in just his third major appearance.

Consider some of the other TOUR winners this year. Tony Finau won two weeks ago at the Mexico Open at Vidanta, his fourth victory in 18 starts. But before that, he had two wins in more than 200 starts.

Max Homa’s victory at the Farmers Insurance Open was his sixth, but he didn’t win his first tournament until he was 28. Russell Henley, who won the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba, has four victories in more than 250 events on TOUR. That was once comparable to Davis Love III, who through the first 150 starts of his career had won only twice. Henley and Love tallied roughly the same amount of top-fives and top-20s in that span. Love, though, quickly began to rattle off tournament wins after that at a pace that Henley, like most players, hasn’t yet been able to match.

Still, Love’s career arc reminds that success doesn’t always come immediately. Just because Clark didn’t get his first win until 29 doesn’t mean he won’t go on to a run of great golf. Later-bloomers Finau, Homa and Love provide the template for guys like Clark, Kurt Kitayama, Seamus Power and Chris Kirk, who also banked TOUR wins this season. Professional golf is more fun when players with a wide variety of cache and success are playing well. Dominant players like Jon Rahm and Scottie Scheffler and others like Clark and Kitayama give the TOUR a great balance of world-beaters and would-be, could-be world-beaters.

The looming weather

Hate to start with the weather, but folks – it might be a wet one in Dallas this week. Scattered thunderstorms are in the forecast each day at AT&T Byron Nelson. Thursday could bring the driest conditions, although the threat of thunderstorms remains. Storms are expected to ramp up in the afternoon on Friday while Saturday and Sunday are forecasted to bear the brunt of the rainfall – at most an inch and a half. The course already got a healthy dose of rain Wednesday.

Based on those rain totals, it’s far from a biblical storm. But even the slightest thought of impending doom gave me a reason to look at some of the worst weather conditions the PGA TOUR has dealt with.

Does anyone remember this moment from Colt Knost in the 2016 Farmers Insurance Open? Despite having next to no visibility with heavy rain and wind whipping, Knost gets a 6-iron onto the par-3 third green and drains the long putt for birdie. Chaos ensues.

Coincidentally, one of the worst weather weeks the TOUR has seen came at the AT&T Byron Nelson way back in 1994. The Dallas Morning News put together a great deep dive for the event’s 20th anniversary if you want the full story, but here’s the gist.

Early-week storms dumped four inches of rain on the course, canceling play Thursday and cutting the tournament to 54 holes. Workers and helicopters spent the day trying to dry the course out, but Friday brought more rain and another day of cancelations. Contested then at TPC Las Colinas, the tournament expanded to include a second course, Cottonwood Valley GC, and was reduced to 36 holes. By the end of the second round Sunday, six players held a share of the lead, a TOUR record. Yoshinori Mizumaki of Japan missed a six-foot putt on his final hole, Cottonwood’s No. 9, that would’ve won the tournament.

So Mizumaki, Tom Byrum, Mark Carnevale, David Edwards, David Ogrin and Neal Lancaster headed back out for the six-man playoff. Lancaster won, sticking his approach to 4 feet and making the birdie.

“Every time you teed it up, you felt like it was going to be your last,’’ Lancaster told the Dallas Morning News. “We didn’t know how many holes we were going to play.’’

That epic week proved to be Lancaster’s only TOUR win. For everyone’s sake, let’s hope we can look back at it again in 30 years without having a new tournament take its place.

Scottie’s putting woes

It’s hard to call Scottie Scheffler’s season anything but a success. He’s made every cut, finished inside the top 10 in eight of 12 events and outside the top-25 just once. His wins have come at two of the biggest tournaments of the year – THE PLAYERS Championship and the WM Phoenix Open. He’s second in the FedExCup standings and has already accumulated more than $12 million in on-course winnings.

He’s improved in nearly every Strokes Gained category, too. There is one glaring exception: his putting.

Scheffler’s never been a great putter statistically, but in 2022 he finished with positive Strokes Gained: Putting for the first time. It wasn’t anything remarkable – he ranked 58th overall in the statistic – but for someone with Scheffler’s tee-to-green prowess, that’s more than enough to dominate. And while he’s been dominant in stretches this season, it’s far from where it could’ve been.

His putting has fallen back to 99th this year, teetering right around neutral in SG: Putting. In some of his close calls this season his putting has been the reason he couldn’t close it out. In his last start, a T11 at the RBC Heritage, Scheffler ranked 5th in SG: Tee-to-Green but ranked 54th in putting. In his T4 finish at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, he ranked 54th in putting and lost 1.7 strokes to the field on the greens in the final round. He missed the playoff by two. At the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play, Scheffler missed a five-footer on the second playoff hole of his semifinal match against Sam Burns that would’ve secured his spot in the final. Instead, it was Burns who won it on the next hole.

“I’ve seen a lot of putts that I’ve really thought were going to go in that haven’t,” Scheffler said Wednesday. “I'm usually pretty dangerous when my putter gets hot, so I've been working on it pretty good.”

He’s had three weeks to work on it since the RBC Heritage. If he finds his stroke this week, there’s no reason to believe the hometown kid can’t take his third victory of the season.

Adam Scott’s brutal honesty

It was startling, if for no other reason than its complete transparency.

Adam Scott was fresh off a third-round 67 that put him in contention at the Wells Fargo Championship last week. He would need Wyndham Clark to fall back to the pack, which at the time seemed possible. Scott was encouraged about his play through three days, but still seemed to harbor some doubt. Given his recent stretch of golf, which included zero top-10s entering the week, it was hard to blame him. When asked about the rut he’s been in, he said this:

“It's been hard not to be frustrated because there isn't one thing that I can really put my finger on why I'm not getting better results. I play OK every week and OK kind of sucks on the PGA TOUR, so I'm nowhere with anything. This business is all about results, so that's what I'm looking for tomorrow.”

It was a rare and sobering look into the head of one of the top golfers of this generation. Scott has won a major and racked up 14 career wins. He’s had 25 more top-three finishes. Clark proved too difficult for anyone to catch but Scott didn’t give himself much of a chance during his final round. He bogeyed the first hole and never got any lower than 1-under during his round. He shot even par to finish T5.

Still, it’s the most promising showing of Scott’s season. And he’s in the field again at Byron Nelson. Maybe he’s closer to consistently strong golf than he thinks.

Can K.H. do it again?

It would be disrespectful not to discuss K.H. Lee, who is going for a feat this week at the AT&T Byron Nelson that hasn't been done in more than a decade -- three consecutive wins at one PGA TOUR event. Steve Stricker was the last to do so, winning the John Deere Classic from 2009-11. Lee also could become the first player in nearly nine decades to earn his first three wins in the same event (Leonard Gallett did it at the Wisconsin PGA in 1929, '33 and '34).

Yet, there is no reason to believe he can’t do it. He’s fended off Jordan Spieth, Hideki Matsuyama, Xander Schauffele and Sam Burns over the last two years to win. He’s coming in with good form, a T8 at the Wells Fargo. He’s the only player to win the AT&T Byron Nelson since it moved to TPC Craig Ranch.

“Honestly, very good pressure for me,” Lee said of the looming record. “But still, I'm very thankful for that opportunity, three times in a row champion. I try my best. If that happens, it's really cool.”

Lee may be too humble. If he wins again, I think something drastic needs to happen. Move aside Spieth and Scottie Scheffler, Lee is the new honorary king of Dallas. Give him a key to the city. At a minimum, he needs a statue. OK, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll revisit this on Sunday night.