CASTLE ROCK, Colo. — Home games in tour golf are rare, and those played at more than a mile high, in this case 6,200 feet, tilt the advantage further toward Denver’s favorite son Wyndham Clark this week. Or does it?

Clark, a former U.S. Open champion and a recent Olympian trending in the right direction, grew up in Highlands Ranch, about a dozen miles north of Castle Pines Golf Club, site of the BMW Championship that begins here on Thursday. When he was 7 or 8, he said, he attended his first PGA Tour event, the now defunct International, at Castle Pines, and kept coming back, until the demise of the tournament in 2006. He also noted that he has played the course more than anyone else in the field, more than 30 times in his estimation.

So is the sum of those parts an advantage for Clark?

“Not a ton,” he said here on Tuesday. “I didn’t grow up playing this course per se like every day. Yes, I know some of the nuances that maybe other people don’t know. And then maybe where it shows up, altitude is tough to play at, and I’m not here that much playing golf. When I come back, I’m either seeing family, friends, I’m fishing or working with trainers. When I’m back, I don’t golf that much. So I’m a little rusty on my altitude game.

“But the good thing is that I am used to it, and I feel like I have some tricks up my sleeve when I get into certain situations. Maybe it’ll come with shot selection and distance control.”

Working, too, on his behalf is that after a strong start to his season that included a victory at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a second in the Arnold Palmer Invitational and a tie for second in the Players Championship, his performance began to fall off for a player still ranked No. 5 in the world.

He missed the cut in the Masters and PGA Championship, tied for 56th in the U.S. Open, and missed the cut in the British Open before regaining some form in recent weeks, including a tie for 14th in the Olympics after opening with a 75, and a tie for seventh in the FedEx St. Jude Championship on Sunday.

“I’ve gone back to a little bit more of a process,” he said. “I think I was getting a little too outcome focused. As I had some early success in the year and was playing amazing golf. I think just falling short of Scottie [Scheffler] a couple times and then thinking, OK, I just got too much into winning and trying to break through and win in some of those big events.

“Then I got away from everything that made me successful, and I feel like recently I’ve gotten back to the process of focusing on the things that got me here, playing good golf, and I’ve started to play good golf. I’ve had some poor rounds to start, but I feel like I’m overcoming that and doing a lot better. So I think my game is trending in the right direction.”

The timing points to a homecoming performance that promises, at least, to an entertaining weak for Denver’s favorite son.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com