Pieters, Hatton, and Fleetwood accept PGA TOUR Special Temporary MembershipPieters, Hatton, and Fleetwood accept PGA TOUR Special Temporary Membership
PONTE VEDRA BEACH – The PGA TOUR announced today that Thomas Pieters, Tyrrell Hatton and Tommy Fleetwood have accepted Special Temporary Membership for the remainder of the 2016-17 PGA TOUR Season. All three completed at last week’s World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play in Austin, Texas. Pieters hails from Belgium while Hatton and Fleetwood are both natives of England. The PGA TOUR now has 88 international members from 23 countries outside the United States. In six PGA TOUR starts in 2016-17, Pieters, 25, has two top-5 finishes, a T2 at the Genesis Open and a T5 at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship. With his finish in Mexico, Pieters earned 110 FedExCup points, taking his total to 416, surpassing the points earned by the player at No. 150 in last season’s FedExCup standings and making him eligible for Special Temporary Membership on the PGA TOUR. He now owns 441 non-member FedExCup points after his T30 finish at the Dell Technologies Match Play. Pieters, who captured the 2012 NCAA Men’s Individual Championship while competing for the University of Illinois, has three career European Tour wins. Last year, he won the Made in Demark on the European Tour, finished fourth in the Olympics Men’s Golf Competition in Rio and was a Captain’s Selection for Europe at the 2016 Ryder Cup. With top-10s at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, Hatton and Fleetwood earned enough non-member FedExCup points to be eligible for Special Temporary Membership. With a T4 finish at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Hatton, 25, went from 217 to 340 non-member FedExCup points. He now has three top-10 finishes in five starts, having finished T4 at The Honda Classic and 10th at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship. Hatton now has 384 non-member FedExCup points after his T17 finish at the Dell Technologies Match Play. Hatton owns one European Tour title, the 2016 Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. After opening with a 6-over 78 in the first round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Fleetwood, 26, posted rounds of 66-70-68 to finish T10. In need of just four non-member FedExCup points after a runner-up finish at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship in his only previous PGA TOUR start, Fleetwood went from 315 to 388 points with his finish at Bay Hill. He now has 401 non-member FedExCup points after a T39 finish at the Dell Technologies Match Play. Fleetwood has three European Tour victories, his latest being the 2017 Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. As Special Temporary Members, the three are eligible for unlimited sponsor exemptions for the remainder of the 2016-17 season as they attempt to earn PGA TOUR cards for the 2017-18 season through the Non-member FedExCup Points List. Special Temporary Members are not eligible for the FedExCup Playoffs, but Special Temporary Members or non-members who subsequently become regular PGA TOUR members by winning an official event during the season will be counted on the FedExCup points list, along with any FedExCup points earned as a non-member (excluding those won at World Golf Championships events as a non-member) and thus be eligible for the FedExCup Playoffs.
