Four tied for the lead after at FedEx St. Jude

The European Tour plans to resume its season the last full weekend in July with six tournaments in England and Wales that will include COVID-19 testing and depend on the U.K. lifting its quarantine restrictions. It would start July 22 with the British Masters, hosted by Lee Westwood. The next five in the “U.K. Swing” are new tournaments the European Tour will pay for out of its tournament development fund. Three will be at former Ryder Cup venues — two at Celtic Manor in Wales, one at The Belfry in England. The purse at each new event is 1 million euros. The tour said it will add 500,000 euros for the U.K. Swing for charities — half for the markets they play, half for the top 10 players from a “mini money list” to decide. No spectators will be allowed at least for the UK swing. “There is no question that we’re back,” Keith Pelley, the tour’s chief executive, said in a conference call Thursday. The European Tour also set dates for four Rolex Series events — the Scottish Open and BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth in October, the Nedbank Challenge in South Africa and DP World Tour Championship in Dubai in December. Pelley expects the rest of the schedule — with hopes for 24 events — to be announced later. He said the U.K. Swing depends largely on lifting the 14-day quarantine for players arriving from other countries. The PGA Championship in San Francisco is scheduled for Aug. 6-9. If the quarantine is not lifted, top European Tour players would have to choose between a major and four European Tour events with minimal prize money. “Hotels need to be in operation and the quarantine needs to be lifted to continue with these events,” Pelley said. He said he was encouraged and optimistic that will be the case, based on numerous conversations with government officials. “We wouldn’t be announcing these events without having had significant dialogue with the UK government,” Pelley said. “They know about the announcements. They’re worked feverishly with us.” The tour returns under an initiative called “Golf for Good,” which Pelley said will underpin the rest of 2020. The key points are the charitable contributions — 50,000 euros to the five venues and 250,000 euros for the leading 10 players from a money list of the U.K. Swing. He recalled a conversation with one European Tour partner in which Pelley said, “This might not be the biggest event that you have ever done in terms of crowds and hospitality, but it will be the most important event, and it should be the most emotional event.” The European Tour was last played March 8 at the Qatar Masters. Eight tournaments have been canceled, including a World Golf Championships event in Texas and the British Open. Nine others have been postponed, and officials across several tours worldwide have been trying to piece together the season. The majors set the framework with the PGA Championship going to Aug. 6-9, the U.S. Open planned for Sept. 17-20 in New York and the Masters moving to Nov. 12-15. Pelley did not take any questions on the Ryder Cup — with or without fans — except to say it remains on the schedule for Sept. 25-27 in Wisconsin. The Scottish Open, originally planned for July, moves to Oct. 8-11 and precedes the European Tour’s flagship event, the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth. He said other events, such as the Irish Open and other key stops in continental Europe, were close to being announced. Pelley was quick to point out the tour’s strength — a worldwide tour — has become an obstacle from having to work with so many different governments and their regulations for the pandemic. “Moving 30 events with one in its place (Dunhill Championship in Scotland on Oct. 1-4) has been challenging,” he said. Andrew Murray, the tour’s chief medical officer, says testing will include an antigen test for the coronavirus when players arrive, along with daily thermal readings and questionnaires about their health. No media will be allowed at tournaments for the U.K. Swing, and the tour expects no more than 500 people on site. Pelley said fans and hospitality account for only 5% of revenue, so having fans is more important for optics than business. Even so, he expects tournaments to gradually have more spectators. However the rest of the season is put together, all will offer Race To Dubai points toward the conclusion. The European Tour said no one will lose status for 2021 and there will not be a Q-school at the end of the year.

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NAPA, Calif. – Michael Kim and Max Homa, who will play together along with Cameron Champ in the first and second rounds of the Fortinet Championship at Silverado Resort & Spa, sometimes regard their college years with a pinch of nostalgia. The Cal teammates hit fairways, made birdies. It was a simpler time. They roomed together on the road, and when Kim, who moved to America from Korea when he was 12, spoke to his parents on the phone, Homa couldn’t catch a word of it. At other times, though, Kim would slow it way down as he dictated simple Korean phrases into his phone. “He’s going to be so mad I’m telling people this,” Homa said with a grin. “… He starts recording something on his phone and it would be like me saying like – ‘I drove my car to the store’ in Korean. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m in this Korean 101 class that I’m not supposed to know, I’m not supposed to be fluent in this.’” Ah, the college years. But what followed for Homa and Kim was no laughing matter. Each made it to the TOUR only to fall apart in his mid-20s, lose his TOUR card, and slog through a bewildering odyssey in the golfing wilderness. The game, once so simple, got complicated. Homa missed 15 cuts in 2015, played on the Korn Ferry Tour in ’16, and missed 15 cuts again in ’17, when he dropped to 244th in the FedExCup. “He’s way too good a player to lose his card,” Rory McIlroy said of Homa at the Wells Fargo Championship in May. True enough. Homa, the defending champion at the Fortinet, is still in the afterglow of a career-best two-win season and fifth-place finish in the FedExCup. Last week U.S. Presidents Cup Captain Davis Love III named him among his six picks to help round out the team that will take on the Internationals at Quail Hollow Club next week. Now it’s Kim’s turn to come back. He parted ways with longtime swing coach James Oh to go with John Tillery just three weeks before the 2018 John Deere Classic, which he then won by eight shots. It was a happy day, with Kim having shot 27 under to lap the field, but when asked in his press conference afterward about the recent coaching change he burst into tears. “You feel like you’ve gone to war with a guy for years,” Kim said Wednesday, “and I started seeing (Oh) when I was 15, and he’s the one who had really helped me get on TOUR. That was three weeks after I had told him, and it felt like 90 percent of the work we had done for that win was with James, and maybe the last 10 percent was with J.T., but it was going to be looked at as J.T. came in and fixed everything. I felt bad that people were going to look at it that way.” What’s more, as Kim sat there before the press, the trophy won and a life goal realized, he harbored a bizarre secret: Other than that one week at TPC Deere Run, he wasn’t playing well. “I was still struggling even that year,” he said. “I wasn’t playing great, I just got hot at the perfect moment and the stars aligned for me. I got caught up in the trendy thing in the golf swing and tried to quote, unquote take the hands out of it. Growing up, a lot of my feel was in my hands. Tiger Woods talks about his hands. I lost that.” Kim’s freefall was dizzying. He made it to the weekend just once in two years, at one point missing 25 consecutive cuts. He fell outside the top 1,000 in the world. By abandoning the right-to-left tee shot that found fairways and allowed for the fullest expression of his above-average wedges and short game, he became utterly, hopelessly lost. “It might have been a technical thing at first, but I think it became a mental thing,” said Michael Weaver, a Cal teammate who briefly played on the Korn Ferry Tour. “I was a fill-in caddie for him at the 3M Open in 2019, and he played with Smylie Kaufman and Austin Cook, and I felt bad for Austin because Smylie and Michael were hitting it all over the place.” Kaufman is now a golf broadcaster, and for a time it was anything but certain Kim would make his way out of the williwags. He parted with Tillery and tried his luck with various other coaches, including George Gankas, but nothing stuck. His friends tried to buck up his spirits, telling him they still believed in him even as the cuts piled up. “Every time I asked him, ‘Where are you playing next?’ I was prepared to hear, ‘I might not play for a while,’” Weaver said. “You work so hard to build up your confidence and then it all goes badly and you’re like, I used to be good at this and now I suck. I wouldn’t fault anyone for shutting it down; it’s a natural reaction to not being able to find your way out.” Kim saw flashes of form, but they could vanish even as he made the turn. “I was really dejected because on the front nine you have that hope,” he said, “and then it’s a crash all over again.” He got a slight reprieve from Covid, the pandemic extending his status a year and saving him from a return to Korn Ferry Tour Q School. After Monday-qualifying for the Fortinet last year, he tapped Weaver to caddie for him again. “He hit it in the condos on one,” Weaver said. It looked like the same old stuff, but just a few weeks earlier Kim had begun working with was Sean Foley, who diagnosed the problem: Kim had gotten away from his swing DNA and what made him great in the first place. “Sean said, ‘We needed to get you swinging a little more like you did as a kid, with similar feels and tweaks here and there,’” Kim said, “and that’s how we started. We were still making the transition last year. It was all very new.” Slowly, methodically, Kim clawed his way back. He started the 2022 Korn Ferry Tour season with a pair of missed cuts, but a T15 at The Panama Championship in February provided hope. He texted Foley: This was going to work. Kim racked up 12 top-25 finishes in 25 starts to regain his PGA TOUR card. He also shared the first-round lead at the Puerto Rico Open (T16) and finished seventh at the Barbasol Championship. Today, he feels like he has a new lease on life. “I mean obviously it would be great if I went to see Sean first,” he said. “I’ve come to believe it’s more about your fit with your instructor and does his swing philosophy fit with what you have.” Without the last four years, though, he added, he might not be the same player he is today. “I don’t think I’d be as excited and have a fresh perspective on playing the PGA TOUR,” he said. “You go through the ups and downs and you appreciate it more.” Homa could say the same. His eyes got a little teary Wednesday as he talked about the journey from his very first PGA TOUR start to making his first U.S. Presidents Cup Team, and the ups and downs along the way. For the two Cal Bears who will reunite at Silverado, the struggle makes it all the sweeter.

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2021 Houston Open, Round 1 Scoring Conditions: Overall: +2.29 strokes per round Morning wave: +2.05 Afternoon wave: +2.54 Current cutline (top 65 and ties): 72 players at +2 or better (T63) Top 3 projected cutline probabilities: 1. 3 over par: 36.3% 2. 4 over par: 33.5% 3. 2 over par: 14.9% Top 10 win probabilities: 1. Scottie Scheffler (T2, -3, 12.5%) 2. Jason Day (T2, -3, 8.9%) 3. Brandt Snedeker (1, -5, 7.8%) 4. Adam Scott (T8, -2, 5.4%) 5. Tony Finau (T16, -1, 4.7%) 6. Harold Varner III (T2, -3, 4.4%) 7. Hideki Matsuyama (T29, E, 3.7%) 8. Cameron Davis (T2, -3, 3.4%) 9. Russell Henley (T16, -1, 3.0%) 10. Dustin Johnson (T63, +2, 2.9%) NOTE: These reports are based off the live predictive model run by @DataGolf. The model provides live "Make Cut", "Top 20", "Top 5", and "Win" probabilities every 5 minutes from the opening tee shot to the final putt of every PGA TOUR event. Briefly, the model takes account of the current form of each golfer as well as the difficulty of their remaining holes, and probabilities are calculated from 20K simulations. To follow live finish probabilities throughout the remainder of the Vivint Houston Open, or to see how each golfer's probabilities have evolved from the start of the event to the current time, click here for the model's home page.

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