Tommy Horton, English Ryder Cup player, dies at 76

This is where it all began last season for two-time defending CIMB Classic champion Justin Thomas. The FedExCup victory after five wins in 25 starts, including the PGA Championship. The 3-1-1 record at the Presidents Cup at Liberty National. The Player of the Year honors. It all began at TPC Kuala Lumpur, a 7,005-yard, par-72 track five miles from the city that hosts Southeast Asia’s only PGA TOUR event with full FedExCup points. The 72-hole stroke-play tournament features a 78-player field, with no cut, made up of players from three sanctioning bodies: the PGA TOUR, the Asian Tour and the Professional Golf Association of Malaysia. Five of the top 15 in last season’s FedExCup standings will make their first start of the new season: Thomas, Rookie of the Year Xander Schauffele, Hideki Matsuyama, Paul Casey and Pat Perez. Six other players also finished in the top 30 of the FedExCup. Others in the field include Presidents Cup International Team members Branden Grace, Charl Schwartzel, Jhonattan Vegas and Anirban Lahiri. Here are the featured groups. Kuala Lumpur is 12 hours ahead. All tee times are Eastern Time. Hideki Matsuyama, Pat Perez, Branden Grace: Matsuyama, a three-time TOUR winner last season who beat Thomas in a well-played singles match at the Presidents Cup at Liberty National, is the headliner of this group. Perez also won last season, parlaying his victory at the OHL Classic at Mayakoba into the best campaign of his career, a season in which he finally played his way into the TOUR Championship and finished a career-high 15th in the FedExCup. Grace went 1-2-2 for the Internationals at the recent Presidents Cup. Tee times: Wednesday 9:50 p.m. (ET) off first tee; Thursday 8:40 p.m. off 10th tee Si Woo Kim, Davis Love III, Paul Casey: This threesome features the very young (Kim, 22), the relatively old (Love, 53), and a player who improbably seems to be hitting his stride at age 40 (Casey). Kim is the most recent winner of THE PLAYERS Championship and showed admirable spunk during his recent Presidents Cup singles loss to Daniel Berger. Two-time PLAYERS champ Love is still trying to break Sam Snead’s record for oldest TOUR winner. And the ever-steady Casey had a chance to win the FedExCup before fading at the end to finish 11th. Tee times: Wednesday 9:40 p.m. off first tee; Thursday 8:30 p.m. off 10th tee Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele, Gavin Green: Glamour group features reigning FedExCup champion and Player of the Year Thomas, who also happens to have won this tournament two years running, along with newly minted PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year and surprise TOUR Championship winner Schauffele, plus Asian Tour Order of Merit leader Green. After racking up five victories and 14 top-25 finishes in 25 starts last season, what will Thomas do for an encore? Tee times: Wednesday 8:40 p.m. off 10th tee; Thursday 9:40 p.m. off first tee Brendan Steele, Jhonattan Vegas, Charl Schwartzel: Steele won the PGA TOUR’s season-opener, successfully defending his Safeway Open title just hours before a massive wildfire swept through the area and forced an evacuation of the tournament host, Silverado Resort and Spa. Venezuela’s Vegas is coming off an impressive singles victory over Jordan Spieth at the Presidents Cup at Liberty National, where South Africa’s Schwartzel notched his own singles victory over Matt Kuchar to salvage some respect for the beaten International Team. Tee times: Wednesday 8:50 p.m. off 10th tee; Thursday 9:50 p.m. off first tee

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The last two winners on the PGA TOUR – Rory McIlroy and Seamus Power – have both represented Ireland in the Olympics. They were almost college teammates, as well. And not at a school that’s necessarily top of mind when you think of American powerhouses. East Tennessee State in Johnson City, Tennessee, competes in the small Southern Conference and in the Football Championship Subdivision (more commonly referred to as Division I-AA). Golf may be the school’s strongest sport, thanks in part to a pipeline from Great Britain and Ireland that included Power. The Buccaneers, led by Irishman Keith Nolan, finished third in the 1996 NCAA Championship – ahead of a Tiger Woods-led Stanford team – and twice played in the NCAA Championship during Power’s tenure. Power, who won his second PGA TOUR title Sunday at the Butterfield Bermuda Championship, almost was preceded on campus by McIlroy, who won THE CJ CUP in South Carolina a week earlier to ascend to No. 1 in the world. McIlroy signed a letter of intent to play golf for the Buccaneers beginning with the 2005-06 season. “The youthful McIlroy brings an extensive and successful resume to Johnson City,” reads the news release from November 2004, which is still available online. McIlroy opted to stay in Ireland and play amateur golf, however, but ETSU’s coach at the time, Fred Warren, kept the signed letter of intent and had it framed. “I signed a letter of intent to play for ETSU, did my SAT, did everything like that so I (was) fully ready to come over and play college golf,” McIlroy said in 2015. “But at that point I knew that I really wanted to turn pro earlier than the four years he was going to be here. I had no intention of graduating at all, so I thought it was just better to play that full time amateur golf in Ireland. … By the time I was probably just getting out of college I had just won my first major, so sort of it was a good decision in the end.” The Ireland-to-ETSU connection actually was started by John Paul Fitzgerald, who played for the Buccaneers and became McIlroy’s caddie for several years. Next was Nolan, who finished T9 in that 1996 NCAA Championship and represented Great Britain & Ireland in the following year’s Walker Cup. Warren watched Power play at the 2005 European Boys’ Team Championship at Monticello Golf Club in Italy. If it had not been for the interest from East Tennessee State, Power was considering taking an accounting course at a university in Ireland, according to a New York Times article. Power still had doubts about attending ETSU even as he was on his flight bound for the States. “Where am I going?” Power told the Times. “I didn’t have a telephone. I didn’t have many dollars. If I land over here, and if something as simple as my coach isn’t at the airport to pick me up, I have no idea what I’m going to do.” According to a 2016 profile on PGATOUR.COM, Power’s scholarship actually became available after McIlroy decided to not attend East Tennessee. McIlroy played amateur golf until turning pro after the 2007 Walker Cup. Power started at ETSU in the fall of 2006 and graduated with an accounting degree in 2011. He also was a two-time conference champion. He spent several years on the mini-tours before playing his first full Korn Ferry Tour season in 2015. He was a PGA TOUR rookie for the 2017 season, but failed to make the FedExCup Playoffs in three of his first four seasons. He started 2021 ranked 429th in the world but has now risen to a career-best 32nd in the OWGR. He also is fifth in this season’s FedExCup.

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