Pick ‘Em Preview: Genesis Scottish Open

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HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the pool where he trained a year ago in March, Tommy Hughson had to get creative. He had aspirations of swimming in college, and he had to stay in shape. So, during the week, the high school senior would run and ride bikes to work on his cardiovascular fitness. Then, on Saturdays, Hughson, who has competed at junior nationals since he was in ninth grade, would swim in the river near a friend’s house. One day they saw an alligator about 200 yards in the distance, and they did the only logical thing. “We swam the other way,” Hughson says matter-of-factly. Meanwhile, Julia Kubec and her mother were spending some of their free time in the early stages of the nationwide shutdown last April and May sewing personalized home-made masks and handing them out to medical workers at various facilities on Hilton Head Island. “I’m not the best sewer, but we made them by hand,” Kubec says. If it’s true, as playwright Oscar Wilde once said, that no good deed goes unpunished, though, Kubec’s gesture turned out to be one of them. In October, she tested positive for COVID-19, along with several other members of the Seahawk soccer team at Hilton Head Island High. It was the weekend before Kubec was set to return to in-person classes. “At first I was like really concerned, but I was pretty asymptomatic, so I wasn’t super worried about it,” recalls Kubec, who did lose her sense of taste and smell. “But in my house, like, my family would not even acknowledge me whatsoever. They would leave food like outside my door.” Later this spring, Kubec and Hughson will graduate from high school this spring with GPAs in excess of 5.0, heading to Duke and the University of Chicago, respectively. They are among 11 seniors from Beaufort and Jasper counties who were named Heritage Classic Foundation Scholars earlier this year. All were deeply affected by COVID-19. One of the recipient’s father was in the hospital for 11 days battling acute respiratory distress syndrome, viral pneumonia and sepsis. He survived thanks to a transfusion of convalescent plasma. Another family needed food bank donations after several members tested positive and had to stop working. One recipient worked at a local pharmacy and delivered medications while separated from his mom and sister, who couldn’t get back home from Nevada due to travel restrictions. Ten of those impressive students received four-year awards that ranged from $16,000-20,000 while the 11th was a one-year grant of $3,000. A total of 353 students have been named RBC Scholars and earned grants totaling $4.63 million since the beginning of the program in 1993. The Heritage Classic Foundation Scholars program is funded by members of the Tartan Club, who make a minimum family contribution of $1,000 year, and ticket sales. “It means a lot,” Hughson says. “It really means a lot. And it puts me again in debt to this Island. I’ve grown up here and I’ve gotten so much from this Island. I have so many great memories and yet again, I’m being helped along in my life by something amazing.” Kubec’s reaction was similar. “I feel like it kind of is a way for me, like, all the sacrifices and hard work that I’ve accomplished over the past few years finally feel like they’re being recognized kind of, because there’s just been so much that I’ve had to give up throughout high school in order for like my academics and athletics,” she says. “So. with this, it just finally feels like worth it.” Academic success, leadership and community service – three hallmarks of the RBC Scholar program — go hand in hand for Kubec and Hughson. Kubec was vice president of her freshman and sophomore class and president as a junior. She’s helped organize homecoming activities and food drives and donations for local animal shelters. The last year has been different, though, and milestones like graduation ceremonies and the prom are up in the air. “It’s just been crazy and I’m not like the biggest fan of like surprises, but everything with COVID just feels like new surprises showing up every week,” Kubec says. “It’s been really interesting, like kind of disappointing in some ways, because a lot of the things that we may have been like looking forward to this year, haven’t been able to go on. … “So that’s definitely been upsetting, but I feel like everyone, especially our school has been really good at like adapting to it. And they still like have tried at least to provide us with some of those things, which is positive.” Kubec, who will attend Duke in the fall and likely study economics, has also taken mission trips with her church to work at youth recreation camps in the Honduras and build houses in the Dominican Republic. She calls the experience “life changing. “Just seeing how different, life is in one of those countries and even just like the culture and the way that people interact,” Kupec says. “The communities are so close and everyone is just so like appreciative of everything. Especially when we worked with the children, just seeing how even despite like the language barriers and everything, we were just able to like form these close relationships with them. It was very heartwarming.” Hughson, who will swim for the University of Chicago next year, is president of the Model United Nations and French National Honor Society at Hilton Head Island High. If not for COVID-19, Hughson would be preparing to travel to a conference where students like him roleplay as delegates to the UN. This year it’s on-line. “You pretend to be a country or a representative from that country and you debate and argue and try to solve world issues such as maybe a hunger crisis in a country or a conflict over in another region,” Hughson explains. “So, you have to do it through diplomacy, and you have to make decisions and write the laws and bills. It’s really interesting.” Small wonder, then, that Hughson hopes to work in the State Department. As much as he’s interested in current events, though, the Seahawk swim team captain also loves looking into the past. Hughson has been interested in archeology since he was in preschool – “I’ve always liked old ruins, digging in the dirt and finding old stuff,” he says. His interest is so keen that the local archeological society has given him the opportunity to work on a native American shell ring that turned out to be 3,500 years old. Hughson started small, moving dirt, then screening through it to find artifacts. As he gained experience, he was able to operate some of the machinery like the magnetometer and spectrometer. He calls the opportunity “pretty cool.” “Growing up with the island, you only really know about the beaches and the tourists and all the big hotels,” Hughson says. “So, I didn’t really know we had such a rich history.”

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Titleist’s new high-end CNCPT CP-01 and CNCPT CP-02 irons were born without limits. When building the CNCPT irons, Titleist’s Research and Development team was allowed to use any materials and processes, with no regards for a budget. “CNCPT is the result of our R&D team having the leashes taken off,â€� Kelley Moser Jr., Titleist’s Brand Manager of CNCPT Clubs told PGATOUR.COM. “ ‘Hey, you guys go find whatever you can find that’s really cool — new materials, new processes, whatever it takes — to give our customers a product worth the price tag that they’ll be paying for.’ â€� In recent years, it seems the floodgates have opened for high-priced irons on the domestic retail market. It’s no longer uncommon for a single iron to sell for more than $400. Titleist, however, says some of its competitors had a product that didn’t match the price points. “We sat back and watched some of what our competitors have done with the price point, and the product themselves [were] not what we thought was worth that price point,â€� Moser said. “But they sold a lot of it. So we said ‘Alright, if we could go ahead and build anything we wanted, what would we do?’â€� Titleist’s new CNCPT irons are the result of that no-holds-barred process. Most notably, the hollow bodied irons use a face insert – Titleist is calling it a “Super Metal L-Face insertâ€� — that’s made from a mysterious, high-strength material that’s “never been used before in golf,â€� according to Moser. “It’s the highest strength material that we’ve ever tested,â€� Moser said. “It allows us to make the thinnest unsupported face in golf. I can’t say what the name of the material is at this point; we don’t have exclusive rights to it. It’s very expensive, very rare, and you have to buy a lot of it at one point in time so it’s an expensive endeavor, but it’s worth it when you watch the ball flight.â€� The thin inserts, unlike most face inserts throughout the industry, have uniform thickness from heel-to-toe and top-to-bottom, rather than a variable thickness. As Moser explains, this helps to reduce hot spots, or in other words, areas of the face that produce higher ball speeds than others. In general, having a very thin, high-strength face helps to raise ball speeds, but it also reduces unwanted weight from the face area to be utilized in other, more effective areas. Titleist used this discretionary weight to add Tungsten – a high-density material — to the clubs’ perimeters. In fact, Titleist reports that Tungsten makes up “nearly 50 percentâ€� of the total head weights in the lower lofted irons. This design means more forgiveness for golfers because the perimeter-weighted head leads to higher MOI (moment of inertia, a measure of energy transfer), and with the positioning of Tungsten low-and-rearward, the irons are designed for higher launch, as well. The CNCPT irons come in two different head models: the CP-01 and the CP-02. The CP-02 head shape is for players who enjoy the look and sound of a traditional blade, but with higher performance than the traditionally unforgiving blade constructions. “This would be a product for guys who maybe used to play blades – we’ve all played blades at one point or another,â€� Moser explains. “But since the advent of cavity back, high-MOI, all the Tungsten you use now, you sacrifice a lot by using traditional blade. Most people know, ‘I want to use a blade but I know I shouldn’t.’ So they’ve graduated and moved onto maybe AP2 or AP3 or something along those lines. But they still would really like to have a blade in their bag. So we can do that. With all the Tungsten and how dense the tungsten is, we can cram a lot of weight in the perimeter of this golf club, and still use that super thin metal face to get the speed that they want. So what you have here is an MB look, with AP2 workability, but an AP3 speed. So it’s a homerun for us. We’ve had a lot of fun showing consumers this product because it’s so vastly different from anything we’ve ever made in the past.â€� The CP-01, on the other hand, is more of a performance-first design with a slightly larger profile, more offset and a thicker topline; it’s made for maximum performance. “The performance of [the CP-01] is unparalleled,â€� Moser said. “There’s nothing in the market that’s going to come off the face faster with the ball flight characteristics that you want to see, than this.â€� Both of the head models are made with hollow-bodied constructions. There have been other high-end irons on the market from various companies that use material between the face and the body for durability, or sound/feel benefits, but Titleist decided to keep the irons hollow. “When you put something to support a thin face, you’re essentially taking away the benefit of a thin face,â€� Moser said. “So we wanted to make sure as thin as we can go, we wanted to keep it unsupported from the inside. That was a big component for us.â€� As for the price tag, Titleist will sell the CNCPT CP-01 and CP-02 irons for $500 per head. Moser explains the price point: “We’re going to sell them for $500 per club, which, in our opinion there’s a market there at that price point. But we didn’t want it to be a marketing story. We wanted it to be about product and performance first. So you’re not going to hear us talking about it a lot. We’re not going to be on TV. We’re not going to be in your face marketing in a traditional sense. This is going to be more word-of-mouth, underground. We’re going to find the right people first. We’re going to fit them, we’re going to get them excited about the equipment, and we’re going to let them tell their friends and we’re going to let it grow organically that way, because we want all the money to go into the product and the research to develop products like this, rather than talking about the products.” Titleist has a special concierge to setup fitting for the CNCPT irons.

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