Johnson wins by 3 shots at RBC Canadian

The Masters expanded its reach to elite amateurs on Thursday when it offered a special invitation to NCAA champion Gordon Sargent, the first time in more than 20 years an amateur received such an invitation. Augusta National also awarded a special invitation to Kazuki Higa, who won four times on the Japan Golf Tour and captured the money list last year. “The Masters Tournament prioritizes opportunities to elevate both amateur and professional golf around the world,” Chairman Fred Ridley said. “Whether on the international stage or at the elite amateur level, each player has showcased their talent in the past year. We look forward to hosting them at Augusta National in April.” Sargent is the No. 3 player in the world amateur ranking and among the growing list of young American college stars. As a freshman at Vanderbilt, he won the NCAA individual title last year with a birdie on the first hole in a four-man playoff over Eugenio Chacarra, Parker Coody and Ryan Burnett. He also was chosen for the Palmer Cup, matches between college players from the U.S. and Europe. The Masters has a history of looking after elite amateurs, once inviting the Walker Cup team until the late 1980s. It currently invites the U.S. Amateur champion and runner-up, the British Amateur champion, the U.S. Mid-Amateur champion and winners of the Asia-Pacific and Latin American amateur events it helped create. The last amateur to earn a special invitation was Aaron Baddeley of Australia in 2000, who was 18 when he beat a field that included Greg Norman and Colin Montgomerie to win the Australian Open. The invitations bring the current field to 80 players. The only way to qualify now before the April 6-9 tournament is to win a PGA TOUR event that offers full FedExCup points or be in the top 50 in the world ranking a week before the Masters. Higa’s invitation was expected. The Masters has a history of inviting international players who have had sterling seasons without having regular access to the PGA TOUR. The last special invitation went to Shigo Imahira of Japan in 2019. Higa is No. 68 in the world and his four wins on the Japan Golf Tour include the Dunlop Phoenix in November, one of the strongest fields of the year in Japan.

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Cullan Brown had zero expectations when he teed it up in the Barbasol Championship at Keene Trace Golf Club two years ago. “He had nothing to lose that week,” Emily Brown, Cullan’s mom, recalls. “He wasn’t like the other men trying to make their living at it. He considered it a free pass and he was going to make the best of it.” And that’s exactly what Cullan did. The affable 19-year-old, a rising sophomore at the University of Kentucky, was playing in the tournament on a sponsor’s exemption. Cullan proceeded to make the cut in his home state’s PGA TOUR event, shooting par or better in every round, and tied for 53rd. Among the highlights that week? Cullan reeled off five straight birdies on the front nine Saturday with his dad, Rodney, on the bag. Rodney – a last-minute fill-in when Cullan’s caddie got heatstroke – was so intent on his job he didn’t even realize that his son was on such a roll. “I don’t think that was by accident,” Kentucky coach Brian Craig says. “I think that was coordinated there by the man upstairs that his dad was going to be caddying for him in a TOUR event. It was pretty cool, pretty amazing.” “I’m so glad that those two had that,” Emily says, her voice catching, before she continued the thought in the present tense. “Rodney has that memory of doing that. That’s something he’ll always cherish.” The Barbasol Championship would be the last tournament Cullan Brown would ever play. On Aug. 17, 2019, barely a month after he made his TOUR debut, Cullan was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, after doctors found a tumor in his right thigh. Sadly, he died 345 days later. In Cullan’s short life, though, he had a significant impact on his family, friends and teammates – and essentially everyone else he met. He was friendly and faithful, humble and kind, the guy with the biggest smile in the room and the heartiest laugh and the Pied Piper personality. That’s why the same people who extended that sponsor’s exemption to Cullan in 2019 wanted to honor him in a more permanent way. So, the winner of the Barbasol Junior Championship – this year’s inaugural champ was Preston Summerhays – will receive the Cullan Brown Trophy and a spot in the PGA TOUR event. And this week at the Barbasol Championship, Cullan’s sister Cathryn, an accomplished player in her own right, will hit the opening tee shot on Saturday. It will be a quick turnaround – she’ll rush home from an AJGA event in South Dakota that ends on Thursday, then drive to Lexington, Kentucky on Friday – but it’s something she doesn’t want to miss. “Someone asked her the other day, why does she play golf?” Emily says. “And she said, well, Cullan always told me that I could be better than he was if I just dedicated myself to the work and put in the time. So that’s why she says she plays.” The Brown family received some more exciting news recently. Cathryn had just shot a career-low 69 in an AJGA qualifier in Ashland, Kentucky, which is five-and-a-half hours from their home in Eddyville. She was ushered into a room, presumably for an interview, only to see her grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and Coach Craig gathered around. On the phone was Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear who told the Browns that the golf course where Cullan grew up playing is being renamed in his honor. It will now be called “The Cullan at Mineral Mound State Park.” “His legacy literally is going to go on and on and on,” Craig says. “We’re all going to make sure of it, but just the things that have even happened so far, like, wow. That just tells you what kind of impact he had and what kind of person he was. “I mean, you just don’t see it at that age, I mean, people want to recognize him like this. They want to cement his legacy by doing all these really amazing things – and for a 20-year-old, you know what I mean? Like, that’s pretty awesome.” The family joke was that Cullan started playing golf because he hated to run. He could shoot the basketball, but he didn’t like to run up and down the court. He’d knock the cover off a baseball, but he didn’t want to run the bases. Football and soccer, now those were out of the question. But when he was 8 years old, Cullan started tagging along when his dad and his grandfathers and his uncles when they headed to the golf course. “He just kind of picked it up and he was like, hey, you don’t have to run in golf,” Emily says. “That’s kind of how it came about.” The natural ability was there, though, as was the work ethic. When Cullan was in the eighth grade, his instructor, Todd Trimble, called Craig to give him a head’s up. That summer, the Kentucky coach went to a junior tournament and the first two shots he saw Cullan hit were a driver, 3-wood – into the wind – to 25 feet on a lengthy par 5. “That got my attention really fast, really fast,” recalls Craig, who offered Cullan a scholarship four years later. A wrist injury kept Cullan out of the Wildcats’ lineup during the fall semester of his freshman year. But he managed eight starts that spring, posting a 72.42 scoring average with a career-low 64, and landed a spot on the All-SEC Freshman Team. The sponsor’s exemption into the Barbasol Championship that summer was a bonus. Cullan, who had caddied for his good friend Emma Talley at an LPGA event the previous week, called it an “opportunity unlike any other really – to get to be here and just to get to play, much less compete against these guys is just fantastic.” Craig was on a Greek island on a long-planned family vacation when Cullan and several of his former Kentucky players were competing at Keene Trace. But he had his smart phone and the PGA TOUR app to follow their progress. “I literally was just refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh,” Craig recalls. “… I was following it as closely as you can follow it without being there.” Cullan finished with rounds of 72-68-67-71. He called the week a “fantastic” opportunity for an amateur to “be able to see where their game is and where it needs to be and what they need to do to get from A to B.” “He got to experience his dream,’ Emily says. “He got to live his dream and that’s what I’ve told a lot of people. I’m so thankful he got to do that because as a mom, I got to see it.” Several weeks later, Cullan got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He hit his right leg on a piece of furniture. At first, doctors thought he had a deep bone bruise on his knee. When medicine didn’t alleviate the pain, an MRI was ordered. Cullan, who loved classic country music, had to give up tickets to the Grand Old Opry to go to Lexington for the procedure. The news was not good. The chemotherapy was aggressive, and Cullan spent between 150-200 of his remaining 345 days in the hospital. He died on Aug. 4, 2020. “I’ll never understand that — why, why, why he couldn’t stay with us longer, but I guess God needed him more than I did,” she says. “But maybe I’ll get my answer one day when I get up there.” “I still feel like I’m in a bad dream,” Craig says. “I just can’t even grasp it. I just, I really can’t. It’s just so, so unfair.” Cullan knew how serious the diagnosis was. He was treated in the pediatric oncology unit at the University of Kentucky but at 19 he was considered an adult. He was a part of every meeting with the doctors – “there was nothing really we kept from him or sugar-coated up until the very end,” Emily says. “He never complained,” she continues. “People would come to the hospital to visit — how are you? (He’d say) there’s nothing I have to complain about. He was more worried about us. He was more worried about how everybody else was doing. “And that was just Cullan. He was like that from an early age.” Craig and the team visited Cullan often in the hospital. It was an awful battle, Craig says, but Cullan handled it like a “superhero.” The Kentucky men’s and women’s golf teams wore B4B – “Birdies 4 Brownie” – stitched on their uniforms last year. “He went through it valiantly and he was a champion all the way through it,” the UK coach says. “He was an inspiration to so many people, not just our team, but I mean, the people in the hospital — like he touched everybody, like everybody that came in contact with Cullan, whether it was a nurse or the doctors or whoever. “They felt his influence in such a powerful way.” Craig feels his team gained perspective from the way Cullan lived his life. He understood golf was just a game, and his demeanor never changed whether he shot 67 or 76. He always tried to do his best, but he knew his family, teammates and friends would love him regardless. “He was very laid back,” Emily agrees. “… He just kind of took the world as it came. I wished I had his demeanor on a lot of things like that. “He loved life and he did a whole lot of living in the 19-and-a-half years that he had before his diagnosis.” In nearly two decades at Kentucky, Craig has coached PGA TOUR players like Josh Teater and J.B. Holmes. He feels certain that Cullan had the talent to join them although he wonders whether he would have liked the lifestyle. Many people describe Cullan as an “old soul.” He loved to read, particularly novels about the old West, and was an A-student. He also was an avid hunter and fisherman — in fact, he’d already seen a ranch in Montana on-line that he wanted to buy. “So, my guess is he would have tried to have made the TOUR and make as much money as he could, as quick as he could, and then said, boys, I’ll see, y’all later, I’m retired to my ranch in Montana,” Craig says, “That’s probably what he would have done to be honest with you, and then just made an appearance every now and then. “That’s exactly what he would have been like. He would not have been one of these guys that would have sacrificed everything to be a TOUR player. … He would have figured out a way to, to balance both of them.” Cullan also loved to watch cooking shows and try new recipes. On an offseason golf trip to Florida with some current and former UK players and some of their fathers, he cooked every night. His grandparents gave him a Blackstone grill last Christmas so he could cook his specialty – hibachi chicken or steak with fried rice and homemade yum-yum sauce. In fact, cooking was one of the topics of conversation when Cullan met John Daly at the Barbasol Championship. Cullan told him about a dry rub called “Flavor Dust” that he and a high school buddy created when they were tasked with cooking for the FFA banquet. It was so successful, the two bottled and sold it. “He really enjoyed talking to John,” Emily says. “I think there’s a shared love of food there, as well.” Emily says the last promise she made to Cullan was to try to live her life the way she thinks he would have lived his. She wants to keep his memory alive and share his faith and the hope that everyone has a chance of seeing him again one day. “I have a picture of him when he was like less than two and he has a diaper on and he’s swinging one of those big plastic golf clubs that all kids have in the house,” she says. “And I always say that when he was in contention on Sunday at the Masters, that was the photo I was going to give CBS because that was our dream. That was his dream. “It was our dream and I believe that he could have achieved that if cancer hadn’t taken him from us. So, you know, the Barbasol was a gift from God. And it’s only in God’s timing that he got to experience that, just before his diagnosis, we all got to live it.’

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South African Victor Lange came to the United States to play golf for Louisiana Tech in Ruston, Louisiana, where he had a successful college career, capping his four years by earning Conference USA Golfer of the Year. The Johannesburg native graduated in 2015 and turned pro, joining PGA TOUR Latinoamérica in 2018. Lange had just begun his third PGA TOUR Latinoamérica year when the coronavirus pandemic caused a postponement to the 2020 season. Following the Tour’s Estrella del Mar Open in Mazatlan, Mexico, the first event of the season, Lange returned to South Africa and tested positive for COVID-19. He remains in quarantine in Durban, South Africa. Related: Golf in these times Last week, I was supposed to be in Argentina, playing in PGA TOUR Latinoamérica’s Buenos Aires Championship. I was really looking forward to that event. It is where I played my first PGA TOUR Latinoamérica tournament, in 2018. I tied for 58th that week, and last year, after rounds of 68-70-69-70, I tied for fifth, three shots out of the playoff Andres Echavarria won. I’ve had some really good results in Argentina, so I was quite excited for the Zurich Argentina Swing, that tournament the first of three consecutive in the country. Obviously, though, plans have changed. It’s what happens when a global pandemic grips the world and you contract what is known as COVID-19 to earn the dubious distinction as the first professional golfer with coronavirus. What’s been odd about all this happening is the season started out as planned. I played in the season-opening event, the Estrella del Mar Open, in Mazatlan in early March, and I didn’t have any symptoms in Mexico. I was completely healthy. Just to get to Mexico was quite a long journey. I flew 16 hours, Johannesburg to Atlanta, then from Atlanta to Mexico City and from Mexico City to Mazatlan. That week, I played the first two rounds well. I opened 66-67, and at 11-under I was two shots off the lead heading to the weekend. I didn’t have a good third round (3-over 75), and although I shot 3-under in the final round, which is normally a good score, around there you had to go a lot lower. I tied for 51st. I still felt great, so much so that I played a game of tennis with fellow player Matt Ryan on Sunday after the final round. We were out there for hours. Before that, I was throwing the football around with Brian Hughes, who I was paired with in the final round. No signs of coronavirus, no thoughts of coronavirus, and the next morning I did the journey back to South Africa. As soon as I got back to Johannesburg, I flew to my parents’ home in Durban. The next day, March 10, I went on a little vacation with a group of eight friends, including my girlfriend, Gabriella, to an area about a two-hour drive from Durban. We went on a hike in the Drakensberg Mountains and were gone for two nights. After that, we went to the beach for a bit more holiday. On Saturday, March 14, Gabriella hurt her toe and ripped off her toenail. We thought her toe might be broken, so I took her to the ER early that evening. Once at the hospital, because of what was going on, we were both screened for coronavirus and they asked a bunch of questions about symptoms, such as cough, fever, sneezing, that sort of thing. We said no to all of those, but when they asked if we had been out of the country in the last 21 days, I had to say yes. Hospital policy dictated that I receive a coronavirus test. I totally understood the concern, but it was actually quite frustrating because Gabriella’s toe was hurt, and it was like I was the patient even though I was taking her to the hospital. They were checking me out before helping her, the one who was in pain. Added to my frustration is I had zero symptoms, I was feeling healthy and was trying to get them to take care of Gabriella. They told me the test results would come in a day or two. We returned to Durban on March 15, and since we were tired from the trip, we slept in Tuesday and spent the day at the house. I was sitting on the couch with Gabriella, with my parents – Richard and Suzette – nearby when I got this phone call from a random number. I stepped into another room to take the call, and a doctor told me that she had my coronavirus test results in front of her, and they had come back positive. Again, I displayed no symptoms, and I was quite taken aback. “Are you sure you did the test correctly?� I asked. “So, what do I do?� I asked, and the doctor told me to keep a cool head, understanding that I had been in contact with Gabriella and my parents. We all had to be quarantined for 14 days, and at that point it really didn’t matter if Gabriella or my parents should be tested. They had been exposed, and they were basically ordered to go into quarantine, as well. Looking back, Gabriella and I have since realized that if she hadn’t hurt her toe, we would have never found out about my positive test because neither of us had symptoms. We would have come home and been in close proximity to my family and Gabriella’s. She lives with her brother, sister-in-law and their 7-month-old baby. We would have both gone to our homes and possibly infected our families. After my diagnosis, my first phone call was to my buddy Martin Rowher, one of my close mates and a professional golfer on the Sunshine Tour. I had gone on a 5K run with him Sunday. He was my first phone call because we had run together and sweated together. After that, we informed all the people who went with us on vacation, and I sent an email to Claudio Rivas of the PGA TOUR Latinoamérica staff, letting him know. I also spoke with Patrick Newcomb, who I roomed with in Mazatlan, Matt Ryan and Brian Hughes. I wanted to make sure everybody I was in close contact with knew, and the TOUR told me it would send out a message to all players and staff. I very much appreciated that because I wanted everybody to be aware what was going on. Since that phone call with the doctor, I’ve felt fine. I’ve also thought back about how I may have gotten this virus. I don’t think I got it in Mexico, but I believe it was probably in one of the airports on my way home to South Africa or possibly on the airplane because of the higher risk associated with airline travel and the circulated, filtered air in a closed space. If one person has it on a flight, there is a good chance everybody on the flight got it. But that’s all speculation. I could have gotten it in South Africa at a restaurant. Who knows? I certainly have had to find ways to keep busy during this quarantine period. In the initial first couple of days, I was in contact with so many people letting them know what happened. Then my story hit the news, and people were sending me messages. I also ended up talking to several news outlets. It was quite a big story here in South Africa, so my first two quarantine days were quite hectic. I appreciated the interest and felt like the media were using my story to spread a bit of ease among the public, that I had the disease, but I was feeling fine. The message in each story I participated in was that I am doing what the health professionals were telling me to do, so in that sense it was a good story that maybe gave people some peace of mind, which isn’t a bad thing. Since that initial rush, I’ve gotten into a bit of a routine. I work out each day, doing the same thing a bunch of buddies who are professional golfers are also doing. At the end of our workouts, we all have to do a little video that we post that proves that we did it. In between, I’ve also been getting a lot of rest. Another interesting aspect of my life right now is we don’t have wifi at the house here. My parents are kind of old-fashioned, and they’ve really never needed wifi. We’ve always had TV and a good subscription. So, I haven’t been able to log on to Netflix or other platforms. On the positive side, it’s been nice spending time with family—from a distance (it’s 1.5 meters here)! We got re-tested last Wednesday. Gabriella and I put gloves and facemasks on, and we drove to a drive-through testing facility where you don’t have to get out of your car. They swab your throat or nose, get your sample and you’re on your way. It’s actually quite cool. That’s been it—a drive from home to the testing facility and back home. The good news is we both tested negative, so Gabriella never tested positive although we suspect she did have coronavirus. The negative results were obviously very welcomed, and we’re happy about that as it has allowed us to be a bit more relaxed at home. All along, my main concern from the moment I found out I was positive wasn’t really for myself because I always felt that I would be OK and that Gabriella would be OK. The biggest worry was for my parents. I would have hated to have infected them with COVID-19. That would have been the worst. To show what kind of parents I have, when we were on our way home from Durban after the initial test, I called my dad and asked him if he thought we should maybe check into an Airbnb and wait until the test results came back. He was like, “No, no. You haven’t been home for a while, you’re feeling good. Please come on home.� I was like, all right. For the last 10 days, I’ve mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges, stuff like that. I’m getting pretty good at that—just like when I was living here full time as a kid! Gabriella is still with us. I guess, technically, she is allowed to go home. But she’s staying here because since our self-imposed quarantine, the country entered a 21-day lockdown. We’re in Day 5, with 16 to go. What that means is I’m basically going to spend five weeks inside, not counting the day I went out for my last test or when I go outside to do yard work or swing a golf club. We have quite a big backyard, and I can chip if I want. I’ve been swinging a little every day to remember what a golf club feels like. I’ve been thinking about putting up a net, but I haven’t done that yet. We’ll see. Sitting on the couch sure doesn’t feel quite right to me, though. December and January are when you work so hard for the upcoming season, and then this is the time to really start playing. Instead, we stopped playing after one week. I don’t know how to label these times, really. These are the worst times the whole world has faced in decades. They’re really unprecedented for everybody. We all have to keep cool heads and do what the health professionals are telling us to do, and it’s our job to get on top of this and slide down the infection rate and get the society healthy again so we can all get back doing the things we love to do. For me, that thing is golf.

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