Kevin Tway taps in to childhood Kapalua memories

Due to logistical challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship is now the WGC-Workday Championship at The Concession, a Jack Nicklaus/Tony Jacklin co-design in the Bradenton-Sarasota area in Southwest Florida. The tournament will kick off a four-week Florida Swing that also features the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, THE PLAYERS Championship and The Honda Classic. The World Golf Championships event will be staged without general admission ticketed spectators but will have a limited number of club members and invited guests on-site for competition days. It will also include a Wednesday pro-am, plus honorary observers. Here are five things about The Concession Golf Club: 1. It's named for an act of sportsmanship. Nicklaus conceded a 2-foot putt to Jacklin on the final hole of the 1969 Ryder Cup. The gesture, known as "the concession," guaranteed the first tie in Ryder Cup history. The United States still retained the Cup with the tie, but it would have won the Cup outright had Jacklin, winner of the 1969 Open Championship and 1970 U.S. Open, missed the short putt. "I don't believe you would have missed that, but I'd never give you the opportunity in these circumstances," Jacklin recalled Nicklaus telling him. Nicklaus has personally designed some 300 courses worldwide, Jacklin seven. The Concession, which features no houses lining the course and where "the natural setting is the star," was named "Best New Private Course" by Golf Digest when it opened in 2006. It is the only design collaboration between World Golf Hall of Famers Nicklaus and Jacklin. It also features a par-3 course, The Gimme, that golf.com called one of the world's 25 best. 2. Some of the top players know it well. Bryson DeChambeau won the 2015 NCAA Championship at The Concession, becoming the first SMU golfer to capture the NCAA individual title, by one stroke over C.T. Pan. DeChambeau also won the 2015 U.S. Amateur, becoming just the fifth player (Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods, Ryan Moore) to capture both titles in the same year. Among DeChambeau's seven PGA TOUR titles he has never won a WGC event. 3. The par-5s actually have teeth. The Tampa Bay Business Journal lists The Concession as having both the highest course rating (76.7) and slope (155) in the Tampa Bay area. The short, dogleg-right eighth is its signature hole and is recognized as one of the best par-4s in the state. It features water that comes in at the front of the green, which places a high emphasis on the approach shot. The course is known for its spectacular bunkering, exciting green contours and especially its stellar par 5s, which make up four of the five most difficult holes on the course. The most memorable of these is perhaps the risk/reward 13th. The tee shot is a forced carry over water and the green is guarded by the course's most expansive bunker complex. The par-5 seventh hole is 606 yards long and the No. 1 handicap. 4. Long Islanders may be reminded of another course. Nicklaus worked on this course while he and Tom Doak were doing Sebonack Golf Club, another highly regarded collaboration in Southampton, New York, and later said the small, heavily contoured greens at The Concession were inspired by those at Sebonack. 5. Hanging on won't be easy. Par is a good score on the 486-yard, par-4 finishing hole, which features a narrow tree-lined opening off the tee followed by an approach shot to an elevated green that is guarded by bunkers in the front and water to the right. Players will likely contend with a headwind on the 18th.

Click here to read the full article…

Jordan Spieth has continued his form resurgence with a stunning hole-out eagle helping the former FedExCup champion to a tidy 7-under 65 in the opening round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Spieth tied his personal best score at Pebble Beach Golf Links on Thursday, matching the third-round 65 he shot in 2017 on his way to victory. The silky round comes hot off the heels of going close to breaking a near four-year win drought at last week's Waste Management Phoenix Open. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Acclaimed artist designs Spieth’s bag for Pebble Beach The shot of the day came on the par-4 10th when Spieth took dead aim with a sand wedge from 113 yards. The ball bounced just short of the pin, hopped behind it, and then spun back into the cup. Spieth was sitting just two under at the turn and briefly headed to the wrong tee box on 10 just prior to the super shot. "We played the pro-am from the U.S. Open (back) tee. So, I walked back from 9 thinking that was going to be one of the more difficult tee shots and then I saw the tee boxes were up, and so I kind of got a little juiced about that," Spieth chuckled. "It was a bonus for it to obviously go in. I saw it drop and then there were three people on the balcony of the house in the distance and a couple volunteers near the green where hands went up. It’s still weird having a moment like that where you’re used to kind of a loud roar and it’s just so kind of calm and quiet." The moment catapulted Spieth towards a further three birdies over the closing five holes to leave him in a tie for fourth, just three shots behind Patrick Cantlay's incredible 10-under 62. Importantly, Spieth was able to go low without the need to make several long putts. With his climb back from swing troubles well documented, the Texan held the co-lead after 54 holes in Phoenix thanks to a Saturday 61, but that was off the back of making over 125-feet of putts. He faded on Sunday to finish fourth as his accuracy continued to be wayward, but the magic on the green diminished. On Thursday at Pebble Beach, Spieth needed just shy of 62-feet of putts to drop and was happy to rely on a stock punch draw with his 4-iron off many tees. He hit 15 of 18 greens and gained over two strokes on the field in Strokes Gained: Approach. "Maybe the best sign of good things to come of any stat," Spieth said afterwards of his ability to score without a reliance on his flat stick. "Pebble presents a lot of precision and you have to really trust what you’re doing. Early in that round you really have got to take advantage. I didn’t try and go force those birdies. I just kind of tried to hit to the right spots early and kind of got settled into the round and then I was kind of rewarded on number 10 with a hole-out eagle just from playing the right style of golf before that." Spieth is looking for his first victory since the 2017 Open Championship.

Click here to read the full article…

When John Feinstein sits down to write a book, the best-selling author has a single focus in mind. “What I’ve always tried to do is not make headlines but explain headlines,â€� he says. And those headlines have been an extremely diverse collection. Feinstein has written about the two teams who played in the 1995 Army-Navy game (a book that is his personal favorite), as well as Bobby Knight and his 1985-86 Indiana basketball team, probably his best-known tome. He even delved into the December 1977 fight between the Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Lakers when Kermit Washington landed a punch that left Rudy Tomjanovich bleeding and unconscious. And that’s why when Rory tweeted when the book came out … that reading the book he felt like he was in both team rooms, that I thought it was kind of the ultimate compliment. And of the 26 non-fiction books he has written, nine have been about golf, including the most recent, “The First Major: The Inside Story of the 2016 Ryder Cup,” which was released in October. That’s more than any other sport Feinstein has researched and speaks to an enduring fascination with the game that began when he worked at Gardiner’s Bay Country Club on the eastern end of Long Island as a teenager. “I loved the esthetics of it,” he says. “I loved the fact that you could go out and practice and play on your own. I used to get off work in the summer at about 7 and would just grab a cart and go play nine holes by myself before dark, and I had the whole golf course to myself. “I always loved that.” The first person Feinstein told that he was going to write “The First Major” was Davis Love III. The conversation – the first of many over the next 18 months — came on the same day in 2015 when the soon-to-be-named World Golf Hall of Famer was selected as captain of the U.S. Team. “He said, ‘Oh, here we go again’ because he’s been involved in so many of my golf books, and that’s the great thing, though, (because) he completely understands what I’m doing and what I’m trying to do,” Feinstein recalls. So many, indeed. In fact, Feinstein’s first golf book, “A Good Walk Spoiled,” begins with Love standing in the 18th fairway at The Belfry, a bundle of nerves, knowing that his match with Constantino Rocca would decide the 1993 matches. Feinstein actually wanted to write his latest book two years earlier when Tom Watson was the U.S. captain. The two had become close when Feinstein wrote “Caddy for Life” about Bruce Edward’s struggle with ALS. As he pitched the book to Watson, Feinstein hoped to get access similar to what he had when he wrote “Season on the Brink” about the volatile Knight and his Hoosiers. Feinstein had essentially embedded himself with the Indiana team that year and he hoped to tell the story of Watson’s American team from the inside out, as well. “Tom is always honest,” Feinstein says. “And he said, I know it would be a great book, but if one guy on the team came to me afterwards and said, you know, having John in there was a distraction and we lost 14-13 1/2 or something, I’d never forgive myself, and I understood that.” So instead of focusing on the Americans in 2014, Feinstein decided to write about both teams at the 2016 event. Over the next two years he worked to develop relationships with as many of the players as possible, as well as both captains and their assistants. He’d let them take him inside the ropes and behind the scenes instead. “And that’s why when Rory tweeted when the book came out … that reading the book he felt like he was in both team rooms, that I thought it was kind of the ultimate compliment,” Feinstein says. The author was almost overwhelmed by the reception and cooperation he received in researching the book. Take his quest for a sit-down with Jordan Spieth, for example. “The first thing that happened actually that was funny and tells you a lot about Jordan, he had to postpone twice for legit reasons, and when we sat down, the first thing he did was he apologized for postponing, and I said, Jordan, come on, you’re doing me a favor giving me this time, and he said, well, aren’t you doing me a favor putting me in your book?” Feinstein says. “I’m like, really? Jordan needed to be in my book like I need to gain another 20 pounds. And so I laughed. And so then we sat and we talked for a long time, and at the end, like I said, I said, I’m going to need to circle back to you, and he said, yeah, yeah, let’s just make it simple, take my cell phone number and text me whenever you want to talk. You can’t ask for more than that.” From Oct. 2 of last year, when the matches at Hazeltine ended in a hard-fought U.S. victory, to that Thanksgiving, Feinstein estimates he touched base with 16 or 17 of the players to get their take on the event, as well as Love and his European counterpart, Darren Clark. He also interviewed all of Love’s vice captains with the exception of Tiger Woods. “But I had so much stuff from other guys on him, talking about how obsessed he became, and to me people always say, what was your biggest surprise,” Feinstein says. “My biggest surprise was definitely how into the whole thing Tiger became, especially given his past Ryder Cup participation when he was clearly just there because he thought he had to be.” Even as he was in the midst of those follow-up interviews, Feinstein started writing some of the background and historical chapters the week after he got back from Minneapolis. The 320-page book was finished on Feb. 1 of this year. “I’ve always said my newspaper training comes in because I can write fast and I can write on a deadline,” he noted. “I knew it was going to be a fast turnaround, but I was mentally ready to deal with it.” While the competition is at the center of the book, the anecdotes Feinstein gleaned from the coaches and players are what sets it apart. Two of his favorites involve Clarke and Phil Mickelson, two long-time friends as well as keen competitors. Clarke lost his first wife Heather to breast cancer shortly before the Ryder Cup matches in 2006. Mickelson’s wife Amy also has fought the disease, and among Clarke’s memories from that emotional year came at the opening ceremonies when members of the two teams walked in together. “That year it was wife, player, player, wife, two from each side walking side by side, and Darren was supposed to walk in with Amy and Phil, and of course he did not have a partner,” Feinstein says. “And so when the music started and they were about to walk in, Amy walked around Phil, got in between Phil and Darren, took both their hands and walked in with them that way. “And of course Darren never forget that, and Phil said that when Amy was diagnosed, the first phone call he got was from Darren saying, you know, I’m here for you.” Another favorite story in Feinstein’s book came from Love, who remembers seeing Clarke and Mickelson deep in conversation into the wee hours on Sunday night after the U.S. victory. “(He was) talking about sitting and watching Darren and Phil talking together at 2 or 3 in the morning and thinking, this is what Sam Ryder would have wanted the Ryder Cup to be, these guys who have been through so much more together than a golf match, coming back together after competing against one another for three days and sitting around and telling stories together,” Feinstein recalls.

Click here to read the full article…