Lexi Thompson on her mental and emotional break from golf: “I was just struggling with myself”

When Billy Hurley III played in the 2005 Walker Cup, his teammates included Matt Every, Brian Harman and J.B. Holmes, all players he now competes against regularly on the PGA TOUR. But his path to the TOUR decidedly different than theirs. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 2004 and had a five-year service commitment before he could even think about making his living playing golf. That Navy career took Hurley to Pearl Harbor as well as to the Persian Gulf, where he served aboard the USS Chung-Hoon, which is a 10,000-ton, guided missile destroyer that was charged with protecting Iraqi oil platforms. And often, Hurley was the man driving the ship, winning several handling awards along the way and even navigating the Suez Canal. Hurley, who competes this week in THE PLAYERS Championship, focused on a career at the helm early on in part because he thought his eyesight would preclude him from flying. Even when the Navy decided to allow pilots who had LASIK surgery midway through his stint at the Academy, Hurley stayed the course – literally. “We have ships at the Naval Academy that we use for training just there in the Severn River and Chesapeake Bay,â€� Hurley says. “And you know, the first time doing that I knew I was pretty good at it and just really enjoyed it. “It was just a lot of fun.â€� After graduation, Hurley was selected to be a surface warfare office – and learning to drive the ship was the first order of business. He says it normally takes nine months to a year, depending on sea time, to prove competency, which is followed by an oral examination by the captain, XO and other senior officers. “That usually consists of a lot of standard kind of questions and then some situational kind of questions and then some emergency procedures to kind of make sure that you know what you would do … in an equipment failure,â€� he explains. “There’s very regimented steps.â€� “It’s already laid out. It’s not guesswork. It’s if this happens, you do one, two, three, four. If that fixes it, great. If it doesn’t, then you do five, six, seven, eight. So you kind of have to have all that memorized and know that really like the back of your hand.â€� The destroyer, which in Hurley’s case was 509-and-a-half feet long, has two rudders and two huge screw propellers. The rudders can’t operate independently except in an extreme emergency. The screws are a different story, though. “So that’s obviously just like driving a speed boat on the lake, you turn the wheel to go left, you go left,â€� Hurley says. “But the unique thing about having two propellers is that you can operate those in different ways to, to kick the ship or back the ship up in a different angle. “So we call it twisting the ship where you could make one of the propellers go backwards and one go forward and the ship will kind of nearly just twist in place if you do it right.â€� Hurley, who picked up his first TOUR victory at the 2016 Quicken Loans National about an hour from Annapolis where the Naval Academy is located, says you can even make the 10,000-ton behemoth go straight sideways by twisting the screws and doing the opposite with the rudders. “It’s really cool,â€� he says. “It’s really cool.â€� The trip through the Suez Canal, according to Hurley, was more of a management situation “where you’re just kind of making sure you’re in between the buoys and stay in the middle.â€� Once, though, he was the man giving the orders as the destroyer got underway from Pearl Harbor without using any tugboats. “We twisted and twisted and kind of just came off the pier and then, and then drove out of the slip,â€� Hurley recalls. “So that was, that was one of the cooler things. “I think I made the captain a little nervous when I told him I wanted to try. Sir, I think I can do this without tugs. He’s like, y-e-a-h, I know you can. (And I was like) well, no, I can, like, we can do this without tugs. So we had the tugs obviously there … but we didn’t end up using any of their help. So that was really fun.â€� So does driving a car seem easy now that he’s maneuvered massive destroyers through the Red Sea and the South China sea? “Honestly, it’s very, very, very different,â€� Hurley says. “The thing about a ship is when you turn the wheel, it doesn’t just go. There’s a little lag time. So unlike driving a car where you can do nearly what you want immediately, you have to be constantly thinking ahead. “Then you have wind and you have current and you have all these other things that you’re paying attention to as well, that can help you if you do it right and can make it really, really difficult if you do it wrong.â€� Not that Hurley made too many mistakes.

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ORLANDO, Fla. – Twenty years have passed since Padraig Harrington first faced Tiger Woods on the weekend at a major, and the Irishman has kept a close watch ever since. He doesn’t think Woods is finished. Harrington believes Woods can win another major if he can just get to the final nine holes. “You’d never run Tiger off,” Harrington said, drawing from the two hours he watched Woods play in a 10-hole made-for-TV exhibition last weekend. “But I actually think he might be in a better place than I had thought.” Never mind that the 15-time major champion turns 47 at the end of the month, or that Woods has had as many — if not more — surgeries than he has won majors. Plantar fasciitis in his right foot kept Woods from playing the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas two weeks ago, and he wouldn’t be playing with his 13-year-old son in the PNC Championship this weekend if not for carts being allowed. No matter. “There’s two things that make a golfer — how talented they are and how resilient they are,” Harrington said Thursday after storms washed out the PNC Championship pro-am. “Usually you get very talented, not very resilient; or you get very resilient and not very talented. Tiger, through his whole career, has both of those, which is very unusual. “So I would never doubt.” His views were contrary to Colin Montgomerie saying earlier this week on a podcast he doesn’t think Woods can win again. “Listen, yes, he’s great,” Montgomerie said. “But Tiger doesn’t have to now just get back to the standard he was performing at then. He has to improve it. The standard is improving all the time, and there’s not one or two guys that can beat him now. There’s 22 guys that can beat him. So, it’s Tiger trying to get not back to where he was but to get to a standard he’s never been at before and I don’t think that’s possible. “I can’t see that happening. I’d love it to happen because it’s great for the game. I would love him to win. But I just can’t see it happening.” Woods has played all of 172 holes this year in tournaments — 162 while walking. He tied for 48th in the Masters, withdrew after the third round of the PGA Championship on a cold day at Southern Hills and he missed the cut at St. Andrews. He was in a cart for the team match last Saturday with Rory McIlroy as his partner. Woods said in the Bahamas that “I don’t have much left in this leg,” referring to the right leg that was shattered in a February 2021 car crash in Los Angeles. Harrington and Woods first squared off in the third round of the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black in 2002 — Woods won his second straight major — and they have been friends since then, with Woods having respect for the Irishman’s work ethic. Harrington used to say his goal was to see where he stood through 63 holes, and then show what he has on the final nine. He won three majors in 2007 and 2008. What inspired him from watching 10 holes in the match last week was the speed Woods showed in his swing, which he thought was enough power to keep up with today’s generation and to at least get him to the back nine. “The little bit of extra speed will help him because in the first 63 holes … you know, who would want to be coming down the stretch against Tiger?” Harrington said. “You know he’s capable of doing anything at that stage. I think he’s in a better position to get himself into that last nine holes.” It only takes 27 holes to get to the last nine at the PNC Championship, which Woods is playing for the third time. Woods and Charlie, now 13, finished one shot behind John Daly and his son a year ago. The competition can be serious at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club Orlando, though this is mostly about time spent among fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. With Woods involved, everything always feels bigger, however much time he has left. “I would say we are never really going to know how much is in there because he just continues to do more than we thought he would ever be able to do,” Stewart Cink said. “He continues to defy really all conceivability.”

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NAPA, Calif. – The first birdie of the new season was a tie, more or less. Stephan Jaeger, who was in the first group off the front nine at the Fortinet Championship, made a 2 at the par-3 second hole. Wyndham Clark, in the second group off the back nine, birdied 10. Maybe the golf gods can call it. The first bogey was a tie between Mother Nature (90-minute fog delay) and an announcer’s botched first-tee intro of Tano Goya, a 34-year-old rookie who finished 19th on the Korn Ferry Tour Finals Eligibility Points List. He’s from Alta Gracia, Argentina, 46 kilometers southwest of Cordoba, but was introduced as being from “Argentina, Argentina.” People around the tee laughed, and Goya shrugged and nodded. “It’s OK, it’s funny,” said Goya, who estimates he’s played golf in more than 40 countries but has made a home in Jacksonville, Florida, since 2020. “It happened on the Korn Ferry, too.” Two more Goya factoids: He rocks those groovy pants that taper at the ankle in the manner of South African Erik van Rooyen (and others), and he and his caddie always wear matching shirts. Brand: Full Wedge. It’s to the point where if they don’t go matchy-matchy, Goya said, people ask what’s wrong. Welcome to get-to-know-you week on TOUR, with 27 rookies in the field for the first of 47 events on the new season, and five of them (Trevor Cone, Nicolas Echavarria, Harrison Endycott, Vincent Norrman, Kevin Roy) making their first-ever TOUR start. Cone’s mother was in tears. “He’s earned this,” she said. Norrman’s father had flown all the way from Stockholm, Sweden. Philip Knowles was introduced on the first tee and smiled at the whoops from his crew of supporters, including his pregnant wife, Olivia, whom he met through high school golf. They were teammates; she played on the boys’ team. “I used to outdrive him,” she said. “Used to.” S.H. Kim shot 66 for the best round among the rookies. He’s won four tournaments worldwide, biggest among them the 2021 Japan PGA Championship, one of five Japan Golf Tour majors. Defending champ Max Homa shot his third straight 65 here. Justin Lower shot 63 and said he’s just happy to have a TOUR card after sneaking into the top 125 after his rookie season. Another standout was not a rookie but second-year PGA TOUR pro Sahith Theegala, who opened with a 67. Absent presumed Rookie of the Year Cameron Young, Theegala is the gold standard to which all rookies at the Fortinet should aspire. After posting five top-10 finishes, among them heartbreakers at the WM Phoenix Open (T3) and Travelers Championship (T2), Theegala was one of two rookies (with Young) to make the TOUR Championship last season. And he’s already looking like a super sophomore at the Fortinet, where he racked up eight birdies and three bogeys and was four off the early lead. “Yeah, it was great, I was playing well all year,” he said. “The results maybe didn’t really show it, but I made a ton of cuts, played a lot of solid golf. I feel like this year’s even more of kind of a – I use the term free-roll a lot. This year seems to be even more of a free-roll for me because I got the nerves of being a rookie and certain expectations out of the way, and now it’s my second year and I’m playing all these events again for the second time. “I feel like I have more flexibility and I’ve learned so much the last year,” added Theegala, who also benefits from a recent change that provides a two-year exemption to TOUR Championship qualifiers. One lesson: He can’t tee it up every single week, even though he’s only 24. After playing 32 tournaments last season, Theegala took a seven-day break, his longest since 2019, and didn’t touch a club. “I got the itch back pretty quickly after that,” he said. Players with the itch were all over Silverado, what with so many getting their first taste of TOUR membership. Taylor Montgomery, a two-time Nevada Open champion from Las Vegas, had nine top-10 finishes in his last 12 Korn Ferry Tour starts last season to earn his TOUR card. He opened with a 4-under 68 at the Fortinet thanks largely to needing just 23 putts and ranking first in Strokes Gained: Putting despite battling nerves. “It’s probably one of the most nervous times I’ve had on the golf course, for some reason,” he said. Surely, someone pressed, he must have some idea why. “Don’t know,” Montgomery said. “First PGA TOUR event as a pro? I have no idea. I don’t know. It’s what I do for a living. I shouldn’t be that nervous.” Goya, the Argentinian, was one of 35 players who came back to the course Friday morning to complete the first round. A second fresh start was good for him as he birdied two of his remaining three holes to card a 1-over 73. “When the pandemic hit, we didn’t have many tournaments in Latin America, so my goal was to try to get to America,” he said. “To at least get on the mini-tours, try to get competitive, so that when tournaments came back, at least I’d be ready.” With seven international victories on the European Tour, European Challenge Tour, Argentina Tour, and Southern Africa Tour, the Korn Ferry Tour grad is ready. His caddie is ready. Their matching shirts are ready. Mile upon mile of fairways, row upon row of tiny, open squares on the scorecards – it’s all in front of him now. It’s all in front of all of them.

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