PGA Championship purse up to $17.5M total

SILVIS, Ill. — With 50 mini-tour wins, give or take, to his credit, Eric Cole knows he has game. Having spent 12 years chasing the coveted opportunity to follow his father, Bobby Cole, onto the PGA TOUR, Cole also knows the difference is both vast and minute between the brand of golf played on the minis and the game that succeeds on a major-league level. “You don’t have the depth that you have in like a Korn Ferry event or out here on the PGA TOUR, but you’re still playing against the top few guys that are really, really good — guys who either have had success out here in the past or are capable of it in the future,” said Cole, who has actually lost count of his many mini wins. “It’s kind of crazy how many good young players there are playing the Korn Ferry Tour and just kind of learning the ropes of professional golf, guys are going to have a lot of success out here in the near future.” As he readies at this week’s John Deere Classic for his third PGA TOUR start in the past five months, the 33-year-old Cole is working to build on his nearly two years of competing on Korn Ferry Tour. In March, he advanced through a PGA TOUR Monday qualifying event for the first time in several tries and logged a 22nd-place finish at the Corales Puntacana Resort and Club Championship. Last month, he advanced through two rounds of qualifying for the United States Open and, despite shooting rounds of 77 and 73 and missing the cut at Torrey Pines, learned some major lessons. Thursday at 8:35 p.m., Cole will head off the first tee at TPC Deere Run for his seventh official TOUR round after again successfully playing his way into the field through John Deere Classic Monday qualifying. His hope is to cash out Sunday with enough FedExCup points to finish 200th in the year-end TOUR standings and punch his ticket to the impending Korn Ferry Tour qualifying finals. “Where I’m at on the Korn Ferry points list, with the two seasons in one, it takes a lot to move from 107th where I’m at to top 75,” he said of his decision to compete for a John Deere Classic opportunity. “I already have some non-member FedExCup points from Puntacana, so if I could get in that top 200 that’s kind of where my focus turned.” That’s his hope. His dream, of course, is bigger. Joining defending champion Dylan Frittelli and the 22 others who scored their maiden PGA TOUR victory over 49 Quad Cities events would be a life-changing occurrence. That’s an unspoken dream, however. Although his father is a former British Amateur champion and winner on the 1977 Buick Invitational and his mother, Laura Baugh, was an LPGA Tour Rookie of the Year with a bevy of top 10 finishes on the premier women’s tour, Cole knows well that a place on TOUR is anything but a birthright. Highlighted by a tie for third at the Savannah Golf Championship last October, Cole’s inaugural opportunity on the Korn Ferry TOUR represents the pinnacle of his professional career. Still, it has been a challenge and then some. He has made 14 cuts In 27 starts in a combined season elongated by the pandemic, and Savannah represents his lone top 10. As such, he has gained a keener understanding of the miles-deep talent in a game that’s grown far beyond what his father faced at the advent of the all-exempt TOUR in the 70’s. So, he’ll tee it up Thursday with ample perspective and genuine appreciation. “I’ve definitely had a bit of a grind this year, and then in the past doing more Mondays and mini-tour stuff years ago,” he said. “It’s just something that you have to kind of take the positives of and try and find a way to enjoy it. If you’re not one of those kids coming out of college and really having extreme superstar success, it’s something that you have to kind of relish, take the positives and enjoy it when you can.”

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GREENSBORO, N.C. — Ryan Armour shot a career-best 9-under 61 on Friday for a share of the lead with Webb Simpson after two rounds at the Wyndham Championship. Armour and Simpson were at 13-under 127 halfway through the PGA TOUR’s final event of the regular season. Simpson shot a 64. Henrik Stenson was a stroke behind them after a 66. Ollie Schniederjans and Vaughn Taylor and were 11. Schniederjans shot 63, Taylor had a 66. First-round leader Matt Every followed his 61 with a 72 to slip six strokes off the lead. The field at Sedgefield Country Club is once again full of players trying to force their way off the bubble and qualify for the postseason. The top 125 players on the points list earn berths at THE NORTHERN TRUST next week in New York. At No. 187 on the list, Armour isn’t even close to the bubble. “Could turn your life around,” Armour said. “I had some goals at the beginning of the week. I knew where I stood and, you know, right now the goals are attainable.” The 41-year-old who has yet to win on tour and has bounced between the big tour and the Web.com Tour throughout his 14-year professional career, had nine birdies — five on his first nine holes, then four in a row on Nos. 5-8 — to quickly climb the leaderboard. His round was two strokes better than his previous best of 63 nine years ago in Milwaukee. Simpson, a North Carolina native who won here in 2011 and named his third child Wyndham, put himself in position to contend for his first victory since 2014. He had four birdies on the first six holes of his back nine, pulling even with Armour at 13 under after his birdie on the par-5 15th. “Keep making birdies, stay aggressive and know that there’s plenty of good golfers behind me,” Simpson said. “I got to keep the hammer down.” Stenson, who started on the back nine, offset his lone bogey of the round — he missed a 15-foot par putt on the par-4 18th — with three birdies during the four-hole span between Nos. 4-7. “The game plan is there,” he said. “I got the set-up in the bag to give me those numbers off the tee that we need and it’s just about going out there and playing, continue making birdies and giving myself birdie chances. It’s a low scoring golf course … keep it going.” Among bubble players, No. 125 Geoff Ogilvy played his way to the weekend late in his round. He had birdies on five of his final six holes to move to 4 under for the tournament — good enough to help him beat the cut line of 3 under. And No. 141 Johnson Wagner had the shot of the tournament so far, with an albatross on the par-5 fifth, using a 5-iron to hole out his 215-yard second shot from the right fairway. It was the first albatross at the tournament since Fabian Gomez had one on No. 15 in 2011. “I had a bunch of family that’s up by the green and they started going bananas,” Wagner said. “Pretty clear it had gone in.” Wagner shot a 64 to move to 9 under. Some others weren’t so fortunate: No. 129 Daniel Summerhays was at even par while No. 126 Cameron Tringale was 1 under.

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ERIN, Wis. — To drive along the two-lane roads that wind through Wisconsin pastures on the way to Erin Hills, to see the rolling terrain of a golf course built on 652 acres that opened only 11 years ago, is sure to pose a natural question. What is the U.S. Open doing here? Forget for a moment that very few Americans were even aware of golf at the time, and the same could have been said about that two-lane road that led to Shinnecock Hills when it first hosted the U.S. Open. Then again, that was in 1896. The U.S. Open was in its second year. What raises questions about Erin Hills is that it’s the second time in three years for golf’s second-oldest championship to go somewhere new. And it’s even more pronounced because the U.S. Open now has 121 years of history behind it. “Listen, if you look at our next 10 U.S. Open venues, they are historical, tried-and-true sites that have these wonderful names associated with them,” said Mike Davis, the USGA’s executive director. “But we relish the idea of occasionally introducing a new golf course, because when you think about it, there’s no country in the world that has as many great golf courses as the United States, and we should celebrate that.” What is the U.S. Open doing here? The short answer is the USGA was lacking a good spot in the Midwest. The U.S. Open has been to Hazeltine and Oakland Hills, both now used more by the PGA of America. It went to Olympia Fields in 2003 and found Chicago politics involving the support staff to be tougher to manage than U.S. Open rough. And then along came a wonderful piece of property 40 miles west of Milwaukee purchased by Bob Lang, whose dream was to build a public course that could host a U.S. Open. The USGA saw it for the first time late in 2004, and the wheels were set in motion. Lang’s inspiration was “Open,” the book by John Feinstein on how Bethpage Black came to host the U.S. Open in 2002 (and later in 2009). David Fay, the former USGA executive director, recalls being in Lang’s office in the summer of 2005 when Lang asked if he would sign the book for him. “Here’s hoping a book will be written — in the not-too-distant future (i.e., when we’re both alive to enjoy it!) — on the U.S. Open at Erin Hills,” Fay wrote. They’re both alive, even though Fay retired (he’s working for Fox Sports this week) and Lang had to sell the course a year before it was awarded the Open. Only part of the success of Erin Hills will be based on how it plays this week and the quality of the winner. The real measure is if it returns. Because if it doesn’t, how would that look? “It would have to be a negative,” Fay said Tuesday. “My signature was on all those contracts through 2019. I would never go to a place if I were to think it was never going back. I would be disappointed if we didn’t return.” Chambers Bay in 2015 had all the drama a U.S. Open could want, ending with Jordan Spieth capturing the second leg of the Grand Slam when Dustin Johnson took three putts from 12 feet on the last hole. What it didn’t have was much grass on the greens, a product of either bad weather or bad agronomy, take your pick. It also had one hole where spectators couldn’t watch and others where they needed binoculars. Those can be fixed. Either way, Chambers Bay is on the clock. The idea of going somewhere new is part of U.S. Open history. When the U.S. Open was still in its infancy, there was a stretch from 1916 (Minikahda) through 1930 (Interlachen) went it was held on courses hosting a U.S. Open for the first time. That was to be expected. With more history behind it, the U.S. Open had 22 straight years of going somewhere it had been before, a streak interrupted by Pinehurst No. 2 in 1999. Just like now, there were spurts of new sites. The U.S. Open was at Olympic Club, Oak Hill and Southern Hills for the first time from 1955 to 1958. Those courses now have combined to host the U.S. Open 11 times. There was another stretch like that involving Champions (1969), Hazeltine (1970) and Pebble Beach (1972). Not all of them were love at first sight. “All you need is 80 acres of corn and some cows,” Dave Hill said when he was runner-up at Hazeltine in 1970. Hazeltine is where Payne Stewart won his first U.S. Open, and where Tiger Woods lost his first major when he had the 54-hole lead. It’s where the Americans captured the Ryder Cup last September. It has more than corn and cows. Whatever happens this week at Erin Hills, it’s worth trying to look it at through a wide lens. “What Erin Hills doesn’t have is history yet,” Davis said. “But everybody had to start somewhere.”

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