Steve Stricker, Sean O’Hair team to win QBE Shootout

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – Cameron Champ’s driving distance may be unprecedented, but Davis Love III can relate to the advantage Champ has over his peers. Three decades ago, Love was the rookie whose length was the talk of the TOUR. He led in driving distance during his debut season, averaging 286 yards off the tee. That’s almost 50 yards less than Champ’s eye-popping figure this season, but in 1986 Love was 9 percent longer than the TOUR average (262 yards). Champ is averaging 335 yards, nearly 13 percent longer than the TOUR’s early-season average of 297.1 yards. They played together Thursday at The RSM Classic and, as testament to the myriad ways golf can be played, Love came out one-stroke ahead. Love, 54, is the tournament host and a World Golf Hall of Famer. Champ, 23, is just five starts into his rookie season. The living legend sits tied for fourth at 5 under while the electrifying rookie is tied for seventh place after carding a 68. “It was fun. A lot of memories of when I was the rookie long hitter,� Love said. “No 3-wood, that was pretty cool because that was me in 1986.� The tree-lined Plantation Course was protected from the high winds that blew in off the Atlantic and made the other course in use this week, Sea Island’s Seaside layout, play a stroke over par. The cold weather is expected to continue as Love and Champ tackle Seaside on Friday. Love called Thursday’s weather the worst he’s seen in tournament history. Love would be the oldest winner in TOUR history if he could finish atop the leaderboard on Sunday. Champ would put an exclamation point on a breakout fall season. He also would tighten his grip on the Rookie of the Year award, for which he is the early front-runner. Champ already won this season’s Sanderson Farms Championship and finished 10th at the Mayakoba Golf Classic. He is ninth in the FedExCup standings. Love and Champ had Thursday’s largest gallery. Fans didn’t brave Thursday’s cold temperature just to see the long-hitting rookie. They also came for Love, who doubles as the tournament host and is a longtime resident of the area. Champ started the round with a double-bogey on the first hole. He played the final four holes of his front nine in 5 under, though. He birdied Nos. 15-17 before chipping in for eagle on the par-5 18th. He made two birdies on his back nine before closing his round with a bogey. Champ’s comeback illustrated the maturity that has helped him succeed in little more than a year as a pro. That attribute may be just as important as his ballyhooed driving distance. “I think prior in my golfing career, I probably would have went very south from there, but we had 17 holes and plenty of golf to make it up,� Champ said. Love had four birdies and two bogeys on his front nine, then added three birdies on his back nine. He has challenged for his hometown TOUR title just once before. He shared the 54-hole lead with Jim Furyk in 2012 before shooting a 1-over 71 in the final round. Love showed promising signs two weeks ago, though. He led the field at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Strokes Gained: Approach. He was second-to-last in Strokes Gained: Putting, though. “I putted well today and it saved me,� he said. The longest club in the bag can draw inordinate attention, but the shortest one should not be overlooked.   

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PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – The birdie putt on the seventh hole Sunday was from 24 1/2 feet. When it dropped, Si Woo Kim knew he stood alone atop THE PLAYERS Championship leaderboard. Then something unexpected happened in the pressure-packed environment on one of golf’s most challenging tests. Kim got comfortable. Wait, let’s amend that. Kim – the youngest active player on the PGA TOUR — got comfortable. Comfort is not supposed to be an option, not here, not at TPC Sawgrass, and especially not for 21-year-olds with limited experience in these matters. THE PLAYERS Stadium Course is meant to rattle your cages, test your mettle, fray your nerves. But on a Sunday afternoon when the heat is usually ramped up, Kim became the coolest player on the course. Calm. In control. “Once he got the lead,” said his caddie, Mark Carens, “that was the least pressure he felt.” So for his final 11 holes, while his chasers struggled to keep pace and make him sweat, the Korean-born Kim — who now lives in Dallas, Texas – offered up a steady ship, deftly relying on his scrambling ability to bail him out of any precarious situations. He never stumbled, eventually producing a bogey-free 69 and a 10-under total – good enough to make him the youngest champ in PLAYERS history. The statistic that most reflects his winning round was easy to find: Kim missed 10 greens in regulation, and successfully scrambled each time. “If you are on your game and playing well, that’s the things you do,” said Louis Oosthuizen, his playing partner Sunday. “You up-and-down when you’re in trouble. You don’t give shots away. If you can do that around this golf course, you can outscore everyone. “And he played like someone that was doing it for five or six years, like it was just another round of golf. … Never once did he look flustered.” That’s surprising, given his age. But then, he seems to be a player who’s ahead of the curve. Kim gained his TOUR card through q-school at age 17 1/2 – and then had to wait a half-year before reaching the mandatory age of 18 to play on TOUR. After spending two years on the Web.com Tour, he regained his TOUR card for the 2015-16 season and made a big early impression on his caddie. In his fourth start, he opened with consecutive bogey-free rounds (sound familiar?) en route to a tie for 17th. “It was unbelievable,” Carens said. Then at the Wyndham Championship last August, in just his 23rd start on TOUR, Kim shot a second-round 60 – he missed a 50-foot putt on his final hole for a 59. He eventually won that week in convincing fashion, by five strokes in a final round that seemed eerily familiar to how THE PLAYERS unfolded. Once Kim snagged the lead, he never let it go. He credits the week at Sedgefield with helping him deal with Sunday’s pressure. He said knowing he had a two-year exemption on TOUR freed him up to be more aggressive. (Of course, by winning THE PLAYERS, he now has another five years.) “Because of that experience,” Kim said through his interpreter, “I could be relieved and I could be very stable. I just focused on myself and I didn’t try to think about others’ scores.” There wasn’t much to think about, honestly. Oosthuizen and Ian Poulter supplied the most pressure, both making their biggest moves at the par-5 11th. Oosthuizen eagled the hole to go to 7 under; Poulter birdied it to reach 9 under. But Poulter quickly gave the stroke back on the next hole and Oosthuizen stumbled with consecutive bogeys. Both had the edge on Kim in experience, especially in dealing with intense situations – Oosthuizen’s an Open champ, Poulter’s a Ryder Cup star. But they could not match Kim on Sunday at TPC Sawgrass, instead finishing tied for second. “You have to take your hat off,” Poulter said. “You have to respect some good golf, and that’s exactly what he’s done.” The performance this week speaks for itself, but in some ways, Kim’s win was most unexpected. Consider his Strokes Gained numbers. Ranked 205th on TOUR Off-the-Tee. Ranked 203rd in Approach-the-Green. Ranked 183rd in Putting. Ranked 204th Tee-to-Green. Ranked 203rd Total. His only solid category was Around-the-Green, in which he ranked 41st. The Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee called it “perhaps the greatest upset you’ll ever see” going strictly on statistics. Yet, added Chamblee, TPC Sawgrass “puts everybody on edge, pretty much turns it into a scrambling contest – and he won it.” But perhaps we shouldn’t view this win as unexpected. Perhaps Kim is the next great Korean star, following in the footsteps of another PLAYERS champ, K.J. Choi. After all, at age 21, he’s done something that not even his fellow 20-somethings Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy can claim – winning at TPC Sawgrass. Unlike Spieth and McIlroy, though, Kim must one day put his golf career on hold to fulfill the mandatory military service for his country. Considering how he played this week, how bright his future is now, it will be a shame to see him go. Hopefully it won’t happen soon. Plenty of opportunities – big opportunities – await, including the Presidents Cup later this year. The International Team appears to have a new star to lean on. “He’s still young and he was just so calm today,” said Oosthuizen, an International fixture. “He’s going to be great to have as a teammate.” Having just spent 18 holes with the young man, it’s evident Oosthuizen would rather be playing with him than against him.

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Kirk Triplett, he of the ever-present bucket hat, has had better years, golf-wise. He has three wins on the PGA TOUR and eight on PGA TOUR Champions - two of those in 2019. But never had Triplett, 58, made news like he did when he put a Black Lives Matter sticker on his golf bag at the Bridgestone SENIOR PLAYERS Championship at Firestone Country Club in August. "Just to say that I personally hear what's going on and I'm in agreement that issues of racial equality and social justice need to be addressed," he says of his decision to apply the sticker after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others. It will remain on the bag as he finishes the season close to home at this week's Charles Schwab Championship at Phoenix Country Club. Sometimes the biggest statements start with the smallest gestures, and so it was with Triplett, who estimates he has given somewhere between 10 and 20 media interviews since his BLM sticker caught people's attention. Mostly, he says, the response has been positive. Sometimes, he admits, it's been virulently negative. But he's not alone in the cause. At the TOUR Championship in September, PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan pledged $100 million to support racial and social justice causes over the next 10 years. Charles Howell III is offering performance-based bonuses on the Advocates Professional Golf Association Tour, which aims to bolster diversity at all levels of golf. Then there's Triplett's large, square sticker, displayed prominently under his name on his PING staff bag. The golfer and his family - wife Cathi; twin biological sons Conor and Sam, 24; and adoptees Alexis, 20, and Kobe, 18 - all had a say in the sticker, and they all agreed that the time was right. Kobe is African American, which took on new meaning given the high-profile events of last spring and summer, plus the fact that he had recently gotten his driver's license. What if he had an encounter with the police? What if someone misinterpreted a gesture or a comment? Who would deescalate? What would that look like? Who would be nominally responsible for a safe outcome, and on whose shoulders would it actually fall? The complexity and urgency of these questions, and the fact that they would land on Kobe as opposed to Conor, Sam and Alexis, struck Triplett as unfair. "We talked about it at home during the pandemic," he says. "I had a lot of time off, and at the behest of a couple of my kids - the sticker was actually bought by one of my older sons. Because the message in my family is often, ‘OK, you're talking a good game, what are you going to do?' So he gave me the sticker and said, ‘Here's this in case you're ready to do something.'" Triplett was. There was no freighted ceremony - he just put the sticker on the bag. It didn't take long to get noticed. "I really didn't consider that there was going to be all of this media interest, and that's because I was involved in my own personal journey," he says. "To understand that Kobe had to behave differently than my other three kids really brought home the point for me that hey, there's some racism there. It made me want to participate in some way and send a message to the African American community that hey, I hear what you're saying for the first time. "I'm 58 years old and just beginning to understand," he continues. "It's not an easy thing to get. When you understand it's different, you go, Oh, this is a problem." Online commenters have occasionally seemed intent on a back-and-forth that Triplett says he isn't interested in having. On a more personal level, some have told him that while it's great that he adopted an African American son, he's gone the wrong way with the sticker. "That helped me understand the frustration level that a lot of African American people must feel," he says. "It gave me an idea for the first time what the word systemic means. Dealing with overt racism is probably significantly easier because it has a face, it has a person that's doing something that's pointing right at you. But when the system is doing it and there's no face, like this is just kind of the way things are, where do you go with that? How do you explain that to people? And I just got a little teeny, tiny part of that." He will peel the sticker off, eventually. He wants to do more than make a statement; he wants to take a more hands-on, boots-on-the-ground approach to the problems of injustice. "Golfers are predisposed to help those in their community that need help," he says. "The first step is acknowledging that there are issues that need to be addressed. Some of it is opportunity. If you walk into a golf shop, you don't very often see an African American guy standing behind the counter, even. You need more penetration into all aspects of golf." Although son Sam, who played for Northwestern, is trying to make it as a pro golfer, Kobe isn't really into golf. He's more interested in computers. Whenever Triplett asks his youngest son if he wants to go to the course, he gets the same answer: "Maybe tomorrow, Dad." That's fine for an 18-year-old high school senior contemplating nine holes or hitting a bucket of balls. But for Triplett and the TOUR, for Howell and too many others to count, that answer was no longer sufficient on the issue of racial justice. It was time. It was past time. For them, as it was for so many Americans and others, tomorrow was today. The sticker is just the start.

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