The First Look: CIMB Classic

CROMWELL, Conn. – Sometimes, Chelsea Hoffmann wakes up and thinks she’s on a houseboat, what with the metronomic sound of the waves lapping at the shore. She and her husband, Morgan, and their service dog, a Doberman named Yama, are bunking in their 35-foot Sunseeker RV this week, and it’s parked in the backyard of friends of theirs in Old Saybrook. Friends, meaning the parents of Hoffmann’s caddie, Sam “Ghost” Spector. “It’s beautiful,” Morgan said after shooting a 2-under-par 68 in the first round of the Travelers Championship, his final start on a medical extension, where he needs a solo fourth or better. “You wake up and look around and it’s just water. The birds are chirping. It’s very peaceful.” Hoffmann, you might recall, was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in 2016 and left the TOUR three years later. Frustrated with the limitations of western medicine, he began a healing journey that has included psychedelics, yoga, surfing, veganism, breathwork, and a grape cleanse. He’s gone from Nepal for ayahuasca (hallucinogenic medicine) to buying a home in Costa Rica for its healthful Blue Zone attributes. He’s not the same guy who reached world No. 1 as an amateur, was an All-American at Oklahoma State, and played the TOUR fulltime from 2013-17. And yet … “I’m not ready to just be a weekend golfer,” he said while drinking a smoothie outside the clubhouse earlier this week. “I’ve added 7 mph clubhead speed. It’s exciting, because when I left the TOUR, I was down to 104 with the driver, which is not ideal. I’ve seen the biggest jump in the last month and a half, in the gym, lifting hard, eating a lot, getting confidence back.” The smoothie, incidentally, is about the only thing Hoffmann can eat from player dining. He limits his menu to raw food until dinner, when he allows for cooked vegetables like spaghetti squash, lentils, spinach, sweet potatoes, and mushrooms. He and Chelsea make meals in the RV, where they were Wednesday night, checking out the definition of Morgan’s right pectoral muscle. That muscle began to atrophy as early as his junior year at Oklahoma State, and he spent much of his old TOUR career searching high and low for a diagnosis. He was poked and prodded and sampled. Doctors hypothesized, equivocated, disappeared. For years, they had no answers. Once they did, and he was diagnosed with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, Hoffmann was told there wasn’t much he could do. He disagreed, embarking on a holistic journey in which he barely touched a club. That he has returned to compete against the world’s best has been an inspiration. “He’s getting notes from players and caddies in his locker,” Chelsea said. “Because everyone is on their own healing journey.” The most sensational part of Hoffmann’s journey, the one that fairly jumped off the pages of a Golf Digest profile, was the hallucinogenic ayahuasca treatment. He recalled a “geometric butterfly” and a moth feeding him a vine, dirt, trees, and berries, after which the vine was pulled from him, an elephant appeared, and black smoke started pouring from his mouth. “It felt like the disease was coming out of me,” he said. Hoffmann has always been a polymath. He’s a pilot (but sold his plane), and has an interest in a clothing company, Greyson. He wore a groovy patterned golf shirt and pink pants for the first round at the Travelers on Thursday, his flowing, blond locks fashioned into a manbun poking out the back of his black cap, the crown of which featured his foundation’s plus-sign logo. “I got a little turned around this morning and was late,” Chelsea said, “but I saw him from afar and thought, that must be him!” She laughed as she watched the action at TPC River Highlands with a handful of Hoffmann’s friends, including one of his partners in Greyson. Hoffmann is also involved in a venture that aims to make it easier to get non-traditional medicine covered by insurance. Long range, he and Chelsea plan to open a solar-powered healing center in their adopted home of Costa Rica. They recently closed on the land. “I’ve never seen someone with more interests than him,” she said. In one way, Hoffmann resembles any other TOUR pro. When he’s not in Costa Rica, he lives in Jupiter, Florida, where he plays out of the Bear’s Club and hangs out with friends Daniel Berger and Justin Thomas. The house belongs not to Hoffmann but his mom, Lorraine, who is a flight attendant and rarely home. She is expected to be on site later this week, cheering him on. Being in Jupiter has its benefits, one of which is that Hoffmann has been working out at Coastal Performance in Palm Beach Gardens. He’s not the same guy who missed the cut by one at the RBC Heritage at Hilton Head in April, his first TOUR start since the fall of 2019. He’s bigger and stronger, part of a concerted effort to catch up to his old playing competitors. “They just opened a new gym,” he said. “It’s really cool. It’s got three different hitting bays, a TrackMan, a putting green you can adjust for slope, a putting lab, and a gym with a big turf area which is cool for agility. Medicine-ball throws. Jumping. Heavy lifting, dead-lifting, kettle-bell work, Turkish get-ups, heavy carrying for full-body stability, rolling. “Warm-ups are difficult,” he added, “and the finisher is usually like the fan bike, or the ropes, or pushing a sled. I’ve put on like 20 pounds of muscle in the last three months.” He’s also made an inner transformation, something Chelsea noticed at Hilton Head. “He thought he needed to birdie his last hole and bogeyed it,” she said. “It was frustrating, and there was a time when it would’ve ruined his whole week. But he was ready to do other stuff and be around other people almost immediately.” Instead of pouting, they took the Sunseeker to Colorado for intensive hiking and got snowed on. Three weeks after RBC Heritage, Hoffmann shot 73-80 at the Wells Fargo Championship in Maryland. That was nowhere near making the cut, but the week, while something of a disaster, provided him more information still. “I was still hitting it short,” he said, “and with the rain and cold I was even shorter. I was hitting 3-irons into those greens. That was a big motivator for me to step it up in the gym.” Chelsea is pregnant, due in late October. It will be a freebirth, at the couple’s mountaintop home in Costa Rica, without the usual medical assistance. Boy? Girl? It will be a surprise. Their home is being renovated, and they will return in July. That, too, could be a surprise – a pleasant one, with any luck. Morgan’s pectoral muscle is coming back. His game is coming back. If he gets smokin’ hot Friday and keeps it going into the weekend, he could play his way to more TOUR starts, or some sponsor exemptions. He could wind up back on the Korn Ferry Tour. But he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it; for now, it’s about embracing the present moment as he finds his way back into some version of his old life. He wants to bring the lessons he’s learned on his healing journey to others, and that includes his old TOUR colleagues. He’s especially intrigued by the treatment of supposedly incurable diseases. Where exactly competitive golf fits into his life remains to be seen, but in a perfect world it will help him fund the healing center in Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. His 2-under start at the Travelers was a decent start. He’ll need to keep going. “It could have been really good,” he said. “I feel really comfortable on this course.”

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ATLANTA – Notes and observations from Thursday’s first round of the TOUR Championship, where Kyle Stanley holds the lead after shooting 64. For more coverage from East Lake Golf Club, click here for the Daily Wrap-up. STANLEY COMES BACK STRONG Last year, Kyle Stanley had to worry about keeping his PGA TOUR card. Now he has a chance to claim the FedExCup. Stanley shot 64 on Thursday in his first competitive round at East Lake Golf Club, making seven birdies against a single bogey. Stanley, 29, is making his TOUR Championship debut in his seventh season. “When we played our practice rounds I thought it was … a pretty difficult test. It was nice to get off to a pretty fast start, making four birdies in a row,â€� said Stanley, who started his day with two pars before making birdie on Nos. 3-6. He is projected to finish second in the FedExCup with a victory. All 30 players at the TOUR Championship are capable of claiming the Cup, though. Stanley finished 34th and 31st in the FedExCup in 2011 and 2012, his first two PGA TOUR seasons. He soon struggled, though, and fell outside the top 150 in both 2014 and 2015 before narrowly sneaking into last season’s playoffs. He had to finish T14 at last year’s Wyndham Championship, the final event of the PGA TOUR’s regular season, just crack the top 125 in the FedExCup. He returned to the winner’s circle at the Quicken Loans National in July and added four other top-10s this season. Stanley ranks in the top 10 in both Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee (7th) and Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green (10th). Stanley and Dustin Johnson are the only other players to rank in the top 10 in both categories. Stanley missed just three fairways and four greens Thursday. SPIETH DOING SPIETH THINGS Jordan Spieth’s TOUR Championship, and his quest for a second FedExCup, got off to an inauspicious start. He snap-hooked his opening drive and struggled to hit the ball straight on the first five holes. “I felt like it was really a grind out there and it’s just because the first four, five holes of the round I was all over the place tee-to-green,â€� Spieth said. “And then my whole back nine I had a chance to birdie all but one of the holes and only made one of them.â€� It added up to a 67 that has Spieth in sixth place. More importantly, he’s projected to retain the top spot in the FedExCup, 150 points ahead of Stanley and 200 points ahead of Justin Thomas, who played alongside Spieth on Thursday and also fired 67. The TOUR Championship’s 30-man field is re-paired after each round, but Spieth and Thomas will play together again Friday. It will be a tight race for the FedExCup as four of the top five players in the standings broke par Thursday. Any player in the top 5 can clinch the FedExCup with a win at East Lake, regardless of how his closest competition fares. Johnson was one shot behind Spieth and Thomas. He’s trying to make amends for last year’s TOUR Championship, where he held the 54-hole lead before a final-round 73 cost him both the TOUR Championship and the FedExCup. Johnson is third in the standings after winning four times this season, including the opening event of the postseason, THE NORTHERN TRUST. Jon Rahm, No. 5 in the FedExCup, also fired 67. He is trying to become the first player to win the FedExCup in his first Playoffs appearance. Marc Leishman was the only member of the top 5 to shoot over par on Thursday, firing a 1-over 71. Leishman is No. 4 in the FedExCup after finishing third at the Dell Technologies Championship and winning the BMW Championship. CALL OF THE DAY SIMPSON GETTING IN THE GROOVE Webb Simpson is thankful to be back at East Lake Golf Club after missing the past two TOUR Championships. He could be happy with the start of his first TOUR Championship since 2014 after firing 4-under 66 on Thursday. He is in second place, two shots behind Stanley. Simpson made just one bogey Thursday. He made three birdies and an eagle at the par-5 sixth, where he hit his 231-yard second shot to 6 feet. “I told somebody yesterday that I’m definitely way more thankful to be here than I was the four years in a row I came here, and it’s because of what you said. It’s hard to get here,â€� he said. “I’ve been putting a lot better, and second, I think I’ve been thinking a lot better. … I haven’t hit it great this year but I’ve hit it good enough, and the ball striking’s coming. I think the reason I haven’t won is because I haven’t been able to put together four days of good ball striking. But I have seen improvements the last couple months and hopefully I can get a tournament here soon where I do have four rounds in a row.â€� Simpson also credited an improved short game after nearly two years of work with short-game coach Pat Goss, who also developed the world-class short game of Luke Donald. Simpson started working with Goss in November 2015. The TOUR Championship field is re-paired after each round, so Simpson will play in Friday’s final group with Stanley. ODDS AND ENDS Former Florida State teammates Daniel Berger and Brooks Koepka will play together in Friday’s second-to-last group after each fired 66 on Thursday. Next week they’ll be Presidents Cup teammates, as well, as both will make their debut in the biennial. Berger finished Thursday’s round by making the day’s only eagle at the 18th hole, where he hit his 234-yard second shot to 11 feet and made the putt. Paul Casey continued his strong play at East Lake with a first-round 66. He has finished in the top five in all three of his appearances at East Lake (2010, ’15, ’16). It continues a trend of strong performances in the FedExCup Playoffs. He has finished in the top five in six of his past eight starts in the FedExCup Playoffs. SHOT OF THE DAY BEST OF SOCIAL MEDIA

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