The PGA Tour’s return is a month away; here’s what answers we have and ones we don’t

South Florida native T.J. Vogel was the medalist in Monday’s qualifier for The Honda Classic. Vogel, who was born in Pembroke Pines, shot 64 at Mayacoo Lakes Country Club to qualify for his second event of the season. Andrew Novak and PGA TOUR rookie Nate Lashley shot 65 to earn their starts in The Honda, while Jhared Hack grabbed the final spot in a playoff. Vogel and Novak both qualified for this season’s The RSM Classic, as well. Both missed the cut. Vogel, 27, finished 10th on the Mackenzie Tour-PGA TOUR Canada Order of Merit last year. As an amateur, he won the 2012 U.S. Amateur Public Links and attended American Heritage High School in Plantation, about an hour from PGA National. Lashley, 35, is 166th in this season’s FedExCup standings, making the cut in three of nine starts. He earned his first PGA TOUR card by finishing 11th on the Web.com Tour’s Regular Season money list in 2017, winning the Corales Puntacana Resort and Club Championship. He won three times on PGA TOUR Latinoamerica in 2016 to win the money list. Novak, 22, turned pro last year out of Wofford College. He started his career on the Mackenzie Tour-PGA TOUR Canada, making the cut in five of 11 starts. He shot 71-73 in his PGA TOUR debut at The RSM Classic. Last year, Hack finished 18th on the Mackenzie Tour-PGA TOUR Canada’s Order of Merit. He had two third-place finishes in 12 starts. Hack, 28, has made one of four cuts on the Web.com Tour this year. The Florida native won the 2007 Western Amateur as a 17-year-old. Hack beat Ben Polland and Web.com Tour player Adam Svensson in a playoff Tuesday morning. Svensson is No. 2 on the Web.com Tour money list after winning The Bahamas Great Abaco Classic at The Abaco Club. He was the medalist in the 2015 Web.com Tour Qualifying Tournament at PGA National.  

Click here to read the full article…

Dustin Johnson pulls away from the field (and his closest pursuer in the FedExCup) with a final-round 66 to capture his 19th PGA TOUR title at the RBC Canadian Open at Glen Abbey. Welcome to the Monday Finish, where Johnson, 34, won for the 10th time in his last 43 starts to maintain the pole position in the FedExCup, going 527 points ahead of second-place Justin Thomas. FIVE OBSERVATIONS 1. Johnson was a ball-striking machine. When he is putting well enough, Johnson crushes the field with his tee-to-green game, and such was the case yet again at Glen Abbey. One week after missing the cut by three at The Open Championship at Carnoustie, Johnson buckled down on his short game and it paid dividends. “I just did not score very well at Carnoustie at all,â€� Johnson said. “I didn’t putt good. I just scored really badly. But I hit the ball — I felt like I hit the ball plenty good enough to be under par after two days, and I was 5-over or something. It was just bad scoring.â€� He had to clean up his putting, which meant working at it on the practice green. Job done. “Started rolling the putter a lot better here this week,â€� he said. “You know, really, really hit the ball well all four days.â€� You can say that again. Johnson averaged 318.5 yards off the tee, which tied for first in driving distance, and hit 57 of 72 greens in regulation, also tied for first for the week. And he feasted on the par 5s, making three eagles and going 12 under on those holes. 2. Canada adopted DJ as one of their own. The famous/infamous streak continues: No Canadian has won the RBC Canadian Open since Pat Fletcher in 1954. It was some consolation, then, that the winner had at least an ancillary connection to the Great White North. He felt, he said, “like an honorary Canadian.â€� The reason: Canadian hockey great Wayne Gretzky, father of Paulina, Johnson’s fiancé. “It definitely helps,â€� Johnson said. “I get a lot of fans that pull for Wayne, they pull for me.â€� 3. Bradley’s mini-revival continues. It hasn’t been easy for Keegan Bradley since the anchoring ban took effect Jan. 1, 2016, but his winless streak goes back even further. At the RBC Canadian Open he was making his 157th start since his last win, at the 2012 World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational. But things are looking up. In the process of shooting a final-round, 8-under 64, Bradley holed out for eagle from 151 yards at the par-4 ninth hole. He became the first player since Derek Lamely in 2011 to record five eagles in a single stroke-play event on TOUR, and moved from 52nd to 44th in the FedExCup. “It’s probably my most tidy short game/putting tournament since I switched away from the belly putter,â€� said Bradley, who along with Harold Varner III shot one of only two bogey-free rounds Sunday. “So really big step forward for me, and it’s so fun to be able to play with a chance to win. It’s just something that I love, and it was fun this week.â€� 4. Hughes gave Canada hope. For the second straight year, Mackenzie Hughes (68, T8) won the Rivermead Cup as low Canadian. He threw a charge into the home crowd with a big front nine (32), but as was the case all week he couldn’t capitalize on the par-5 holes on the back (36). “Talking to me right now, I would say I’m a little disappointed,â€� Hughes said. “Just because right at the end there, if I could have — those par-5s coming in, they were both playing downwind, and if you’re out here and playing with your buddies, you’d probably birdie them both. More tough when there is pressure. But, yeah, overall very satisfied with the week.â€� Hughes birdied only one par 5 in the final round, the 13th hole. He played the holes in only 1 under in Round 1 and even in Round 2 before finally taking advantage in the third round, going 4 under. For the week, he was only 6 under on the par 5s, making him six shots worse than Johnson on those holes alone. At 15 under total, Hughes finished eight behind the winner. It was his first top-10 finish on TOUR since the 2017 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. 5. An’s T2 finish had silver lining. Byeong Hun An, a playoff runner-up to Bryson DeChambeau at the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide earlier this season, was admittedly not at his best as he shot a final-round 69 at Glen Abbey to finish T2 with Whee Kim (69), three back. But An moved from 61st to 40th in the Official World Golf Ranking, and he was headed for this week’s elite, 73-player World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational in Akron, Ohio. He also kept his sense of humor. “I had a tough start, and I bogeyed the second hole, which is probably a birdie hole for most of the guys,â€� An said. “But I found it hard to shoot 3 under today, and Dustin played it great today. I think he’s pretty good at golf.â€� FIVE INSIGHTS 1. Johnson became the first since Tiger Woods (’05-’09) and the 21st in TOUR history to collect at least three wins in three straight seasons. He is now 7-for-15 at converting a 54-hole lead/co-lead into a victory. He has won by a combined 17 strokes in three wins this season: Sentry Tournament of Champions by eight, FedEx St. Jude Classic by six, RBC Canadian by three. 2. Johnson led the field in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee (+1.884), and was fourth in SG: Approach-the-Green (+1.452), accounting for a combined 81 percent of his total Strokes Gained against the field. He was 33rd in SG: Around-the-Green (+.220) and 29th in SG: Putting (+.557). 3. Just 15 years after his dad, Bob, won the 2003 RBC Canadian Open, Kevin Tway took a share of the 54-hole lead into Sunday. He was trying to make the Tway tandem just the 10th father-son duo in history to win on TOUR, but things went awry in the final round as Kevin shot 76. On the bright side, his T17 finish still moved him from 99th to 91st in the FedExCup. 4. The front is generally regarded as the tougher nine at Glen Abbey, what with three of the course’s par 5s on the back. But England’s Tommy Fleetwood (T6), in his first RBC Canadian start, took that to a new level, playing the front nine in 4 over par and the back nine in 20 under. 5. Brandt Snedeker (67, T8) won the RBC Canadian in 2013, so it figures he would excel at Glen Abbey. Still, this was only his third top-10 finish this season. As he said afterward, it came at a good time, as he moved from 90th to 77th in the FedExCup. That puts him in a good spot to make at least the first two FedExCup Playoffs events. He won the whole thing in 2012.

Click here to read the full article…

Commissioner Statement on Pete Dye: “We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Pete Dye, a true friend of the PGA TOUR and one of the most important course architects of this or any generation. “A 2008 inductee into the World Golf Hall of Fame, Pete’s influence is far-reaching, leaving a global imprint on both the amateur and professional games. He designed some of the best known golf courses in the world, though none more recognizable than THE PLAYERS Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. It was here that Pete masterfully brought Commissioner Deane Beman’s revolutionary stadium golf concept to life, melding Deane’s vision with a brilliantly designed course that is celebrated annually as one of the game’s great strategic courses during THE PLAYERS Championship.    “Pete, though, was always quick to credit his beloved wife, Alice, with his success, including the concept for his most famous hole, the 17th island green at TPC Sawgrass. Together, Pete and Alice made a formidable team in golf and life, and with sons Perry and P.B., themselves successful course architects, they are recognized as one of the most accomplished families in golf. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the entire Dye family.” Paul (Pete) Dye, who enlivened modern golf architecture by building distinctive and difficult courses that could make both expert and average golfers scratch their heads in frustration and whose career was as long as it was notable, died Thursday at age 94. He designed dozens of courses, many of them done in partnership with his wife of 68 years, Alice. Some of Dye’s courses are among the most well-known in the world: THE PLAYERS Stadium at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., home of THE PLAYERS since 1982; Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island, S.C., site of an annual PGA TOUR event since 1969; Whistling Straits (Straits Course) in Haven, Wis., a three-time PGA Championship venue. “Every potential site I see brings new challenges, and I continue to learn more every day,â€� Dye wrote in 2013 in an updated edition of his 1994 memoir, Bury Me in a Pot Bunker. “My inspiration comes from the golfers themselves, who, in spite of kicking and cursing find a trip around a Pete Dye golf course is always memorable.â€� Utilizing small, sloping greens, pot bunkers, severe mounding and strategically located water hazards, Dye built courses that messed with a golfer’s mind before he settled over a shot. His work seemed to characterize the philosophy of the legendary British writer Bernard Darwin that “golf at its best is a perpetual adventureâ€� and that “it ought be a risky business.â€� Dye’s edgy creations—“Golf is not a fair game, so why should I build a fair golf course,â€� he said—stood in sharp contrast to his disarming and generous personality. “I get a kick out of overtipping people who usually don’t get any tip at all, like the girl at the ice-cream counter., Dye told Golf Digest in 2002. “It leaves her happy and makes my ice cream taste better.â€� A talented amateur golfer and successful insurance salesman before deciding he wanted to design courses in the late-1950s, Dye was known to do deals with developers on a handshake and envisioned his layouts without formal plans. He did not finish high school, college or law school but in 2008 became only the fifth golf architect enshrined in the World Golf Hall of Fame—joining Donald Ross, Alister MacKenzie, C.B. Macdonald and Robert Trent Jones. “Whatever cloth they cut Pete from, you can rest assured that was the one and only piece they had,â€� golf architect Bill Coore told Golf World in 2014. “I’ve never met anyone like him.â€� Dye grew up in Urbana, Ohio, and learned to play golf on a nine-hole course, Urbana Country Club, that his father, Paul Dye—a bar owner, insurance agent and postmaster—built after becoming obsessed with the game. “I first remember going out there with him,â€� Dye recalled in 2008 at his Hall of Fame induction. “He gave me a job and I watered the greens with just a garden hose.â€� Those boyhood summers working at his father’s club during the 1930s and 1940s led to Dye’s lifelong fascination with agronomy and course maintenance. With the onset of World War II and the community’s men leaving to serve in the military, Dye became greenkeeper at Urbana Country Club when he was 15, a successful stint except for the time he overfertilized the greens and watched them, as he wrote in Bury Me in a Pot Bunker, turn to “yellow straw that spelled disaster for me and the course.â€� Once he was old enough to join the Army, Dye spent nearly three years stationed at Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Bragg, N.C.  While in North Carolina near the end of the war, Dye had the opportunity to make the 30-mile drive and play Pinehurst No. 2 Course many times, where he became friends with its designer Donald Ross. The strategic demands of No. 2 made an indelible impression on Dye, piqueing his interest in why a course stood out architecturally, but for years he would concentrate on playing the game. A state high school golf champion in Ohio, Dye won the Indiana State Amateur in 1958 after being runner-up twice. He competed in the 1957 U.S. Open and the U.S. Amateur half a dozen times. In the 1958 Trans-Mississippi at Prairie Dunes in Hutchinson, Kan., Dye lost in the semifinals to 18-year-old Jack Nicklaus, who a decade later would become his design consultant at Harbour Town. Dye began to get the itch to build courses in the mid-1950s. He and Alice got their first design job several years later, a low-budget, nine-hole course south of Indianapolis, where they had settled, called El Dorado. They grew bentgrass for the greens in their lawn and transported the sod to the site in their sedan. “Neighbors used to kid Alice that they could tell when she had a load of bent in the trunk because the front end was raised so high the car looked like a motorboat!â€� Dye wrote. “We thought we had built Oakmont,â€� Dye recalled of El Dorado, “but it wasn’t quite.â€� In nine holes, the couple designed 13 carries over a creek. Despite the inauspicious maiden effort, Dye was off on his second career. It received a boost not long after when the University of Michigan hired Dye to build a course after also considering Robert Trent Jones, the era’s architectural superstar, and Dick Wilson, another well-regarded designer. A 1963 journey to Scotland, where Dye played in the British Amateur and he and Alice visited many of the country’s classic courses, was pivotal in his subsequent architecture. Inspired by the look and feel of golf in the land where it began—including tiny but devilishly deep bunkers with faces shored up by railroad ties—Dye returned home intent on making his designs stand out from the prevailing style of brawny courses with big greens, flashy bunkers and landing-strip tees popularized by Trent Jones. Dye was already at work on Crooked Stick in Carmel, Ind., where the 1991 PGA Championship and 1993 U.S. Women’s Open would be contested. “When I came back to the States,â€� Dye said in an interview with Jeff Silverman in 2014, “I had the idea I had to try to make it look like some of those courses over there.â€� As Jim Urbina—who along with Coore, Tom Doak, Bobby Weed and other prominent golf course designers got their start in the business by working for Dye—pointed out, Dye put a new twist on old architectural features. “He’s taken the classical templates, disguised them and made them his own,â€� Urbina told Golf World. “His angles are classical. His strategy is classical. His courses are classical. But you don’t see it until you really see it.â€� Unlike designers during the Golden Age of golf architecture, who lacked modern machinery but often were given the best land on which to craft their courses, Dye often started with bland or hostile properties. No site was more challenging than the swampy, snake-infested acreage south of Jacksonville, Fla., where then-PGA TOUR commissioner Deane Beman, a fan of the complete examination offered by Harbour Town, hired Dye in the late 1970s to create the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass “It was rough property,â€� said Bob Dickson, then a PGA TOUR staff member. “There were plenty of places in there where if you were going to walk anywhere close to a straight line, you were going to do it with a machete or a chainsaw.â€� Dye sketched the course on the back of a placemat, then, with input from Beman and Alice, immersed himself in the dirty, difficult job, usually with his German Shepherd in tow. “It was amazing,â€� recalled Vernon Kelly, the TPC Sawgrass project manager. “He’d come out and work us all to death. He had a car rented from National at the airport. They’d just park it, without cleaning it, and it was there for him when he came the next time.â€� When Dye was finished with his labor of love, tournament golf had a special stage and its first island-green par 3, No. 17, that would become perhaps the most identifiable one-shotter in golf. If it lacked the splendor of the 16th at Cypress Point or the subtlety of No. 12 at Augusta National, the penultimate hole at THE PLAYERS Stadium epitomized the mental gauntlet that Dye love to throw at skilled golfers. “The thing that gets to a good player,â€� Dye told Golf World, “is fear.â€� Dye contended that his courses looked harder than they were, although the TOUR players carped loudly when THE PLAYERS moved to TPC Sawgrass. Many thought the small, severely undulated greens and their surrounds were too penal. “No question, when it opened up, it was on the wrong side of fair,â€� Beman said of the course in 2011. “It took a couple of renditions to get it right.â€� When he was in his 80s, Dye was still tinkering with arguably his most famous design. His homespun descriptions for his architecture were “playing in the dirtâ€� or “pushing dirt,â€� but those terms belied Dye’s innate gift and studied effort that went into his courses. “The way Pete gets on a property and feels it is pretty impressive,â€� Tiger Woods told Golf Digest in 2008. “His courses built for tournaments are hard, but there’s a good reason behind everything.â€� Dye’s courses had a strong impact on golf architecture. Ron Whitten and Geoffrey Cornish wrote in The Architects of Golf that by the 1980s, “even his chief competitors were building courses that were a reflection of his style or a response to it.â€� Dye, who was predeceased by his wife Alice, and is survived by their two sons, Perry and P.B., both of whom are course architects, received some of golf’s highest honors. In addition to being a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, Dye received the Donald Ross Award from the American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1995; the 2003 Old Tom Morris Award from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America; 2004 Distinguished Service Award from the PGA of America; and 2005 PGA TOUR Lifetime Achievement Award. “My opportunity to mold God’s earth into a test that golfers can enjoy has given me great satisfaction, and I am extremely indebted to those who have given me the chance to build golf courses all over the country,â€� Dye said in Bury Me in a Pot Bunker. “Donald Ross once wrote, ‘My work will tell my story,’ and that is how I hope to be remembered.â€�

Click here to read the full article…