World’s best golfers come to Norton
Northern Trust starts PGA Tour’s three-week playoffs
NORTON — The last time the PGA Tour’s best players roamed the plush green fairways at TPC Boston in Norton was Sept. 3, 2018.
That was 718 days or nearly two years ago.
New England golf fans hoped then to once again see the sport’s biggest stars perform just a short drive away.
They will have to wait a while longer.
The PGA Tour’s top 125 performers for the 20192020 season will be teeing it up in Norton starting on Thursday.
To see them, however, fans will have to watch on TV.
Golf, like much of the sports world, has returned but without fans, and that will be the case when the first leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs begins at the tour-owned course off Route 140.
The PGA Tour resumed play in June but has decided to keep spectators off the courses for the remainder of the season, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
(The tour is also limiting media access to the event. As a result, The Sun Chronicle will not have access to the golf course.)
Pulling off the event was no easy task, said Julie Tyson, the tournament director.
Instead of about 25,000 fans a day, only about 1,000 people will be spread out over TPC Boston’s 383 acres each day. These include players, caddies, PGA Tour staff and the volunteers needed to run the event.
“Overall, the footprint compared to last year is significantly smaller,” Tyson said.
The goal, Tyson said, was to be able to bring the tournament to television viewers in the same manner they have been accustomed to, while keeping the number of people on the course as small as possible.
“We had to come up with a plan that included a smaller number of oncourse support that is normally needed to deliver a world-class tournament,” she said. “This took a massive network of friends, friends of friends, and beyond to all be focused on getting golf back on TV, so fans could feel a sense of normalcy in their lives again and so we could generate the high-level charitable impact we’ve delivered since the tournament’s inception.
“Prevailing over adversity is a pretty great feeling but doing so alongside literally hundreds of people is something I’ll cherish for a long time.”
Besides the lack of fans, a lot of other things have changed in those 718 days.
The tournament is no longer the Deutsche Bank Championship, as it was for the first 14 years of its existence, or the Dell Technologies Championship, as it was called the last two times it was played. The event is named for its new sponsor, The Northern Trust, a financial institution based in Chicago.
The tournament is in August, not on Labor Day weekend as it has been since its inception in 2003, and rounds will be played Thursday through Sunday, not Friday through Monday as they were in previous years.
And the familiar names from the past – Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, for instance – are considered long shots at best to cash in The Northern Trust’s $1.67 million first-place check.
If fans were allowed, however, those two would still draw a crowd.
Tiger Woods practices putting strategies on the 18th green at TPC Boston in Norton before the 2013 Deutsche Bank Championship. Next week, he’ll be back on the course for The Northern
Trust tournament.
Woods, of course, is affixed on the Mount Rushmore of golf, with only Jack Nicklaus challenging him as the greatest player of all time. After a spectacular crash due to personal and physical troubles, Woods staged one of sports’ greatest ever comebacks by winning the 2019 Masters.
He also won a tournament, the Zozo Championship, last fall for his 82nd career win, tying him with the legendary Sam Snead for the most all time.
But the ailing back – he has had four surgeries including a spinal fusion in recent years – has limited the 44-yearold Woods to just a handful of appearances in 2020. His performances have been mediocre at best due to the lack of playing time.
Woods has told reporters that he has been conditioning himself to play a lot of golf in August and September, months that include last week’s PGA Championship, the three legs of the FedEx Cup and the U.S. Open. But whether his health and his game hold up are still in doubt.
“We’ve been training for that,” Woods told reporters during PGA Championship week. “Trying to get my strength and endurance up, that ability to make sure that I can handle that type of workload. We knew once I started playing again when I committed to (the) Memorial (tournament) that this was going to be a heavy workload, and in my training sessions we’ve been pushing it pretty hard, making sure I get my strength and endurance up.
“This will be no different. We’ll be pushing it hard to make sure that I can stay strong and have the endurance to keep going.”
Mickelson, meanwhile, turned 50 in the past year, making him eligible for the Champions Tour. While he has had some strong showings – a second at the recent World Golf Championship event in Memphis and a third at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am – he is in the middle of the pack of the FedEx Cup standings. A recent appearance in the CBS broadcast booth may be an indication that he is thinking outside the ropes for his future.
Here are some of the other changes golf fans can look forward to when play begins Thursday morning.
YOUNG GUNS
Justin Thomas grins after winning the Dell Technologies Championship at TPC Boston in Norton on Sept. 4, 2017.
A wave of twenty-somethings has swept over the PGA Tour in the past two years. Topping the FedEx Cup standings are Justin Thomas (age 27) and Collin Morikawa (23), followed not far behind by Bryson DeChambeau (26) and Sungjae Im (22) in fourth and fifth place, respectively.
Four more players in their 20s – Daniel Berger (seventh place, age 27), Jon Rahm (10th, 25), Xander Schauffele (11th, 26) and Abraham Ancer (13th, 29) are all in the top 13.
And there are plenty of other emerging stars who could easily be holding The Northern Trust trophy on Aug. 23. Some of them may be familiar to golf fans. They include:
Tony Finau, 30, one of the few American standouts on the 2018 U.S. Ryder Cup team, who manages to finish in the top 10 most weeks but still has just one career win to his credit.
Tommy Fleetwood and Tyrell Hatton, both 28, two of the European Tour’s biggest stars have done well across the Atlantic but still have just one PGA Tour victory between the two of them.
Patrick Cantlay, 28, who has two PGA Tour wins and played on last fall’s U.S. Presidents Cup team.
But others may not be so familiar, including three who were not even playing on the PGA Tour the last time a playoff event was staged in Norton.
Cameron Champ, 25, already has two PGA Tour wins in just his second year and is one of the longest drivers in the game, despite weighing in at just 175 pounds.
Matthew Wolff, 21, came off the campus of Oklahoma State University last year and captured one of the first tournaments he entered. He is also a freakishly long driver despite one of the most unusual swings on the tour.
In just his first year on the tour, Scottie Scheffler, 24, has climbed to 23rd in the FedEx Cup standings, earned nearly $2.3 million and has five top 10 finishes, including a tie for fourth at the PGA Championship.
BIG GUNS
When the PGA Tour shut down with the rest of sports in March, most players relaxed and practiced at home.
Not Bryson DeChambeau. He hit the gym – hard.
The Californian, already one of the PGA Tour’s best young players, worked out heavily, beefing up by 40 pounds, all of it muscle. The incredible bulk has vaulted him to the top of the tour’s longest driver list and made him the most talked-about player in golf.
DeChambeau consistently finished in the top 10 in the first events when the tour resumed in June, thanks to average drives of nearly 325 yards. In winning the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit, he averaged 350 yards a drive while also leading the tournament in putting.
At one point during that event, he waited for the group ahead of him to clear the green before he teed off. The hole was a 400-yard par-4.
He didn’t miss the green by much.