Closing surge carries Kuchar to Sony Open title
Matt Kuchar had five birdies on the back nine en route to a 4-under 66 and a four-stroke victory over Andrew Putnam Sunday in the Sony Open in Honolulu.
Kuchar, who had three bogeys on the front nine, finished at 22-under 258. It was the ninth victory of his PGA career.
“It’s just a special thing for me,” he said. “This is really cool. This certainly elevates my love for the game.”
He was tied with Putnam after 13 holes. But Putnam had a bogey on No. 14 and parred out the rest of the way for a
68.
Marc Leishman (64), Hudson Swafford (64), Corey Conners (64) and Chez Reavie (67) tied for third. They were five strokes back.
Youth movement: Leave it to the oldest rookie to best illustrate how the PGA Tour has become such a young man’s game.
Chris Thompson tried for 19 years to reach the highest level of golf, and he finally earned a PGA Tour card when he was 42. With every year he spent on mini-tours from Florida to Arizona, he couldn’t help but notice that getting better only meant keeping up.
“It’s a profession that not many good players get out of, but there’s always good players getting into it,” Thompson said.
Stewart Cink knows what he’s talking about it.
Cink and Tiger Woods arrived on the PGA Tour at roughly the same time and were voted rookie of the year in consecutive seasons (1996 and 1997). Woods got an early start in the fall of 1996 and won two times in eight starts, so that became his rookie season. Cink’s first full season was 1997.
“So really, we started playing fulltime the same year,” he said. “For the first three years, he was the only player younger than me. That put me at 23, 24,
25. There was no younger player besides Tiger Woods than me my first three years.
“How many players on the tour now are 25 and under?” Cink asked. “Forty?”
He was close. There are 29 players with full status on tour who are 25 or younger. That includes Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, who already have won majors and reached No. 1 in the world. It includes Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau and Xander Schauffele, all of whom are among the top 10 in the world ranking.
“They play a lot more, against better competition when they’re younger now,” Cink said. “And they’re just more seasoned when they come out here. There is no break-in period anymore like there used to be because you don’t need to learn.”
When he started two decades ago, Cink said most players – Woods is an exception in almost every way – had to reinvent the wheel and learn to play the style of golf required on the PGA Tour.
“Now you just come out here, guns blazing,” he said.
Golf doesn’t have a 53-man or 25man roster like the NFL or Major League Baseball. And the beauty of golf is that no other sport can be so ageless. Remember, Mickelson won last year when he was 47 at a World Golf Championship.