Busy five weeks for PGA Golf Club
PORT ST. LUCIE — Many of the top PGA professionals from around the U.S. will descend on PGA Golf Club this month for the PGA Winter Championships.
The five-week competition starts today with the Quarter Century Championship, where players have to be members of the PGA of America for at least 25 years. The 36-hole event will be played on the Wanamaker and Ryder courses at PGA Golf Club.
Last year’s Quarter Century champions were Stu Ingraham of Broomall, Pa., (ages 50-64) and Jerry Tucker of Stuart (65 and older).
Other events in the PGA Winter Championships, with defending champions, are the Senior Stroke Play Cham- pionship (Sunday-Monday, Neal Lancaster and Lon Nielsen), the Senior-Junior Team Championship ( Jan. 14-17, Mark Brown and Matt Dobyns), the Four-Ball Stableford Team Championship ( Jan. 28-30, Rich Berberian Jr. and Rob Corcoran), the Stroke Play Championship (Feb. 4-6, Jason Caron) and the Women’s Stroke Play Championship (Feb. 4-6, Karen Paolozzi).
Getting started: Justin Thomas spent a year on the Web.com Tour before he earned his PGA Tour card. He went through his rookie season without winning or making it to the Tour Championship.
A slow start? Hardly. At age 24, he already has seven victories and a major championship. And the start to his professional career was memorable in other ways. He made his pro debut on a sponsor exemption at the Dunhill Links Championship.
“My first tee shot as a pro was at St. Andrews,” Thomas said. His first round as a pro was a 66 on the Old Course, though Thomas wound up missing the cut.
His amateur partner was retired Deutsche Bank Americas chief executive Seth Waugh. The other pro in his group? A 22-year-old from England who was still searching for his first European Tour victory. That would be Tommy Fleetwood.
Gambling on golf: For most players at Kapalua, preparations for the new year included an online tutorial on the dangers of gambling in golf.
It’s part of the new “Integrity Program” that took effect Monday.
The PGA Tour previously had a policy that banned players from betting at tour events. The new program, which comes with a mandatory tutorial, covers all six tours under the PGA Tour umbrella.
Coming up roses: The Sentry Tournament of Champions has the top five players in the world. It just doesn’t have the hottest player in the world.
That would be Justin Rose, who ended 2017 with 10 consecutive top 10s since missing the cut at the PGA Championship. That includes three victories (HSBC Champions, Turkish Airlines Open and Indonesian Masters), along with a runner-up finish in the BMW Championship during the FedEx Cup playoffs.
Oddly enough, Rose wanted to be at Kapalua last year and made a reasonable argument that his victory in the Olympics should have qualified. He was eligible this year from his World Golf Championship title in Shanghai but chose to take an extended break before starting in Abu Dhabi.
Until his big run at the end, Rose had only one top 10 — a tie for fourth in the Irish Open — during a four-month stretch. Rose said that was due more to a few technical changes he was making in May and June than any hangover from his playoff loss to Sergio Garcia in the Masters.