It’s nice to have golf’s focus back on the course (rather than on the boardroom)

On Thursday, Sahith Theegala made six birdies in a row to start his back nine on the way to a 9-under 64 at the Plantation course in Hawaii and the first-round lead of the Sentry Tournament of Champions, the inaugural event of the 2024 PGA Tour season.

And with that, golf fans were perhaps able to think about golf as a sport again rather than as a fractured business. Golf is once again a sport where fans can watch players hit good and bad shots, make remarkable recoveries and do things with a club and ball that the recreational golfer can only dream of.

That hasn’t necessarily been true for the last three months. As the PGA Tour transitioned back to a schedule where the season and the calendar year start at the same time, the tour was left with a three-month period of very little consequential golf. While that is supposed to be an off-season for the game’s biggest names, the tour unfortunately found that time filled with many different headlines. There was the news of Jon Rahm jumping to the LIV Tour, the tour negotiating against a Dec. 31 deadline for a new business structure with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund and with only a few unofficial events in December for a distraction from the business end of the game.

But Thursday, at least for a few hours, it was again about golf. It was about a red-hot start for players like Collin Morikawa and Xander Schauffele. It was about talk of Scottie Scheffler being the No. 1 player in the world, or talk of how long it will take Viktor Hovland to get to No. 1. And it was about a sizzling back nine by Theegala, a burgeoning star on the tour.

This all led up to Chris Kirk’s victory, as he capped off a bogey-free 9-under 64 on Sunday to win his sixth PGA Tour title with a 72-hole total of 29-under 263 and one-stroke better than Theegala.

This week, the PGA Tour heads to Honolulu for the Sony Open at Waialae Country Club.

More golf, less talk about ledgers.

If golf fans have become disgruntled with the professional game in recent months, it can be blamed on the ongoing debate and sniping from the two sides of the PGA Tour/Liv battle. But it can also be blamed in part to not having top-level golf to watch on television. It is football season, after all, and both the NFL and the college game have been dominating the sports world. The PGA Tour has specifically crafted a schedule that avoids the NFL as much as possible. It’s unfortunate that lull in the professional golf world was filled with news that made the sport and its players look greedy.

Focus on the course

But now, the players are back at the office, if you will, and ready to show the world what their skills are, both physical and mental. For now, we can concentrate on just how strong Scheffler’s ball-striking is, how Hovland has improved his short game, whether Brian Harman and Wyndham Clark can follow up on the major championships from 2023, whether players like Rickie Fowler and Jason Day can follow up their drought-breaking victories last year with more wins this year.

We can wonder about rookies coming up from the Korn Ferry Tour. We can marvel at the distance of Rory McIlroy’s drives while wondering if this is the year he gets his fifth major. In other words, we can think about golf on the course rather than in boardrooms. We can let golfers be golfers and not politicians or accountants.

Will that last? Of course not. The PGA Tour and PIF are still negotiating past their deadlines, and some golf figures will be claiming victory and others will be losing their jobs in the coming months. If another player decides to make the jump from the PGA Tour to the LIV Tour, the world will focus on that and not strokes gained-putting.

Still, it was refreshing to think just about golfers and golf courses this week. Let’s hope nothing distracts fans from that for at least a few weeks.

Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. You can contact him at (760) 778-4633 or at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @larry_bohannan. Support local journalism. Subscribe to The Desert Sun.