Biggest Storylines Ahead of the 2015 Sony Open in Hawaii
Living in the Northeast, or anywhere along a line of latitude that points away from the sun in these solstice months, makes one just a tad bitter seeing grown men play golf on a Hawaiian island.
A year ago, Jimmy Walker won the Sony Open and began his meteoric climb to the top of the FedEx Cup standings. This went on for most of the year. Walker went on to have a career year with nearly $6 million in earnings, three wins, 10 top 10s, and he made the cut in 23 of 27 events.
Heeeere’s Jimmy in a terse monologue on Golfweek.com:
"If you could put your finger on it, we’d all do it more. It’s timing, it’s good play, it’s being prepared, it’s being ready when the door opens to step through. It’s hard to do. I was hoping I’d win again last year after the fact, but it’s so hard to do, and so many things have to go your way. If there was that magic formula, somebody would be rich.
"
Along with Walker, Jason Day and Matt Kuchar are in Hawaii playing for 500 FedEx Cup points.
Read on for some of the key storylines heading into the Sony Open.
Where to Watch and Tournament Info
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Where
Waialae Country Club
7,044 yards, par 70
What
Total Purse: $5,600,000
Winner’s Prize: $1,008,000
FedEx Cup Points: 500 to the winner
When
Thursday to Saturday
7-10:30 p.m., Golf Channel
Sunday
4-6 p.m., NBC, 6-8 p.m., Golf Channel
Will Jimmy Walker Repeat?
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Walker’s run through 2014 was life-changing for the Texas native. For some golfers it comes early, others it comes late. Walker, who turns 36 later this week, finally had that breakout year.
After winning the Sony Open in 2014, Walker was never lower than second on the FedEx Cup standings until the final weeks (when Billy Horschel and Chris Kirk went bananas in the FedEx Cup playoffs).
Walker spent 17 straight weeks at No. 1 in the FedEx Cup standings, then spent the final five weeks of his season at No. 2 before ultimately finishing seventh overall.
Walker was downright ornithological last year, averaging the third most birdies on tour with 4.18. The man knows how to drain putts, and that makes him a favorite to defend his title.
But it won’t be easy. Not with the next guy coming in with the smoking irons.
Jason Day Needs a Big Start to 2015
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Jason Day could be sitting on a McIlroy-ian season. This assumes a drop-off in performance from the world’s favorite Northern Irishman (sorry, Graeme McDowell).
We haven’t seen Day in quite a while, but that hasn’t factored into how Sean Martin of PGATour.com feels.
Martin loves Day in Hawaii, saying, “Day, who launches the ball about as high as anyone not named Rory McIlroy, should feast on the par 5s.”
Day ranked eighth in scoring average in 2014 and is now the eighth-ranked player in the world.
He’s got the game. The key for Day is health. He had a nagging thumb injury early in the season and back pain late. Talk about an opposable thumb. Hey-o!
"It's tough because you know, this is what I like to do, this is what I love to do. I want to be out here competing. If I'm at home and I've got a lot of time off, I'm an angry man, just because I need to compete. And you know, if I could stay healthy, I believe that I can win this year.
"
An angry man who, by all accounts, is healthy right now? That spells trouble for this field.
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Geoff Ogilvy Is the Sleeper Pick
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We can talk about favorites all we want. Did anyone really figure Walker would win the Sony Open? Or that Chris Kirk would finish second?
So, who in this field has the chance to be the Walker of 2015? He’s not quite as obscure as Walker, but Geoff Ogilvy—the other-other Aussie on tour—is a two-time winner of the Hyundai Tournament of Champions and a former top-five player in the world rankings.
Four years later, he finally made it back.
His 2014 was, by his 2006 U.S. Open standards, abysmal, but he won one event and was T2 at the Deutsche Bank Championship to close out his last few months on a positive note.
Ogilvy sits at No. 94 in the world rankings. That’s not laying siege to Hawaii’s banana crops, but as Ogilvy says in an Associated Press story, the bottom is rich:
"Ben Hogan would have been pretty hard to beat. He'd have been just as hard to beat as Rory. But the 125th guy in Hogan's era probably wasn't breaking 80. The 125th guy now is ... harder to beat. The top comes and goes — the legends — but bottom is getting closer to the top, and the gap gets narrower from best to worst. So that must make it harder to win, I guess.
"
What About Other Sleepers?
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Stuart Appleby
Stuart Appleby, the other-other-other Aussie, had a strong kick down the lane in 2014 coming out of nowhere for a T2 at the Barclays last August.
In 2014, his scoring average before the cut of 69.17 was good for 29th on tour. The problem became Rounds 3 and 4, when he scored a 209 and 211th-ranked 73 scoring average.
Can Appleby finish here at the Sony Open? Stranger things have happened.
Matt Kuchar
Kuchar winning the Sony Open wouldn’t be entirely surprising for the 11th-ranked player in the world. It’s the geography of the event that makes him a sleeper.
Mike McAllister of PGATour.com wrote, “Of Kuchar's seven TOUR wins, six have been in the Eastern Time Zone, so I'm going against the grain here. But hard to ignore the fact that he's a collective 67 under in five starts at Kapalua.”
Now Kuchar moves his bag to Waialae.
Kuchar is smooth, steady and easy-going. He doesn’t feel the need to go under the hood and tinker too much with the mechanics of his game.
Kuchar told Golfweek.com:
"I didn't have like a glaring weakness, I don't think. I don't think I need to dive into the stats necessarily to learn that much from it. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of where I sit and how I'm doing just on my own.
"
A top-10 finish seems a lock, and a win very likely.
Zach Johnson
Johnson is one of those players on tour who is almost always overlooked, yet he’s always in the thick of a tournament.
A year ago he had a win, a second, a third, five top 10s and 12 top 25s. He won the Hyundai Tournament of Champions and finished T8 at the Sony Open. So, yes, Johnson won’t get much “action,” as it were, with Day, Walker and Kuchar in the field, but he’s every bit as capable of handling the Hawaiian winds.
Johnson told Yahoo! Sports:
"It's hard to explain. Obviously one (Kapalua) is hilly, one (Waialae) is very flat. But when it comes to execution with wind and trajectory control, they are both very similar and I like that kind of golf. That's kind of what I grew up playing.
"
Who Wins the Battle of the 50+ Quintet?
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What is this, Boca?
We’ve got Vijay Singh, the 2005 winner of this event. There’s Fred Funk, Davis Love III, Kenny Perry and Paul Goydos teeing it up at Waialae.
What do they have in common? They were all born in the '60s. All but Funk. He was born in the '50s.
What can we reasonably expect from these men? With Funk, you know he’ll be having some fun out there. Goydos, master of the retweet button, RTed this by Pat Perez, and Singh will lull us to sleep with his wish-I-was-in-a-lab-instead-of-teaching-students professorial demeanor. He does look like he should be teaching string theory, not swing theory.
No matter. This field is spread across those born during the Red Scare and those during the reign of Punky Brewster. Let’s see how it shakes out. In this tournament within a tournament, Singh has the edge.
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