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KAPALUA, HAWAII | With his regular caddie Jimmy Johnson dealing with plantar fasciitis, Justin Thomas turned to a familiar face to carry his bag on the weekend at the Sentry Tournament of Champions.
His father, Mike.
This week at the Sony Open in Hawaii, Thomas will have another familiar face working with him – Jim "Bones" Mackay.
Mackay, whose long tenure as Phil Mickelson’s caddie ended last year, will take a break from his Golf Channel on-course commentary duties to carry the bag for the defending champion at the Sony. Interestingly, Mickelson never played at Waialae Country Club with Mackay as his caddie.
“I’m very excited. It will be fun. I wish I had Jimmy but Bones is a very good alternative,” Thomas said.
“I was with Jordan (Spieth) and Jordan asked him when was the last time he caddied there and he said 1992, which is before either of us was born. I’d say the course has changed a little since then.”
After Johnson struggled for two days at Kapalua, Thomas suggested he take a break to be ready down the road.
“I told him I’d rather you take as much time as you need to get it better and make sure you’re OK come L.A., Match Play, Masters, whatever. I want him to be 100 percent again. Walking Kapalua isn’t going to help that at all,” Thomas said.
While PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan was worried about the Tour potentially losing its tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status last fall when the new tax bill was being debated, he called in his heavy hitters.
Jack Nicklaus and Davis Love III.
Monahan enlisted both of them to lobby legislators to ensure the Tour would maintain its tax-exempt status.
“Our tax-exempt status was compromised at the end of the year, in an early draft in the Senate bill,” Monahan said.
“When we found out it was in the Senate bill, I called Jack. I thought I was calling his office but it was his cell phone and he whispered, ‘Hello.’ I said, ‘I need your help’ and explained the situation. He said ‘I’m in the middle of a field in upstate New York and if you work with my office we’ll get this thing going.’ ”
Love, coming off hip surgery, made a trip to Washington to help make the Tour’s case to lawmakers.
In the final version of the bill, the Tour retained its tax-exempt status.
“It’s pretty amazing Jack and Davis reaching out like that,” Monahan said.
In his second year as PGA Tour commissioner, Monahan is continuing to focus on reworking the Tour’s schedule with the hope of announcing the redesigned structure in the coming months.
With the moves next year of the Players Championship to March and the PGA Championship to May, and the goal of completing the FedEx Cup season by Labor Day week, Monahan said the process is complicated but moving along.
“We continue to make progress. Obviously we haven’t finalized all of our plans or we would have made an announcement,” Monahan said during a 45-minute session with reporters at Kapalua on Sunday.
“Typically we let our tournaments know a year in advance. We’re making good progress. We should be able to make that announcement in a couple months.
“It’s complicated. You’re moving dates. There are different tournaments affected in different ways. It’s not as simple as move this tournament to this date.”
Among other topics Monahan touched on Sunday:
The Players Championship will occupy the third week in March on future Tour schedules.
He anticipates Vijay Singh’s lawsuit against the PGA Tour eventually will be decided by the courts but does not know how long that will take. The suit was filed in 2013. Monahan said it’s possible a separate lawsuit filed by caddies could be resolved before going to court.
Monahan is still hopeful the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour can play an event at the same site. There had been talk of adding LPGA winners to the event at Kapalua but that has not yet materialized. “We’ll talk to the LPGA, and if not here how do we accomplish this at one of our tournaments,” he said.
The Tour raised $180 million for more than 3,000 charities in 2017, upping its all-time total to $2.65 billion. “It’s a big part of who we are and we think we do it better than anyone else,” Monahan said.
And some people thought winning the Open Championship was the highlight of Jordan Spieth’s 2017.
Then he broke the news during the Christmas holiday that he and his longtime girlfriend Annie Verret were engaged. Spieth posted a picture of the two of them together with her sparkling diamond engagement ring featured prominently in the display.
Spieth didn’t offer many details about the engagement during his first media conference of the new year last Tuesday at the Sentry Tournament of Champions – “just confirmation,” he said with a smile.
With his brother and her sister in town for Christmas, Spieth determined it was the right time for a proposal. He said the plan wasn’t months in the making. The biggest potential roadblock was an unexpected illness.
“I had a decent idea and then I was pretty sick,” Spieth said. “I had to have a backup plan. But I woke up and felt good that day and went through with it.
“We had our families there afterward and it was great night, really excited.”
For a guy accustomed to major moments, Spieth was asked whether he was more nervous winning the 2015 U.S. Open at Chambers Bay, the 2017 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale or asking Verret to marry him.
“I was probably most nervous at the British, yeah,” Spieth said. “I was pretty confident this past winter. So it was a good offseason. It was a fantastic year, 2017 was very memorable.
“I forget kind of how I felt the back nine of the British, or I mean of Chambers. British is still fresh, engagement is still fresh, I'll probably at some point end up forgetting the British, but I won't probably forget the engagement.”
After playing fall events in Korea and China, Marc Leishman went back home to Virginia Beach, Va., and basically put his clubs away until he came to Maui.
Unless you count a visit to Topgolf where he lives.
Leishman showed up there during the holidays, just having some fun and keeping a relatively low profile. It wasn’t his first visit, either. Leishman said he has a lifetime membership to Topgolf.
“The first time I went there, I didn’t realize there was like a leaderboard at the front desk,” Leishman said. “I scored really high and then all of a sudden all the people turn around and I’m having a couple of beers just having fun.
“This time it was a little different but it’s fun.”
On his most recent visit, Leishman said he had an end bay and didn’t draw much attention except from a guy beside him who happened to recognize the Aussie.
“He said, ‘You’re pretty good with the tools,’ ” Leishman said.
After nearly two decades of struggling, chasing the kind of breakthrough success that eluded him until he won the Sanderson Farms Championship last fall, 41-year-old Ryan Armour found himself in Maui last week enjoying his newfound job security along with everything else that came with playing the Sentry Tournament of Champions for the first time.
Armour didn’t get to go whale-watching, something he had hoped to do, but he did make the famous, winding drive along the road to Hana and got plenty of quality family time before getting back to work.
Pretty cool stuff for a guy who has spent most of his career scrapping for a spot on the PGA Tour. Winning changed all that.
“I don’t know if you can put it in words,” Armour said of his victory in Mississippi last year. “It’s a validation. When you didn’t believe in yourself, someone else believed in you for you. To go out and win and be here, it’s truly special.
“This game kicks you down. Unless (you’re) the top 10 or 15 guys in the world, you get your butt kicked. To have a wife that believes in you and have the support I have that sometimes may believe more than I do is special.”
Armour was the oldest player in the Sentry field, two days older than Pat Perez, a distinction he embraced.
For the first time, Armour gets to make his own schedule this year.
“There’s always uncertainty but the cool part is I get to say when I get to play instead of looking at a list all the time, saying am I in, am I in? That’s the cool part. That’s going to last until 2020, at least,” Armour said.
Tidying Up
For Rickie Fowler, the difference between a good year and a spectacular season is slender.
Fowler had one of his most consistent years in 2017, ranking among the Tour’s most efficient putters and proving himself to be the best bunker player from a statistical standpoint.
He won the Honda Classic and he blitzed the field in the unofficial Hero World Challenge in December. His personal challenge in 2018 is to sharpen areas that he felt cost him at times last year.
“Obviously, putting’s finally back to what I'm used to and where it should be and bunker play has probably been one of my biggest improvements over the last few years,” Fowler said.
“One of the areas I feel like we have seen that can use some of the most improvement could be around 100 to 150 yards, wedges to pitching wedge, 9-iron, an area that I'm not necessarily bad at, but statistically I can be better against – when you look at the other guys on Tour. For the most part I feel like we have done a good job every year of not falling back statistically. Last year was statistically one of my best years.”
Last season, Fowler ranked ninth on Tour from 100-125 yards but was 56th from 125-150 yards.
“Not that we're going to live off statistics, but (it’s good) if we can check all the boxes in there and be some of the most prepared that we can be and ready to go win golf tournaments," he said. "If there's a weak part, that's ultimately going to hurt you when it comes down to Sunday or the weekend or being in contention. So if we can check all those boxes, that will ultimately help Saturday and Sunday.”
Brian Harman picked up a big prize during his short offseason.
A 162-inch deer he killed with his new carbon fiber hunting bow.
And if you’re wondering, Harman wasn’t trophy hunting. He field dressed the deer and said nothing was wasted.
“We eat it all,” Harman said. “My favorite is a shoulder roast. Actually take a shoulder and I wrap it up in tinfoil with a bunch of different stuff and I stick in the oven at 210 (degrees) for 10 or 11 hours.
“It's great for game days. It's wake up in the morning, throw the shoulder in, it tastes just like pot roast. Most of the other stuff turns into ground meat like chili, spaghetti. If I had a better place to age it would be like eating steaks, but I don't have a good place to age it yet.”
Harman said he needs a full-size hanging freezer to properly age meat.
“If you kill a cow and you tried to eat it right then, it's going to be stiff, you can't chew it,” Harman said. “They age all that meat. They age it for weeks. I don't have a good place to age it. It takes time.”
Ron Green Jr.