The calendar says that it’s Thanksgiving weekend of 2018. Yet if you were to check out the PGA Tour’s website, you’d find that we’re already eight tournaments into the new 2019 season. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem all that long ago that Tiger Woods was the surprise winner of the season-ending Tour Championship and that Team USA was demolished the following week in Paris during the playing of the biennial Ryder Cup Matches. Suddenly it was October of 2018 and the brand new wraparound calendar year was upon us.
Thanksgiving came four days early to Charles Howell III when he made a 15-foot birdie putt on the second playoff hole to win the RSM Classic at Sea Island, Georgia. Two staggering statistics came out of Howell’s big win last Sunday. Although he has been around since 1996 and will turn 40 years old next summer, Howell’s victory at Sea Island was just his third win on the PGA Tour. Charles won the Kingsmill tournament in 2002 and five years later he captured the Los Angeles Open. He went 11 years before he added a third career title last weekend.
More amazingly is the fact that Charles Howell III is the 20th-leading career money winner on the PGA Tour. True, Howell has been a known entity on golf’s center stage since he first played in the Buick Challenge (Southern Open) as a 17-year-old in 1996, and yet to consider that he has pocketed $37 million with just three victories is a bit of a head-scratcher. The $1.152 million he added to his bank account last Sunday is his largest paycheck to date, and yet to contemplate that only 19 golfers have accumulated more money on the PGA Tour is quite the surprise. A secondary stat when considering Howell’s career is that he has been atop the leader board on numerous occasions late Sunday afternoon as evidenced by the fact that he has come in second place 16 times and third place nine times over the course of his competitive playing days.
Howell was one of those teenage phenoms who was a highly ranked amateur golfer. He played golf at Oklahoma State University and during his junior year he won the NCAA individual title while leading OSU to the team title. In those days the NCAA was played under a stroke play format and Charles’ four-round aggregate was a record-setting 23-under-par.
Following the completion of the collegiate golf season, Howell immediately turned professional as a 21-year-old and made an immediate impact. In his third event that summer, he finished in third place at the Quad Cities John Deere. The 2001 season was his first full year on tour and he won rookie of the year honors by making 20 of 24 cuts while accumulating five top-10 finishes. The 2001 campaign was indicative of how Charles would play professional golf during the course of the next 18 years. He would often finish near the top of the leader boards, he would cash a bunch of paychecks, and he would make a high percentage of cuts. Yet Howell just didn’t seem to be able to get over that most difficult of hurdles by finding the winner’s circle. On top of that, he seldom excelled in the game’s four majors. His best finish in a major is one solitary tie for 10th place in the 2003 PGA Championship.
Yet the beginning of the 2019 golf season in the fall of 2018 has been a rejuvenation of sorts for Charles Howell III. During the past 20 years he has only been able to play in his hometown tournament, namely the Masters, just eight times. With his win at Sea Island, he will be able to tee it up at Augusta National for a ninth time. Howell is a classic journeyman who actually came in ninth on the money list in 2002, but has spent the vast majority of his career somewhere between 30th and 60th on the annual money list. He has never been a bubble boy and yet he has also never qualified for a team competition such as the Ryder Cup or the Presidents Cup. When all is said and done, his relative consistency has kept him out of the winner’s circle, but it has kept him eligible to maintain his PGA Tour card year after year. The end result is that he is playing professional golf at a time when there is a lot of money to be made for the consistent. That’s why Charles Howell III has $37 million in the bank.
The rest of the fall season on the PGA Tour has provided a mix bag of winners and champions. Kevin Tway opened the new wraparound season with a win in the Safeway Open at Napa’s Silverado. Tway is best known as the son of former PGA champion Bob Tway. His victory at the Safeway Open is the first career win for the 30-year-old Tway. Australia’s Marc Leishman’s win at the CMB Classic in Kuala Lampur was his fourth career win. Like Howell, Leishman is a journeyman who has now won four times on tour during his 13-year career. He is 35 years old.
During the course of a three-week stretch, the PGA Tour’s big boys added to their winning resumes. The 2018 golfer of the year, Brooks Koepka, took home the CJ Cup @ Nine Bridges in South Korea. Xander Schauffele, the 2017 Tour champion, won the big money HSBC World Golf Championship in China. Bryson DeChambeau won in Las Vegas the following week. For the eclectic DeChambeau, it was his first win of the new season and his fourth tour title during the 2018 calendar year. All 20-somethings, Koepka, Schauffele, and DeChambeau will be an active part of PGA Tour leader boards and American cup teams for the next 10-15 years.
While the game’s top-ranked players were in China, the rest of the tour was in Jackson, Mississippi for the playing of the Sanderson Farms Championship. Cameron Champ, a 23-year-old from Sacramento, won the Sanderson. A graduate of the 2018 Web.com Tour, Champ has only played in 12 tour events during the course of his very young career. He already has three top-10 finishes and is the No. 1-ranked driver of the golf ball, averaging 328 yards off the tee and finishing first in shots gained off the tee. Once his game develops (he is 153rd in shots gained around the greens and 227th in scrambling), he will be a dangerous competitor.
Finally, two weeks ago Matt Kuchar won in Mexico at the Myakoba Golf Classic. It was Kuchar’s first win in four years and his eighth overall. For the 40-year-old Kooch, it was a nice moment. The PGA Tour will now take the next five weeks off and resume again on Jan. 3 at Kapalua in Hawaii. By then the calendar will say it’s 2019. There has yet to be a Tiger sighting and we’ve seen very little of Justin and Jordan and Rickie and the rest. However, the new wraparound season is already in full swing.
