The Fed Ex Cup playoffs concluded last Sunday in Atlanta with Viktor Hovland taking home the $18 million first place check. He also garnered an additional $4 million the weekend before when he won stage two of the playoffs in Chicago. It has been a very good year for the 25 year old from Norway who won the U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach in 2018, was the recipient of the Ben Hogan Award as the top college golfer in 2019, and turned professional that summer. It didn’t take Hovland long to make his mark with the game’s top players as he won the Puerto Rico Open in February of 2020. He won at Mayakoba in December of 2020 and followed that up with a win in Mexico in November of 2021.
Hovland has always been a gifted ball striker and yet his short game oftentimes let him down. He focused for the last year on his shortcomings and the results have been career altering. Viktor won the prestigious Memorial Tournament this past June and then added the two FedEx Cup events for a banner year. No, he won’t be the PGA Tour of the year, regardless of all the cash he has in his bank account. That honor will probably go to Masters champion, Jon Rahm.
The PGA Tour actually takes the next two weeks off until it resumes its Fall Series in mid- September at the Silverado Resort with the playing of the Fortinet Championship. Yet with all the talk about pros and money, maybe we should take a moment to check out what is going on at St. Andrews in Scotland and at Erin Hills in Milwaukee this weekend.
On Saturday and Sunday the top 10 amateur golfers in America will compete against the top 10 from Great Britain and Ireland in the 49th biennial Walker Cup Matches, contested at the Old Course at St. Andrews. It was the site of last year’s British Open and the birthplace of golf in the 1600s. First begun in 1922 in an effort to promote the game, the Walker Cup is named after the USGA president at that time, George Herbert Walker. Walker is the grandfather and great-grandfather of American presidents, George Bush and George W. Bush.
The Walker Cup is kind of like the Ryder Cup and then again it sort of isn’t. The teams include 10 golfers. The Ryder Cup has 12 man teams. The Walker Cup is played over two days instead of three and the GB&I team does not include golfers from continental Europe. It calls for four two-man matches on Saturday morning at foursomes which is commonly known as alternate shot. There are no better ball matches. Saturday afternoon features eight one-on-one matches. On Sunday the morning session is the same while the afternoon matches includes all 10 golfers playing the other side’s 10 in another round of individual play. There are a total of 26 matches which means it takes 13½ points to win the Cup. Everything is contested at match play and Team USA has won the last three Walker Cups and carries a prohibitive lead in the matches at 38-9-1. A number of current PGA stars played on Walker Cup teams over the course of the last 15 years including Rickie Fowler, Jordan Spieth, Patrick Cantlay, and Harris English as well as their counter-parts including Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood, and Matt Fitzpatrick.
The American team is made up almost entirely of college stars. Nick Dunlap just won the U.S. Amateur, Gordon Sargent played in this year’s U.S. Open and made the cut in the John Deere Quad Cities. Caleb Surrell is the reigning SEC champ at Tennessee while David Ford is an all-American from the University of North Carolina. Nine of the 10 team members are college aged. The lone exception is Stewart Hagestad, a former U.S. Mid Amateur titlist who is 32 years old, will be competing in his fourth Walker Cup, and has exactly zero desire to turn pro.
The Walker Cup will be seen this weekend on television and the viewer will not only get to see the uniqueness of St. Andrews but will also be getting a sneak peek at the stars of the future. For those fans of the game who would like to see the Walker Cup up close and personal, two years from now the Cup will be played at the Cypress Point Club on Pebble Beach, a highly regarded test of golf which is called the “Sistine Chapel of Golf.” After that it goes to the iconic Lahinch in Ireland to be followed six years from now at Bandon Dunes on the Oregon coast.
College golf is a two season sport with teams playing into the fall and then again into the spring. When I attended Marquette University in Milwaukee in the early 1970s the school didn’t even have a golf team. Back then collegiate golf was just a spring sport and the top programs were warm weather teams such as Houston and Florida. There wasn’t much of a golf season in places like Wisconsin and I even recall occasional snow flurries over Memorial Day weekend.
With two seasons as well as much improved travel situations, schools in northern climates can now have full blown golf programs. My alma mater is currently the reigning Big East champion, went to the NCAA regionals last May, and is hosting the Marquette Intercollegiate, a 54 hole tournament that runs from this Sunday through Tuesday. The added perk to this event is that it is being held at the Erin Hills Golf Course, site of Bruce Koepka’s first major win in the 2017 United States Open. Having played Erin Hills four months after Koepka’s break-out win, I can tell you that it is a modern era gem located in the Kettle Moraine section of Wisconsin, west of Milwaukee. The Kettle Moraine is where the glacier went through the area thousands of years ago and dug out some very interesting terrain. It is a uniquely beautiful test of golf.
The Marquette Intercollegiate field includes a number of powerhouse programs including Cal-Berkeley, Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Dayton, Chattanooga, Cincinnati, Purdue, Penn State, and UC Davis. Golf Digest ranks Erin Hills as one to the top 10 golf courses in America open to the public. It will be hosting the Women’s U.S. Open in 2025.
There is frequent talk about professional golf and money. Like other sports there are multi-millionaires and others who have met with frustration and professional failure. Why else would there be an LIV Tour funded by Saudi Arabia if it wasn’t all about big money? Yet there is such a thing as playing golf for honor and glory, for one’s nation or for one’s college. Later this month the top 12 golfers from America and the top 12 from Europe will be competing in the Ryder Cup Matches in Italy, another series of biennial matches that had its beginnings in the 1920s. That too will be for honor and glory and hopefully a healthy dose of sportsmanship and camaraderie. When all is said and done, there is a lot of money to be made by the truly gifted and talented, and yet there are also a bunch of reasons to love the game for its other valuable aspects.
