Breaking News
Local Sports

World’s best excited to get year started at TOC

By Robert Collias 4 min read

It has been no secret that Jordan Spieth loves the Kapalua Plantation Course and the Sentry Tournament of Champions.

It hurt him a bit that he was not able to get here for four years coming off a five-year span where he made it here as a PGA Tour winner from the previous calendar year four times. From 2014 to 2018, he finished second, won, tied for third and was ninth -- he has won $2,389,000 here.

"Yeah, this is, qualifying for this tournament is obviously a number one goal on the year," Spieth said at his pre-tournament news conference on Tuesday. "You want to win on the PGA Tour and in order to get

here you have to do that. So, I've always embraced the opportunity to come down here to Hawaii and I've had solid success at Kapalua as well.

"So, not only does it turn into a really fun and easy week, given the size of the field and the weather compared to Mainland, but it's also an opportunity to get off to a good start to the season and it's done a lot for me in the past, too."

With a 38-player field -- Cameron Champ withdrew Tuesday after testing positive for COVID-19 before departing Houston -- Spieth knows he can take advantage of the opportunity here.

"When I've played well at this event to feel like you -- you move up in the FedEx Cup. You start to get into a rhythm as you go and hit the West Coast," he said.

It did not take Spieth long to think about his return trip here when he was in contention at the Valero Texas Open in early April.

"It was something I thought about during the final round, to be honest, and I had to kind of throw it out of my head because I had thought about it a couple other times during previous events in the season when I had leads on Sunday and it just adds a little extra to it when you're not, when you take your focus off of just closing out a tournament," Spieth said. "So I was, it was something I mentioned, I want to say within minutes of winning at Valero."

Jon Rahm, the No. 1-ranked player in the world, is also excited to get his calendar year started here. Rahm has four straight top-10 finishes here.

"It's always great to be here being at the Sentry Tournament of Champions, it means you've done a good job, you've won a tournament and you've had a great year," Rahm said. "So, happy to be here, it's always a tournament I look forward to. I've done well on this course, so hopefully I can add up to those stats and give myself a chance to win on Sunday."

Patrick Cantlay is back at Kapalua after winning the FedEx Cup last year. He is currently ranked fourth in the world and finished tied for 13th here last year.

"Yeah, it's always nice to start the year here," Cantlay said. "It's beautiful. I've been in Southern California the last little bit and it's been raining, so coming here with the sunshine is really nice.

"It's a good golf course to kind of shake some rust off. The fairways are big and there's lots of space out here to hit shots and it's also a golf course where you have to be very creative, and so you have to play all the different shots out here to be successful."

Xander Schauffele was not going to be in the field until his Olympic gold medal win was recognized as qualifying him for the field. Schauffele won here in 2019 and finished tied for fifth last year.

"Yeah, it's always nice to come back," Schauffele said. "It means that you won a tournament. I feel extra fortunate this year. The Olympics wasn't on the list and the Tour was nice enough to sort of put it on the list with the help of some players lobbying for me.

"So, it's nice they recognize the Olympic gold medal as a winner and here I am. So excited to be back."

Champ was disappointed not to be able to be part of the field.

A statement from Champ's representation said: "Cameron is naturally quite disappointed not to be able to return to action in Maui. Thankfully, however, he feels good and we were able to confirm this breakthrough case whilst he was still at home in Houston."

* Robert Collias is at rcollias@mauinews.com.

Starting at /week.