Kirk was ranked No. 28 in the FedEx Cup standings coming into this week’s event.
Chris Kirk was feeling it on Thursday at the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
Already in the lead on the 14th hole, Kirk made a hole-in-one to get to 7-under-par. His tee shot bounced twice before rolling into the hole from 205 yards out. That gave the 39-year-old Knoxville native a three-shot lead near the end of his opening round.
It also came on the 14th hole, which has been rebranded this year as The Bluff at 14. The hole includes multiple viewing areas next to the green and will have giveaways each day.
Kirk was ranked No. 28 in the FedEx Cup standings coming into this week’s event. He has six wins on the PGA Tour, most recently winning The Sentry in January.
His ace was the second straight year where a golfer connected on a hole-in-one at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Last year, it was Sam Burns who hit a shot straight into the cup on No. 11.
The tournament is the first leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs and is taking place at TPC Southwind from Thursday to Sunday. The top 50 players in the FedEx Cup standings after this event will advance to the next leg of the playoffs next week in Castle Rock, Colorado.
Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jonah.dylan@commercialappeal.com or on X @thejonahdylan.
McIlroy said he has “three (events) on the PGA Tour to turn an OK season into a very good one.”
Rory McIlroy hopes to use the next three weeks to “change the narrative” of his season as he bids to win the FedEx Cup title for a record-extending fourth time.
McIlroy has won twice worldwide this season but is all too aware of letting other chances slip through his fingers, most painfully in the US Open at Pinehurst and the Olympic Games in Paris.
As a result, the 35-year-old heads into the first playoff event – the FedEx St Jude Championship at TPC Southwind – almost 3,500 points behind Scottie Scheffler, the world number one having won six times on the PGA Tour before securing Olympic gold at Le Golf National.
“I certainly don’t want to sit up here and belittle my achievements at all this year and what I’ve done, but at the same time I expect a certain standard from myself,” McIlroy said.
“I’ve won a couple of times. I’ve had an opportunity to win a few more times than that and haven’t been able to get over the line. So I would have liked to have added a couple more to that win column.
“But as I said, there’s still three tournaments left in this PGA Tour season. I think I’ve actually got eight or nine tournaments left this year, but three on the PGA Tour to turn an OK season into a very good one.
“I think when the bulk of the season has come and gone and you’ve got this opportunity of three weeks to really, I guess, flip the script a little bit or change the narrative and what that season means, I think that’s a motivating factor and part of the reason that I’ve probably played well in the playoffs for the last three years.”
Ireland’s Rory McIlroy competes in round 1 of the men’s golf individual stroke play of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Le Golf National in Guyancourt, south-west of Paris on August 1, 2024. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)
Asked if he needed to do anything different to get rid of the “nearly man” tag he gave himself after the Olympics, McIlroy added: “I just have to finish off tournaments better.
“There’s been glimpses where I have done it, like Quail Hollow (at the Wells Fargo Championship), for example. But obviously the US Open, Olympics.
“I feel like this year and maybe the last couple years I’ve just found a way to hit the wrong shot at the wrong time. That might go into preparation and trying to practice a little more under pressure at home.
“You go through these things in golf and you go through these little challenges and you just have to try to figure out a way to get through it and my challenge right now is that.
“It’s really good but not quite good enough to take home the silverware. It’s just something I’m having to work through.”
Scheffler has topped the FedEx Cup standings heading into the season-ending Tour Championship in each of the last two years but has relinquished the two-stroke lead that gives him on both occasions.
McIlroy overturned a six-shot deficit in the final round at East Lake in 2022, while Viktor Hovland wiped out Scheffler’s advantage by the end of the first round 12 months ago.
“I don’t really think about an exclamation point (on the season) or anything like that, but I definitely want to win the FedEx Cup,” Scheffler said.
“It’s quoted as the season-long race but at the end of the day it really all comes down to East Lake. I didn’t have my best stuff at East Lake the last couple of years.
“I’m kind of excited that they changed the course a little bit. It may give me some new vibes around there.”
“You can’t call it a season-long race and have it come down to one tournament.”
Scottie Scheffler showed up for the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis this week with his Olympic gold medal but he wasn’t exactly showing it off.
“It’s a bit heavy around the neck,” he told members of the media during his pre-tournament interview on Wednesday. “I brought it for a deal this morning, and I promptly put it back in my backpack.”
Scheffler’s victory in Paris was his seventh of the year, though there were no FedEx Cup points awarded for this one. Never mind, he has plenty. Scheffler enters the FedEx Cup playoffs this week with 5,993 points, or double the amount earned by every other competitor on the PGA Tour other than Xander Schauffele.
Nevertheless, his lead will be winnowed to a two-stroke head start over his closest competitor heading into the 72-hole Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, the final of three legs in the playoffs. That is should Scheffler remain on top with points worth quadruple for the next two weeks. (A win that was worth 500 points is suddenly worth 2,000.)
It has Scheffler questioning how fair the season-long points race really is.
“I think it’s silly,” he said. “You can’t call it a season-long race and have it come down to one tournament. Hypothetically we get to East Lake and my neck flares up and it doesn’t heal the way it did at the Players, I finish 30th in the FedEx Cup because I had to withdraw from the last tournament? Is that really the season-long race? No. It is what it is.”
He added: “It’s a fun tournament. I don’t really consider it the season-long race like I think the way it’s called. But you’ve got to figure out a way to strike a balance between it being a good TV product and it still being a season-long race. Right now, I don’t know exactly how the ratings are or anything like that, but I know for a fact you can’t really quite call it the season-long race when it comes down to one stroke-play tournament on the same golf course each year.”
This is the 18th year of the FedEx Cup and it has been tweaked several times. In 2008, Vijay Singh had clinched the title based on the then point structure without needing to play the final tournament, which made for bad TV ratings. Scheffler said that scenario would be great for him but understood it would be a ratings dud. He’s held the lead going into the Tour finale the last two years but hasn’t come out on top as Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland have tracked him down. This has been Scheffler’s most dominant season but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Schauffele, winner of two majors, could edge Scheffler for Player of the Year honors should he win the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup.
“I don’t really think about exclamation point or anything like that, but definitely want to win the FedExCup,” Scheffler said. “It’s quoted as the season-long race, but at the end of the day it really all comes down to East Lake. I didn’t have my best stuff at East Lake the last couple years. I played good there my rookie year, but outside of that, the last few years I haven’t had my best stuff. I’m kind of excited that they changed the course a little bit. It may give me some new vibes around there.”
On Sept. 1, the Tour Championship concludes and someone will take home the season-long trophy as FedEx Cup champion.
“I’m going to play golf as if I went back to the way I was before I had a coach.”
Hideki Matsuyama won a bronze medal at the Olympics in Paris but lost his wallet during a layover in London.
Matsuyama told Japanese reporters, including those at Golf Digest Japan, that someone swiped his wallet and also nabbed the passport and visas of his caddie, Shota Hayato, and coach, Mikihito Kuromiya. They had no choice but to return to Japan and request expedited travel documents instead of going to Memphis for the first leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs. The top 50 in the season-long points race qualify for the second leg, the BMW Championship at Castle Pines in Denver.
“There’s a chance they’ll make it [to Colorado], but we have to go into it thinking it’s close to zero,” Matsuyama told Golf Digest Japan.
According to the report, the earliest they could make it to the U.S. would be just ahead of the Tour Championship in two weeks.
“I’m going to play golf as if I went back to the way I was before I had a coach,” Matsuyama told the Japanese press in Memphis. “I feel like all the responsibility is on me.”
He has hired Taiga Tabuchi, who caddies for fellow Japanese tour pro Ryo Hisatsune, to fill in as a caddie in the absence of Hayato, who famously bowed on the 18th green after his boss won the Masters in 2021.
“I’m glad he accepted,” said Matsuyama of Tabuchi, whose regular boss finished a career-best T-3 last week but fell short of the top 70 and a berth in the playoffs. “He’s worked with Hisatsune this year, so I think he knows the ropes, and he can speak English, so I can rely on him.”
Matsuyama, who won the Genesis Invitational in February, enters the FedEx Cup playoffs in eighth place. He did note that the bronze medal remained safely in his possession.
“You don’t play with a legend like that and a great player and not ask him any questions.”
Penny Hardaway stared intently, studying Collin Morikawa from the tee box on No. 18 at TPC Southwind in Memphis Wednesday.
Memphis basketball’s head coach – and a legendary NBA figure – was the pupil this time.
“I never asked him one golf question until we got to No. 18,” said Hardaway, who was part of the group playing with Morikawa during the pre-FedEx St. Jude Championship pro-am. “I was saying to him, ‘Out of respect, I have to ask you some questions about the game.’ Because you don’t play with a legend like that and a great player and not ask him any questions.
“So, he gave me some information and I hit a great drive and a great second shot onto the green.”
So, what exactly did Morikawa coach Hardaway up on and what was his evaluation of Hardaway, the golfer?
“He’s really good. He’s actually really, really good,” Morikawa said. “I think he had a handicap of 2 today. He made some legit − I think he made two actual birdies, like normal birdies without his handicap. He was striping it.
“He’s such a tall guy, and that’s obviously how basketball players are, and he’s had, I think, six knee surgeries, so he asked me on 18 something he could work on just about rotation and getting it around the corner a little bit better. He hit some balls out to the right. Look, it was impressive. I didn’t know what to expect, and sometimes you see a 2 handicap and they’re not a 2, but I actually believe him. He’s a great player, and just a great guy to hang out with for nine holes today.”
Hardaway said Morikawa isn’t the only high-level athlete’s brain he’s ever picked.
“It’s the same with how I feel when I’m around legends of the game of basketball or whatever their sport is,” Hardaway said. “Just to ask them, ‘What makes you great?’ ‘What do you think about out there?’ All that goes into me coaching as well. You keep feeding for information, it kinda motivates your guys.”
Apart from the free lesson from the two-time major winner, Hardaway relishes the opportunities he gets to be on the golf course – especially when it involves two of the biggest pillars of the Memphis community in St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and FedEx.
Hardaway describes golf as his “peace,” even though he downplays his skill level, describing it as “not even close” to those of the professionals. He said he never envisioned himself taking up the sport while he was blistering the competition on the hardwood as a teenager at Treadwell or a young adult with the Tigers.
“Not once,” he said. “In my neighborhood, it was all about basketball, football and baseball. Never about golf. Even though we had Chickasaw Country Club in our neighborhood, we never even thought about it.”
Hardaway will get a chance to play another round at Spring Creek Country Club in Collierville on Thursday at the Danny Thomas Celebrity-Am. He said he will also be back at TPC Southwind as a spectator for the FedEx St. Jude Championship throughout the weekend.
Commercial Appeal sports writer Josh Crawford contributed to this report Reach sports writer Jason Munz at jason.munz@commercialappeal.com or follow him @munzly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.
The FedEx St. Jude Championship has put its own signature spin on the tradition.
The “Hush Y’all” paddles are back.
With the return of the FedEx St. Jude Championship this week at TPC Southwind – the PGA Tour event that kicks off the FedEx Cup Playoffs – one of the most visible stamps that makes it so uniquely Memphis will once again be on full display.
Rather than the customary “Quiet Please” signs that most golf tournaments employ as either a subtle reminder or a not-so-subtle reprimand for spectators, the FedEx St. Jude Championship has put its own signature spin on the tradition.
Who do we have to thank for it? Dwight Drinkard had only recently become the tournament’s first full-time tournament director – when it was known as the Federal Express St. Jude Classic. It was high time to make the conversion from wooden paddles to something lighter, and it was the perfect time to add some Southern flair to them.
Drinkard, who died on Aug. 5, seized on the opportunity.
“It all started with him,” said Jack Sammons, the FedEx St. Jude Championship’s general chairman. “That thing has just snowballed and become this thing that’s talked about throughout the PGA Tour. I give Dwight 100% of the credit for that.”
But even Drinkard admitted it wasn’t an original idea. In 2019, he told The Commercial Appeal he was inspired by the Atlanta Classic, which also bandied about “Hush Y’all” paddles. But even the Atlanta Classic borrowed the idea from a golf tournament in Jamaica that went with “Hush Mon!”
The ‘Hush Y’all’ signs got a makeover at the WGC FedEx St. Jude Invitational and were spotted on every corner of TPC Southwind during the first round of the tournament. (Photo: Brandon Dahlberg / For CommercialAppeal.com)
“It was endemic to our Southern way of doing things and we became more known for it than Atlanta,” Drinkard told The Commercial Appeal in 2019.
While it has become so popular at the FedEx St. Jude Championship that the paddles are even sold at the merchandise tent behind the 18th green – along with “Hush Y’all” hats, T-shirts and other swag – it was a hot-ticket item dating all the way back to their inception.
When Sammons became general chairman in 2010, merchandise branding was being updated as the tournament went from the St. Jude Classic to the FedEx St. Jude Classic. That included the “Hush Y’all” paddles.
“The good people that make the golf shafts (TrueTemper), they donated these golf shafts with grips so that our marshals could hold the signs up,” said Sammons. “At the end of every day, when they were to turn them in, if they took 500 of ‘em, 250 would come back.
“That told me, one, we had some folks that had a little bit of larceny in ‘em and, two, it told me it was such a popular souvenir that people were willing to pilfer them. That spoke volumes to me.”
Reach sports writer Jason Munz at jason.munz@commercialappeal.com or follow him @munzly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.
Everything you need to know for the first round of the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
The PGA Tour’s 2024 FedEx Cup Playoffs get underway this week in Memphis, Tennessee, at TPC Southwind for the FedEx St. Jude Championship. World No. 1 and gold medalist Scottie Scheffler headlines the field and will be joined by Xander Schauffele, Rory McIlroy, Collin Morikawa and Ludvig Aberg, among others.
Defending champion Lucas Glover isn’t in the field after failing to make it into the top 70 of the point standings.
TPC Southwind is a par-70 track measuring 7,243 yards.
The purse at the FedEx St. Jude Championship is $20 million with $3.6 million going to the winner. The champion will also earn 2,000 FedEx Cup points.
From tee times to TV and streaming info, here’s everything you need to know for the first round of the FedEx St. Jude Championship. All times listed are ET.
The PGA Tour’s postseason got underway at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee, as the top 70 in the point standings are competing in the 2024 FedEx St. Jude Championship.
Defending champion Lucas Glover was not in the field after he failed to finish the regular season inside the top 70. Gold medalist Scottie Scheffler headlines the field and is joined by Xander Schauffele, Rory McIlroy, Collin Morikawa and Ludvig Aberg, among others.
“It’s just not that fun to play golf when you don’t know where the ball is going.”
It’s hard to be the underdog as the reigning FedEx Cup champion but Viktor Hovland found a way.
He’s recorded just one top-10 finish all season – finishing third at the PGA Championship in May – in 13 starts and enters the week at No. 57 in the FedEx Cup standings. That means if he doesn’t get his act together this week at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, which is contested at TPC Southwind in Memphis, the first of three playoff events, and leap into the top 50, he’ll be out of the playoffs. No winner of the BMW Championship, the second playoff event, has failed to qualify and defend his title since the playoffs began in 2007. (It should be noted that the top 70 made the BMW until it was reduced to the top 50 last year.) Even if Hovland does squeeze his way into the BMW at Castle Pines in Denver, he’ll need to vault inside the top 30 to make the Tour Championship in Atlanta to defend that title. So, Hovland, who grew up in Norway, where the chances of finding one’s way to the PGA Tour let alone to becoming a world-beater and FedEx Cup champ are slim to none, is in some way right where he likes to be.
“I feel like maybe I’ve been an underdog in some way my whole life,” he said on Tuesday during his pre-tournament press conference ahead of the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
A year ago, Hovland finished T-13 in Memphis and noted that if not for making a mess at the 18th hole, he might have won that tournament too. He then went on to win the remaining two playoff events with a final-round 61 at the BMW and a 63 at the Tour Championship. He was a trendy pick to win his first major this year and knock Scottie Scheffler from the title of world No. 1.
But he made a curious coaching change at the end of the season and went down a few different rabbit holes in search of perfecting his swing and it backfired. He’s dropped from fifth in Strokes Gained: Tee to Green last season to 65th this go-round. All of his attention on his full swing has hurt his short game, which had long been his Achille’s Heel. After improving to No. 86 last season, he has fallen back to No. 174 this season.
“I’m just working on the things that I need to work on to get back to where I was last year,” Hovland said. “Then I believe I can do some great things again.”
But Hovland, who has won six times on Tour and at 26 seemed well on his way to having a Hall of Fame caliber career, looked lost at times this season. He returned to working with swing instructor Joe Mayo, who guided him to the FedEx Cup last season, but other than being a one-week wonder at the PGA at Valhalla, it has been a baffling year for Hovland.
Viktor Hovland reacts after a putt on the sixth green during the final round of the 2024 PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club. (Photo: Adam Cairns-USA TODAY Sports
“It’s just not that fun to play golf when you don’t know where the ball is going,” he said, which are words the average duffer can relate to. “I feel like it’s a waste of time for me to be playing golf if that’s where I’m at. I’d rather be off the golf course and work on it, trying to figure out why I’m doing those things.”
Someday, Hovland could probably write a book on what went wrong with his swing this season or at least a lengthy chapter for his autobiography, but on Tuesday he chalked it up to changing his “pattern.”
“I knew my pattern was really good. But I was upset that I wasn’t cutting the ball as much as I would have liked. My ball flight started to become a little bit of a draw, which is fine. I was still hitting it good. But sometimes visually I would have liked to have seen the cut,” he explained. “Then in the off-season I made a conscious effort to try to cut the ball more, and when I did that, I ruined a relationship that happens in my swing that makes it really difficult for me to control the face coming down. So now it’s just kind of me learning from that. I know exactly why it happened. I know exactly what happens because I’ve gotten myself measured, and now it’s just kind of a process of getting back to where I was.”
The process of rediscovering his old pattern and the confidence he once had in it is what makes golf great. Even for some of the game’s best, finding it can be fleeting, and Hovland knows that there’s no guarantee he will ever play as well as he did a year ago during the FedEx Cup Playoffs. Perhaps it’s the part of him that loves being the underdog that enjoys the search for something close to perfection in his swing.
“I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for me to play my best golf. It might be this week. It might be next week. But at least now I’m on a path to progress. I’m on a path to improvement,” he said. “Whereas before, one thing is playing bad, but you don’t know why and you don’t know how to fix it. That’s very challenging mentally. I might play terrible this week, but at least I feel like I’m on a path to improvement, and that’s all that kind of matters for me.”
Pro golf’s modern-day version of “Clash of the Titans” takes stage in Memphis this week.
Scottie Scheffler vs. Xander Schauffele.
Professional golf’s modern-day version of “Clash of the Titans” will premiere at the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis this week. When play begins Thursday at TPC Southwind, it will feature 70 of the world’s best golfers, including greats like Rory McIlroy, winners of multiple majors like Collin Morikawa, and former champions in Memphis like Will Zalatoris and Justin Thomas.
But Scheffler and Schauffele have been transcendent this season. Scheffler is No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking and No. 1 in the FedEx Cup Playoff standings. Schauffele is No. 2 in both. Two weeks ago, Scheffler won the gold medal for the United States at the Paris Olympics. Three years ago, Schauffele scored the gold for the U.S. in Tokyo.
Three of golf’s four majors in 2024 were won by either Scheffler (the Masters — where Schauffele finished eighth — already the 28-year-old’s second green jacket) or Schauffele (PGA Championship, British Open — Scheffler had top-10 finishes at both). Bryson DeChambeau, who won’t be in Memphis this year because he has aligned himself with LIV Golf, won the other major (the U.S. Open). Schauffele tied for seventh there, while Scheffler tied for 41st.
How about The Players Championship (golf’s so-called fifth major) back in March? Scheffler won that, too. Schauffele tied for second, one stroke behind Scheffler.
Either Scheffler or Schauffele almost certainly will be the favorite to win the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Neither has been victorious in Memphis before. But they’ve had enough success here — and are having next-level success this season — to instill confidence in even the most hesitant bettor.
Schauffele has made seven starts at TPC Southwind. His best finish came in 2020, when he tied for sixth at the event, then known as the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational. Scheffler has played Memphis four times, finishing 14th in 2021 and tying for 15th in 2020.
Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele walk to the 15th green during the third round of the TOUR Championship. (Photo: Adam Hagy/USA TODAY Sports)
Scottie Scheffler-Xander Schauffele: tale of the tape
