Tag: Brent Grant

‘I don’t really know what’s going on’: Korn Ferry Tour players feel in the dark about future after PGA Tour-PIF agreement

“We’re so in the dark it’s hard to tell whether they made the right move or not.”

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NORMAN, Okla. — Rico Hoey has heard his fair share of chatter the past couple weeks. Then again, who hasn’t in the golf world?

Hoey, a 27-year-old from the Philippines, sits second in the Korn Ferry Tour standings with a win, a T-2 and six top-10 finishes in 14 starts this season. He’s well on his way to securing a PGA Tour card for next season, one of 30 up for grabs in the season-long points race. However, he has no idea what the future looks like, and most don’t.

Two weeks ago, the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced the framework of a new global golf entity. Even with the groundbreaking news, there’s still not much known about what the future looks like.

“I don’t really know what’s going on or what’s going to happen,” Hoey said Thursday after an opening-round 7-under 65 in the Compliance Solutions Championship at Jimmie Austin OU Golf Club. “For me, I’m just really happy to play out here and am going to focus on that. We’ll just keep hearing whenever the news comes out.”

Hoey’s sentiment is common among Korn Ferry Tour players, which is they are pretty much clueless as to what the future is going to be like. Logan McAllister said he wouldn’t comment on the situation because he didn’t know enough about it.

For most players, it’s business as usual the rest of the season. Beyond, no one knows.

The same has been said from dozens of golfers on the PGA Tour, as well. There have been plenty of conversations regarding whether LIV golfers will find their way back on the PGA Tour and how they can be let back in with the merger.

And for every time a LIV player comes back to the PGA Tour, that’s another spot that a Korn Ferry Tour player would take or players like Grant could lose their spot to.

Outside of the initial announcement, there’s plenty of speculation as to what it actually means. And it’s putting plenty on player’s minds, like Brent Grant.

After earning his PGA Tour card last year, Grant has made 22 starts this year, including last week’s U.S. Open. However, he wasn’t in the field this week at the Travelers Championship in Cromwell, Connecticut, so he headed to Norman to continue finding his groove with a new caddie on the Korn Ferry Tour.

Grant was at the RBC Canadian Open when the announcement of the agreement was made, though he didn’t attend the meeting with Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and fellow players. Yet his feelings echo the same thoughts of many on both tours.

“A the end of the day, they gave us no answers,” Grant said. “I feel that there were more than enough guys like me at the meeting who were going to say probably the same things as me. They sprung it on us out of no where. We’re so in the dark it’s hard to tell whether they made the right move or not.

“But for guys like me, Grayson Murray, ones who have won and grinded it out to get on Tour, they kind of feel sold out. But you know, me as a rookie, ultimately they don’t even know who I am, so it doesn’t really matter.”

From worst to first, Jon Rahm struggles and welcome back Lanto Griffin among 5 things to know after Day One at Farmers Insurance Open

Here’s everything you may have missed from Wednesday at Torrey Pines.

SAN DIEGO – Sam Ryder says most of his great rounds usually start with a birdie. On Wednesday, at the first round of the Farmers Insurance Open, he did one better than that.

Starting on the par-5, 10th hole at the North Course at Torrey Pines, Ryder rolled in a long eagle putt.

“Well, that’s it for me. I’m done for the day,” Brendan Steele, one of his competitors in his grouping, recounted what Ryder said. “I was like, ‘Dude, this isn’t a best ball. You’ve got to keep playing.’ So, he just decided to go crazy.”

Ryder tallied six birdies to go along with the eagle to post a bogey-free 8-under 64 and share the lead with Aaron Rai and rookie Brent Grant. Steele did his best to keep up with Ryder, rolling in a birdie at 10, the first of seven on the round to shoot 65.

“He was always in front of me the whole day,” Steele said. “His good play was helpful. It’s nice to see balls go in the hole.”

“You do feed off that,” Ryder added of a comfortable pairing where both players were dialed in. “There’s truth to that, for sure.”

Ryder, 33, entered the tournament in a slump, having missed three straight cuts and four of his last five, but his confidence remained intact.

“I felt like I was shaking holiday rust off,” he explained. “I’ve been working hard since the start of the new year and felt good about my game. It was just, it started off the tee for me, it was drive it in the fairway and I felt like I could attack.”

Ryder tabbed it a stress-free round and it all began with the opening-hole eagle.

“There wasn’t much to the putt,” he said. “It was actually fairly straight and it was one of those when it was halfway there, it looked pretty good and it just kind of fell in perfect.”

Farmers: Thursday tee times, how to watch | Leaderboard

Brent Grant, in the field at 2023 Sony Open in Hawaii, once qualified for the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball shooting a solo 63

Grant’s 63 in the U.S. Am Four-Ball in 2014 beat his previous low round by five shots.

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Brent Grant has qualified for the Sony Open in Hawaii in pretty much all ways imaginable.

The big-hitting Hawaii native got into the field in 2017 – which was also his first PGA Tour start – after winning a qualifier for members of the Governors Cup team, which is composed of the best amateurs in the state.

In 2019, he Monday qualified at Waialae Country Club. In 2022, he was on the Korn Ferry Tour and was attempting again to Monday qualify when he was approached on the course early in his round.

“I got pulled off the Monday qualifier,” he said Tuesday. “They gave me a sponsor invite last minute. Obviously with what was going on overseas and around here with COVID, the field actually dropped lower than anybody really expected.”

Now in 2023, Grant is a full-fledged member of the PGA Tour, having earned his card after an emphatic birdie putt in the Korn Ferry Tour Championship last August.

The BYU-Hawaii alum has yet to make the cut at the Sony in three tries. Maybe his fourth appearance will be the breakthrough for the Hawaii native who started playing golf at age 13 and would spend long hours at a course about 12 miles away from Waialae.

“I grew up at the Navy Marine Golf Course right across from the airport,” Grant said. “My dad was in the Navy for 30 years, and I got dropped off at 7 the morning and picked up at 7 at night.”

After high school, where he said he got “terrible” grades, he attended a junior college before starting his collegiate career at Oregon State. That lasted all of two events. He transferred back to the islands to play at BYU-Hawaii, where he played 13 events.

“That was all the college golf I ever played,” he said, describing how on his 21st birthday he turned pro. He honed his game on several mini-tours and the Korn Ferry Tour before making it full time on the PGA Tour this season.

Grant’s path to the highest level in golf is not that unusual. Many golfers have to grind for several years before they find pay dirt. What sets Grant’s story apart is what he accomplished as a 18-year-old, just five years after picking up the game.

He qualified for the first-ever U.S. Amateur Four-Ball.

By himself.

Shooting a 63.

Brent Grant, 18, qualified for the 2015 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship without his partner.

True story. Turns out his partner, 47-year-old Bill Walbert, was needed in surgery as a physician’s assistant, so Grant went it alone, lipping out a potential eagle putt on the last hole that would’ve given him a 62. Nonetheless, his 63 beat his previous low round by five shots.

Born in Jacksonville, Grant now lives in Chandler, Arizona, but perhaps a strong performance in his hometown event will jump start his PGA Tour career. Whatever happens, it sounds like he won’t soon forget the lean times that came before.

“It’s definitely not great having to go off your Chick-fil-A app for meals you accrued over a two-year span and not having any many to pay for food,” he said. “The only thing I can relate it to is the guys I know in the minor leagues in baseball. Guys that get paid a couple thousand dollars a month for three months of work or whatever it is and they got to go find a job.

“I was fortunate enough to have the Golden State and Outlaw Tour and be able to play and make a couple grand here and there. And then that kind of kept me afloat, and then I had couple people loan me some cash.

“They’re awesome. Each level I played on I’ve been fortunate enough to find people to help me out and I still keep in contact with them. Always there to help because they helped me.”

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