Golf is back, PIPhil is feeling his age and Jon Rahm shows no signs of rust at the Sentry Tournament of Champions | Golf news and tour information

Our long national nightmare is over, because the days of golfless Sundays are finally in the rearview mirror. The PGA Tour returned from their vacation slumber on a Board of Tourism day in Hawaii, the guy who’ll make you wonder why you’re living in a place that is snowing – and that makes you curse the COVID gods because they held you in your Maui hotel room. Okay maybe it’s just me

On more pertinent matters, here are five takeaways from the Sentry Tournament of Champions, which is back to being a real winner after a year of no Tour Championship qualification tournaments being approved.

Cameron Smith and Maui are a surfer couple

I don’t know if Cameron Smith is surfing, but Cameron Smith needs to surf, right? It only fits that the tough Aussie is co-lead in Hawaii, where he won his only individual PGA Tour title. (He’s a two-time Zurich Classic winner because who doesn’t love teaming up with a laid-back Aussie?) The Sentry could well be the gentlest PGA Tour event on the schedule. For starters, every player in the field has won the last season and thus has job security. You’re on Maui. There is no cut. The golf course itself is extremely resort-like: a beautiful but wide-open field that tumbles and twists down a slope with a view of the ocean.

Despite the pull of the Pacific, Smith managed to focus on the task at hand, punching two bomb-eagle putts, a 44-foot at 5 and a 37-foot at 15, en route to an eight-under-65. (Remember par 73 this week). He leads alone, with Daniel Berger one behind and four others one shot further back at six. This is how Joel Dahmen described it after his five-under 68: “The weather is perfect, the golf course is fun, pretty generous of the tees, so you have to hit two bad shots here to hit a bogey out here, it’s for us mostly stress-free and yes, overall it was just a really good day. “

Jon Rahm, Patrick Cantlay showed no signs of rust

A number of top players essentially skipped the fall season – including Jon Rahm, who stated Tuesday that his two-month hiatus was triggered not only by his 2021 roller coaster but also by an 18-month hustle and bustle of golf. After missing the cut in his native Spain, he returned to Arizona to hang out with his wife and little boy Kepa. During this familiar stretch, he almost lost his world number 1 to Collin Morikawa, only the young American stumbled down the route at the Hero World Challenge and stayed in second place.

Rahm wants to fend off Morikawa for at least a week. He showed no signs of rust when he shot a bogey-free seven-under 66 on Thursday. It’s been an encouraging start to the year for a player who has sky-high expectations – both for himself and the media – for 2022.

Patrick Cantlay has not played a PGA Tour event since “winning” the Tour Championship and receiving the FedEx Cup Grand Prize of $ 15 million in September. During the break he hardly played and, as usual, stayed completely away from the radar while reading books on his couch. After an opening bogey on Thursday he started in midseason form and played his last 17 in 8 under on Post 66. Nice to come back from a long break and to be greeted by the broadest fairways of the tour.

Phil Mickelson is back at Kapalua for the first time in over two decades. The reason? In order to raise money from the Player Impact Program, which Phil claimed to have won last week, a player must attend an event jointly agreed with the PGA Tour. For Lefty, that’s the sentry. The 51-year-old will have to work for his $ 8 million, as he told Golf Channel after the round that he was rightly overwhelmed by walking the Plantation Course, possibly the toughest walk on the entire PGA Tour.

“It’s a beautiful place and every hole has such a landscape,” said Mickelson, “but it’s a tough golf course to run. I’m injured. It’s vertical. It is difficult. It is not easy. And that was the biggest challenge, because I was tired of walking up and down these hills. “

He made three of his last four holes with a birdie to turn a disappointing round into a two-under-71.

Lift, clean, and place, for whatever reason

Golf Twitter has its favorite punching bags, one of which is the PGA Tour’s quick triggers when it comes to lifting, cleaning, and placing. While majors are not a starter, “normal” tour events seem to prefer preferred lies … even on Thursday when there was hardly a cloud in the sky. Mark Rolfing, an expert on Hawaiian weather patterns, called it the “perfect day on Maui”. The official justification for the tour was “wet conditions” and without being there it is difficult to assess the ground conditions. From the hotel room, however, that day didn’t look like a mud ball day.

The first day of the post-green book era

January 1 marked the start of the post-green book era on tour when the tour’s vote to pass a local book ban rule went into effect on Thursday. It won’t be easy to enforce the ban because the books are there and gamers have been using them for years. They also rely on an honor system and trust that players and caddies will monitor themselves and only write notes that comply with the new guidelines. It will be an adjustment for some who rely more on the books than others, like Bryson DeChambeau, but most people haven’t been too stressed out by the change.

“I’ve never really been a huge fan of the Greens Books,” said Smith. “I do AimPoint Express and I like to feel a lot of things. I like to see things and to feel things so the Greens Books took a lot of that away for me. I’ve cracked them a couple of times, but yeah, I’ve never really been a fan. “

Talor Gooch has used the books, but believes that the ban will actually benefit him: “I’m looking forward to it. I use the green reading books but I think it was disadvantageous at times and I play my best when I think less, calculate less, I try to be reactive and so it’s great not to have green books. “

“I like it,” added Dahmen. “I’m probably hiding my head in it too much. I don’t use them at home and putt OK so there’s no real reason to have them out here anyway. But on Tuesday and Wednesday it’s a little more work for the caddy to get the slopes and the grain out. But it has worked out well for me so far. “