Not all of the recent Sony Open in Hawaii champions roll off the tongue like Ernie Els or Vijay Singh.
Patton Kizzire, Fabian Gomez, Johnson Wagner, Mark Wilson. These aren’t exactly household names who turn pages in casual fan magazines. When they’re taking pictures at the trophy presentation, the Sony Open representatives prefer handing off the hardware to an Els, Singh, Jimmy Walker, Justin Thomas or, most recently, Matt Kuchar.
Granted, most folks on the mainland have forgotten all about the game of golf. It’s the dead of winter after all — football weather where the National Football League playoffs far outweigh anything going on in the distant fairways of the PGA Tour. There’s a reason the first two events of the calendar year are in the 50th state. And it has little to do with television ratings.
The few folks who did tune in to watch the picturesque settings of Kapalua and Waialae the past couple of weeks might have rummaged around in the garage afterward just to make sure their clubs were OK. After all, baby, it’s still cold outside and will be for another 90 days or so outside of California, Arizona, Florida and Texas, where most of the next tour stops will be before the Masters.
By mid-April, tour players will be ready for the first major of 2019, including the 40-year-old Kuchar. He seems reborn after two victories in his last three starts, something that might have happened to contemporaries Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, but not to the guy with a hair line better suited for a ball cap. The man simply known as Kooch is well aware how hard it is to win out here. That’s why he worked so diligently last year to regain the form he lost somewhere along the way.
More than four and a half years and 115 starts between victories before finally cashing in late last fall, Kuchar is one of those golfers from Woods’ generation who has never won a major. He almost shook that off at The Open Championship in 2017, but some young kid named Jordan Spieth whisked it away with spectacular shots over the final nine, leaving Kuchar “crushed” with his runner-up finish.
Maybe that’s one reason he took a step backward, staggered by that loss and how the continuing downward spiral kept him off the Ryder Cup team. Perhaps that’s why he’s listening to his biological clock much more intently these days. He knows there aren’t that many major chances left in his golf bag. Maybe there aren’t any. But Kuchar is going to spend the next few starts finding out just how long this resurgence thing will last.
He’s got the West Coast swing ahead of him, the Players Championship in March and then the granddaddy of them all in April — The Masters. If you can win only one, this is the major most golfers would choose. Kuchar went to Georgia Tech. He knows all about the green jacket located in the Emerald City of Augusta National, and has demonstrated lately that he has the game needed for the big stage if he can control the nerves that accompany a major championship.
During Sunday’s final round of the Sony Open, he got off to a rocky start, which often leads to a final round of 70-something, something you can’t do at Waialae and win. Gone was that down-home smile and in its place was a grimace of disbelief and frustration. Had he not won in Mexico three starts ago, perhaps Kuchar doesn’t right the ship in time, or at all. Instead, maybe he goes down with it, just a lost opportunity at Waialae, or as Joni Mitchell once sang, “Another dream over the dam.”
But that didn’t happen.
While he spends the next couple of weeks in Hawaii with his family, Kuchar will reflect on that and draw even more confidence from it. He is excited about the prospects, said as much at the press conference Sunday night and has already garnered enough FedEx Cup points to make the Tour Championship a final destination come August. Kuchar enjoys the sound of that. So do Sony officials, who, like many fans here, look forward to his return in 2020.
