The annual reminder that golf is the purest professional sport hits home this week. Fremont High School graduate Zac Blair and Davis’ Daniel Summerhays, two of the three Utahns among the PGA Tour’s current membership, will be playing to save their seasons and extend their careers.
A disclaimer to the drama: It would take something beyond an eclipse, more like a collision of planets, to keep Blair and Summerhays from maintaining full access to the tour’s 2017-18 season. They’re well-positioned, for reasons I’ll explain, even if they’ll make everybody’s list of players on the bubble of the top 125 in the FedEx Cup standings going into the season-ending Wyndham Championship at Greensboro, N.C.
My favorite part of sports is watching other people fight for their jobs, and that’s especially true with guys who are closely followed in the Utah golf community. And I love how pro golfers basically have to prove themselves every year by meeting clear-cut standards.
A lot of golf fans around here will be tracking the Thursday-Friday scores of Blair and Summerhays, as they try to stay in the top 125. West High alum Tony Finau is taking the week off, knowing his No. 26 position will enable him to play in at least the first three events of the FedEx Cup Playoffs.
The context is how the presence of three homegrown Utahns as PGA Tour players of the past three seasons — and longer, in Summerhays’ case — remains one of the state’s biggest sports stories of this century. Equally remarkable is having three Utah high school graduates as head coaches of Power 5 college football programs. Provo’s Kyle Whittingham (Utah), Cottonwood’s Gary Andersen (Oregon State) and American Fork’s Bronco Mendenhall (Virginia) are among 64 people in those positions, making that threesome as historically meaningful as the golfers.
Those coaches have long-term contracts. It’s different for the golfers, who are competing for their existences. Blair is No. 120 in the FedEx Cup standings; Summerhays is No. 124. If they miss the 36-hole cut in Greensboro and enough players behind them post high finishes, they will fall out of the top 125 and lose exempt status for the season that starts in October. Blair would have to be very unlucky for that to happen, though, and Summerhays has another variable working for him.
This is where the discussion gets tricky. The points standings determine the 125 players who will advance to the FedEx Cup Playoffs next week, so Summerhays’ season could end. But the tour’s money list is not in sync with the points. By making the cut in all three appearances in major tournaments this year, even while playing poorly on the weekends, Summerhays has collected some extra money from those big purses.
He’s 115th on the money list ($826,124). Players who are in the top 125 in money, but not points, will be slotted ahead of the Web.com Tour graduates in the eligibility system for filling the PGA Tour’s weekly tournament fields. So Summerhays actually has less at stake this week than Blair, who’s 121st in money.
They’ve made extra efforts to keep their jobs — although Blair loves to play almost every week, anyway. He competed in 16 of 17 weeks prior to the PGA Championship, having missed only the U.S. Open. Summerhays has played 17 of 19 weeks, starting with the Masters in April. They subjected themselves to the heat and humidity of Alabama in the Barbasol Championship in July, while Finau was playing in the British Open.
The Utah-born golfers had to overcome weather issues and other factors that make their rise in the game so significant, aside from the odds of three tour players coming from this state’s population. Johnny Miller once moved his family back to California from Salt Lake City because he didn’t believe it was possible to build a golf game at high altitude and thrive at sea level. Scott Pinckney, who grew up playing with Finau and Blair in the Utah Junior Golf Association, moved with his family to Arizona in the interest of his golf development.
Andy Miller and Pinckney made the PGA Tour, briefly. Finau, Blair and Summerhays have remained there since 2014, and that’s impressive. In the past 50 years, Ogden’s Billy Johnston and Dixie’s Jay Don Blake were the only other Utah prep products who enjoyed extended tour careers (Blake is a PGA Tour Champions regular at age 58).
Ogden’s Jimmy Blair (Zac’s father), Brighton’s Brad Sutterfield and Davis’ Boyd Summerhays (Daniel’s brother) got there temporarily. The current generation has some staying power, but that’s being tested again this week.