Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
It was an eventful year in the world of golf and if you missed it here are a few special moments worth mentioning.
Justin Thomas became the PGA tour’s seventh player to break 60 in an official round, opening the Sony Open in Hawaii in style after winning in Kapalua. In the next event, Adam Hadwin shot a 59 during the third round of the CareerBuilder Challenge, however, failed to close out the tournament.
Sam Saunders also joined Thomas and Hadwin in the 59 club, albeit while playing on the Web.com Tour as he shot the number in the first round of the championship.
Meanwhile, NBA MVP Steph Curry proved he’s got game and held his own in a Web.com Tour event. The Golden State Wariors back-to-back 74s left him ahead of three other pro golfers through 36 holes. The play has inspired another celebrity to give it a go in a Web.com Tour event; country singer Jake Owen to play in the Nashville Golf Open next May.
In other news, 60-year-old Bernhard Langer set the all-time PGA Tour Champions senior major mark when he won the Regions Tradition and the KitchenAid Senior PGA in back-to-back weeks in May. Langer then added the Senior Open Championship in July for good measure, part of a seven-win season that gives him 36 PGA Tour Champions victories for his career, just nine behind Hale Irwin’s all-time mark.
Also, the US Amateur was capped by one of the most dramatic finishes ever when 19-year-old Doc Redman put together one of the best rallies in the Amateur’s 122-year history. The sophomore at Clemson was 2 down to Texas senior-to-be Doug Ghim with two holes to play at Riviera Country Club outside Los Angeles before Redman made a 60-foot eagle putt to win the 17th hole. He then made a 10-foot birdie on the 18th to send the match to extra holes. Playing the drivable par-4 10th at Riviera as the first hole of the sudden-death playoff, Redman won with a conceded birdie after Ghim made a mess of the hole.
One game that cannot go unnoticed is when 13-year-old Chia Yen Wu of China beat American Lauren Stephenson in the quarterfinals at San Diego Country Club in the US Women’s Amateur match. She was the winner of the longest 18-hole scheduled match in USGA history, breaking the mark of 28 holes set at the 1930 US Amateur and 1960 US Junior Amateur. Making the match all the more amazing was its various vagaries of match play moments such as when Stephenson hit her approach on the 26th hole to three feet then watched Wu make a 70-foot birdie putt to halve the hole.
