PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — As the action screeched to a halt near the seventh tee box at The Players Championship Grounds, Ludvig Aberg and Siwoo Kim stood near a tree and waited.
and waited.
In the end, both Kim and Aberg spent more than 20 minutes at the No. 7 tee box, making it the longest wait time among all players during the opening two days of the Players Championship. The two took the opportunity well. Kim paused for a quiet cigarette break under a palm canopy, and Aberg stood out in the sunlight, staring out at the horizon.
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“Well, it was definitely a challenge,” Aberg later said. “It’s no secret that I’m a fast player and I like being fast.”
In golf, as in life, waiting is the hardest part. Tom Petty knew that in 1981 when he wrote the song that first coined the phrase “The Waiting.” The song and album are firm promisehelped propel Petty to his peak as one of the greatest musicians of his time. All the waiting proved to be helpful. Petty eventually became famous enough that people started listening to him. they are On Friday afternoon, thousands of fans gathered in TPC Sawgrass’ formidable merchandise center.
At TPC Sawgrass, it’s hard to maintain patience inside the merchandise tent and inside the ropes. As Kim knows all too well, winning the Players Championship can change the course of your life. He won here in 2017 at age 21, becoming the youngest champion in tournament history and setting the trajectory for a PGA Tour career that will reach its 10th anniversary in 2026.
“The first year (of the tour) was just surviving,” Kim said Friday. “It’s not easy to survive this tour every year. It was a big win.”
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The problem is that you can win career-changing victories. coronation Victories like Kim’s don’t often come to players. The last three winners of this tournament have all come from two of the best players on the planet, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, and it’s the first time since Cameron Smith’s strong run in 2022 that a player’s winner came from a non-major class.
But throughout the two days of this Players Championship, the leaderboard had other ideas. Neither McIlroy nor Scheffler were within 10 shots of the lead entering Saturday morning. (McIlroy, who arrived Wednesday with a lower back injury, was 13 strokes behind the leader at one over. Scheffler, whose driver had his worst performance of the calendar year, also passed by one stroke at 1 over.) Of the six players within five strokes of the leader heading into the weekend, four have no experience in the majors (Ludvig Aberg, Cameron Young, Corey Connors and Sepp Straka), and the other two (Zander) have no experience in the majors. With Sunday’s win, Schauffele and Justin Thomas) face an opportunity to turn around an unusually quiet 12 months in their careers.
“This weekend is going to be tough for me,” Thomas said. “But it would be exciting.”
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Of course, a win at TPC Sawgrass would mean much more to any of the four non-major winners. It’s a moment of promise and fulfillment that rarely comes to Island Green patrons.
“Sawgrass is also a golf course where you have to make shots. I love the golf course that’s in front of me,” said Aberg, who leads the match for two and uses TPC Sawgrass as his home facility during the offseason.
Yes, there’s a difference between loving the course and conquering the course, but Aberg on Friday looked like a guy more than capable of doing the latter. He shot an incredible score of 9-under 63 on a rocky golf course on Friday afternoon, leaving him in the lead by two strokes.
“Is there any benefit (to playing here regularly)?” “Maybe,” he said with a laugh Friday night, “but you still have to take shots.”
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Advantage or not, there is little question that Aberg is the favorite. Going into Saturday’s third round at 12 under par, he has a chance to reignite the breakout season that spread throughout the golf world last summer.
Aberg doesn’t like to address the rampant speculation that filled Friday night with a two-stroke lead in the biggest non-major tournament of the golf season. But there’s no doubt that the PGA Tour’s ambitious new CEO, Brian Rolup, paused long enough on Friday to imagine the Swedish phenom hoisting the trophy.
Lolap has been coyly fanning the flames of major championships among his players from behind the scenes, and a crowning victory would bode well for their major championship hopes. Even if the players never Despite being a major championship, its “better than the rest” status could certainly do worse than welcome the glorious feats of up-and-coming stars like Aberg, Young and Straka, or the return to glory of established stallions like Schauffele and Thomas.
Either way, the results of these players are shaping up to be a rare kind of gift for the Tour of Champions and Lorap. But the answer to that journey will take just a little bit of effort, much like Aberg’s long, hard look at the seventh tee box Friday afternoon. a bit Please wait a little longer.
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