Ivins, Utah — Keep an eye out for Frankie Capan III at this week’s Bank of Utah Championship. He seems to play his best golf when he’s having a hard time taking his eye off the ball.
Kapan birdied three of his final five holes Thursday at Black Desert Resort to open with a 5-under 66, finishing just one stroke behind early clubhouse leaders Thorbjorn Oleson, David Lipski and Jesper Svensson. The Minnesota native had eight birdies and three bogeys despite being hospitalized the night before the tournament with a severe infection in his right eye.
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“I’ve actually played some worse opponents, but despite the adversity this week, this was a pretty good round,” Capan (pronounced SAP-in) said casually, still wearing the Oakley shades he bought yesterday after spending nearly five hours at Intermountain Health St. George Regional Hospital.
Ranked 137th in the FedEx Cup fall standings and in desperate need of a strong finish to his rookie season, Capan noticed bloodshot eyes late last week and simply thought he had eye drops and began treatment with eye drops. He visited Wisconsin over the weekend for his grandfather’s 90th birthday, but his eye condition worsened. Doctors in Wisconsin diagnosed him with cellulitis and prescribed antibiotics and new eye drops. He struggled in Monday’s pro-am match, but new treatment has made his eyes more sensitive to light.
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“I’m left eye dominant, so I actually practiced a few shots with my (right) eye closed on Tuesday to see if I could play like that,” he admitted. “My eye just swelled up and almost closed. It was disgusting.”
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Worried he might have to withdraw, he went to the hospital on Wednesday morning and underwent several tests and a CT scan. It turned out he had a staph infection, requiring a stronger antibiotic, azithromycin, and steroid eye drops.
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He teed off at 9:23 a.m. Mountain Time Thursday, his eyes still blurry and sensitive to light. He had never played a round of golf wearing sunglasses. There were a few times where I had to back off a shot because depending on my position on the course, the sun hit the right side of my face and hit the corner of my eye. On the final hole of the day, the reachable par-5 ninth, he had to hit a 3-wood off the tee because of the glare emanating from the top of his driver. He laid up and hit his wedge to three and a half feet for birdie.
“I was thinking, ‘This might not work,’ but in the end I felt good enough to try,” said Capan, 25, who earned his first individual top 10 of the year at the Sanderson Farms Championship. (He finished third in the team event at the Zurich Classic with Jake Knapp.) “It wasn’t fun, but given how I felt today and how I hit it and rolled it, I thought I could handle it. Thankfully, it was a good day. I played really well.”
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Capan hit the regulation 15 greens and made a putt of about 115 feet, ranking him second among players in the morning wave.
In a strange coincidence, Capan has successfully addressed vision problems before. At the 2024 Vertex Bank Championship, Kapan set a Korn Ferry Tour scoring record with a 13-under 58 in the first round at Texas Rangers Golf Club in Arlington, Texas. In the process, he also broke the course record held by Scotty Scheffler.
He played most of the round battling blurred vision. Strange.
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As for competing despite a more difficult illness, Keipan said he once won a tournament in Japan despite suffering a hip injury that caused him to click at the top of his backswing. “I think I took eight months off after that,” he said. Another time, he teed it up two days after tearing the labrum in his right shoulder. He got through it with “large doses of ibuprofen.”
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Keipan, ranked 236th in the world, shrugged off his recent setbacks.
“I’ve played with all kinds of crap going on,” he said. “I’m used to some pain because I played football. I played with Hogan (Hatten of the Detroit Lions) all the time. I mean, those guys are dealing with a lot worse. So I can deal with some blur.”
Apparently he can do more than that.
