The PGA Tour returns to the Georgia coast for a sixth straight year, but almost everything about the tournament is different from its first five editions.
The event has a new name, a new date, a new course for one of the first two rounds and an expanded field. Sea Island Golf Club remains the tournament host, but the famed Seaside course will share its role as the tournament course for the first two days of play with Plantation, its adjacent sister course.
From 2010-14, the tournament was known as the McGladrey Classic, with the auditing, tax and consulting firm serving as title sponsor. It was recently announced that McGladrey will now be known as RSM, taking the name of its global network partner, with the tournament reflecting that change.
The RSM Classic will be played Nov. 19-22, the latest the tournament has been held. The McGladrey Classic was played Oct. 7-10 its first year and as late as Nov. 7-10 in 2013, with the event held in October four of the five years.
With the change, the RSM Classic will be the final event of the calendar year on the PGA Tour, concluding the Sunday before Thanksgiving. The tour will resume play in Hawaii in early January, and Tournament Director Scott Reid believes the change will result in a stronger field.
“This gives us a little separation from the Tour Championship, the Presidents Cup and the WGC event in China,” Reid says. “And it’s the last event prior to the break.”
The past few years, the tournament has been played in close proximity to the HSBC Champions in China, which effectively kept almost all of the game’s top players from competing in both. This year, the RSM Classic will be two weeks after the WGC event.
The tournament will conflict with two international events that draw the top European Tour players, as well as most of the PGA Tour’s Australian delegation. The Dubai World Championship, the European Tour finale for 2015, shares the same dates as the RSM Classic, as does the Australian Masters.
Even with those conflicts, a number of top international players will be teeing it up on St. Simons Island, with Graeme McDowell, Vijay Singh, Stuart Appleby, K.J. Choi and Tim Clark among the early commitments.
The strength of the tournament field starts with the contingent of players who live on St. Simons Island, or work with members of the outstanding instructional staff at Sea Island Golf Club. That list includes 2015 British Open champion Zach Johnson, fellow Presidents Cup members Matt Kuchar and 2013 McGladrey champion Chris Kirk, Brandt Snedeker, Charles Howell, Harris English, Brian Harman and tournament host Davis Love, who won the 2015 Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C., at the age of 51.
Other golfers with Georgia ties expected to play in the tournament are Stewart Cink, Brendon Todd, Kevin Kisner, Scott Brown, Hudson Swafford, Roberto Castro, Luke List, Henrik Norlander, 2015 Web.com Tour Player of the Year Patton Kizzire and Heath Slocum, who won the inaugural McGladrey Classic in 2010.
All five players who have won at Sea Island Golf Club will be in the field, with defending champion Robert Streb, Tommy Gainey (2012) and Ben Crane (2011) joining Kirk and Slocum.
Streb fired a final round 63 to finish at 14-under 266 and won a three-way playoff over South Africa’s Brendon de Jonge and Will Mackenzie. Streb trailed Mackenzie and Andrew Svoboda by five shots after 54 holes and was still four off the lead with five holes to play, but birdied four consecutive holes beginning at the 14th to pull even with de Jonge and Mackenzie, who were both stuck on 14-under for long stretches.
Mackenzie played his final 10 holes in even par while de Jonge parred his last six holes after playing the first 12 in 5-under. Streb birdied five of the final seven holes of the front nine to close in on the leaders, but a three-putt bogey at the 13th seemingly knocked him out of contention.
Streb followed with four straight birdies, giving him nine on the round, to earn a spot in the playoff, and collected his first PGA Tour victory when he scored his second birdie of the day on the 17th, the second playoff hole. Mackenzie dropped out of the playoff when he bogeyed the 18th, and Streb hit his tee shot on the par-3 17th to four feet to set up the winning putt.
Kirk, Henley and Kisner, all ex-Georgia Bulldogs, tied for fourth at 12-under, with Kirk and Henley both poised to make a move on the stuck-in-neutral leaders but unable to close the gap late in the round.
Streb’s victory launched a breakthrough season for the third-year PGA Tour player, who ended up with nine top-10 finishes and almost $3.95 in earnings, 14th on the final money list. He made his first appearance in the Tour Championship and will play in the Masters for the first time in April.
It was the third time in five years that the McGladrey winner made a huge final round surge, and the fifth straight time the tournament was decided in a playoff or by one stroke.
Crane birdied eight of his last 11 holes in 2011 for a 63 to erase a 5-stroke deficit and won a playoff over Webb Simpson. Gainey closed with a course record 60 the next year after beginning the final round seven shots behind Love. He outdueled major champions Love, Jim Furyk and David Toms, edging Toms by a shot for his only PGA Tour title.
Slocum had the lead going to the final round in 2010, shooting 2-under 68 on the Seaside course to hang on to beat Bill Haas by one shot and Toms by two. Kirk shared the 54-hole lead with journeyman Briny Baird in 2013, firing a final round 66 to finish one ahead of Baird and Clark, who made a Sunday comeback bid with a 62.
Haas, along with Kirk and Johnson the final day Presidents Cup heroes for the U.S., is back in the field this year along with Boo Weekley, 2015 Memorial winner David Lingmerth and Jason Dufner, who will be making his first appearance in the tournament.
This year’s field will be introduced to the Plantation course, which will host half the 156-player field each of the first two days. Plantation plays to a par of 72 (Seaside is a par 70) and measures over 7,000 yards from the tips.
Unlike Seaside, which is located amid the marshes and dunes on the tip of St. Simons Island, Plantation is more of a parkland style layout, with the 10th tee the only part of the course adjacent to the ocean and just a few holes on the front nine bordering the marshes.
With a mostly short-ish group of par 4s, a reachable quartet of par 5s and two short-iron par 3s, Plantation will offer plenty of scoring opportunities for the tour players, with its greens complexes less demanding than Seaside.
Plantation does feature more hazards than Seaside, with water in play on about half the holes, although a few of those require some seriously off-target tee shots to find trouble. Most of the hazards are on the par 3s and 5s, with three of the par 3s requiring tee shots over water, although two of them are in the 160-yard range.
Two of the par 5s, including the 18th, offer risk/reward opportunities, with a third featuring a dangerous tee shot for players hoping to reach the green in two.
Reid says there was some discussion with the PGA about converting two of the par 5s to par 4s, but he noted that ”the spectators like to see guys make birdies,” with the likelihood that the four par 5s will remain par 5s for the tournament.
“It will be exciting to see how the players will handle Plantation,” Reid said. “A lot of players think Plantation is harder than Seaside. But they’re playing just one round and things will depend on the wind.”
The later date will bring the weather into play more than the previous five years, with the likelihood of cooler temperatures. The tournament has enjoyed near perfect weather thus far, but with only a.m. tee times off the first and 10th tees the first two days before the cut, the RSM Classic is better positioned to deal with possible weather delays.
Increasing the field from 132 to 156 will benefit players who were unable to get into the first three tournaments of the 2015-16 PGA Tour season. St. Simons resident Jonathan Byrd has lost his exempt status after 14 years on tour, but will almost certainly be in the field, either getting in off his past champions status or on a sponsor’s exemption.
The Georgia PGA will be represented in the tournament by Tim Weinhart, who claimed Player of the Year honors for a record eighth time in 2015. Weinhart has made appearances in the tournament previously and has made several strong runs at making the 36-hole cut, a rare achievement for a PGA professional.
The RSM Classic begins with a pro-am on Monday of tournament week, with a noon shotgun start on Seaside and free admission to the public. The courses will be closed to the public on Tuesday, with both Seaside and Plantation hosting pro-ams on Wednesday.
A highlight of tournament week will be a concert Saturday night with Martina McBride at the St Simons airport, which is across the street from Seaside and Plantation. Previous pre-tournament concerts had been held on Plantation’s first hole, but it will be used for its intended purpose this year.
Golf Channel will provide live coverage of the tournament all four days from 1-4 p.m., with cameras located on both courses Thursday and Friday.