The journey that ends in Atlanta — with a $10 million prize — is underway.
Jim Furyk has a lot of ground to make up.
The four-event PGA Tour playoff begins this week and culminates with the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club next month. As the FedEx Cup defending champion, Furyk is on the outside looking in. He desperately wants that to change.
The current field of 125 professional golfers will be narrowed to 30 by the time they arrive in Atlanta for the final event Sept. 22-25. Furyk, currently 60th in the standings, will have to jump 30 golfers in the next three events to book his return trip. He played at last week’s Wyndham Championship in North Carolina, to improve his position before the start of the playoffs. Furyk tied for ninth and moved up 10 spots.
“At Greensboro ... it was a pretty strong field,” Furyk said Tuesday. “You had a lot of guys that were in that field that maybe weren’t in the past, but they were looking at their seeding for the FedEx Cup. They weren’t in a position that they liked. I was one of those players. I said ‘You know what? I have to go to Greensboro and try to improve my position.’”
The Barclays, which begins this week at the Plainfield Country Club in Edison, N.J., is the first event. The top 100 players in the standings move on to the Deutsche Bank Classic at TPC Boston. The top 70 in the standings after that event will advance to the BMW Championship at Cog Hill Golf and Country Club in Illinois in the final cut before the Tour Championship.
It won’t be easy for Furyk, who is one of five players to make it to the Tour Championship all four years of the FedEx Cup. When Furyk won last year, he entered the playoffs third in the standings.
Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh are the other two winners in the four-year history of the playoffs. When Woods won in both 2007 and 2009, he was first in the standings entering the playoffs. Singh made the biggest jump, winning after starting in seventh place. He won the first two playoff events to make for an easy path. By the time he got to East Lake, all he had to do was show up, and the crown was his.
There will be new names in Atlanta this year. With 11 first-time winners on the PGA Tour this season, the field is wide open. Woods, who failed to finish in the top 125, will not be in attendance for the second consecutive year. The top five players in the current standings are Nick Watney, Steve Stricker, Webb Simpson, Luke Donald and PGA Championship winner Keegan Bradley. Phil Mickelson is sixth.
Rob Johnston, general chairman of the Tour Championship, said Tuesday this is the first year that pre-tournament talk didn’t revolve around the big-name players.
“The marquee names are not all that is being talked about,” Johnston said. “It’s not just about who is not coming here.”
Ticket update
A limited number of daily and weekly tickets remain for the Tour Championship, according to executive director Todd Rhinehart. All military personnel, active, retire or reserve, can attend the event for free, including up to four dependents. Also, children 18 and under can attend for free with a ticketed adult.
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