Looks to salvage PGA Tour card
Looks to salvage PGA Tour card
BOISE, Idaho — When William McGirt walked off the course two weeks ago in Greensboro, missing the cut in the season-ending Wyndham Championship to lose his PGA Tour card, he said he was “ready to move on” from professional golf.
But first, he’ll have one more chance to get back on Tour.
The Fairmont native is playing the Korn Ferry Tour Finals, a three-event series with 25 PGA Tour cards for the 2022-23 season at stake. The three-event series includes the top 75 players from the second-tier Korn Ferry Tour and the 126th- to 200th-ranked players from the PGA Tour; McGirt finished the PGA Tour season ranked 181st in FedExCup points.
The first Korn Ferry Tour Finals event is the Albertson’s Boise Open, beginning Thursday at Hillcrest Country Club in Boise, Idaho.
“I figured I might as well try to get my card back at Finals. If I don’t, my plan is to play Sanderson Farms at the end of September and most likely call it a career,” McGirt said. “I’m at a different place in my life now where I want to spend more time with my family and less time on the road. I’m not going to chase Monday qualifiers and I don’t want to go back to the Korn Ferry Tour (next season). I could change my mind and maybe decide to play a few events if I get in but I don’t know what my plan for that is right now.”
McGirt will tee off Thursday at 2:30 p.m. ET on the 10th hole, paired with Jeremy Paul and Kevin Chappell. The threesome will be the first group off on Friday morning at 9:30 a.m. ET on hole No. 1.
McGirt will be making his fourth Boise start. He played the event in 2010 and 2011, when he was a Korn Ferry Tour regular and the tournament was a regular-season event, finishing 42nd and 43rd. He missed the cut in last year’s Korn Ferry Tour Finals event there. His career scoring average is 69.2 on the par-71 layout.
“It’s a shorter course and is usually a shootout,” McGirt said. “The par-5s are fairly short but the par-3s are good holes. It’s a place I can play well at but it’s like playing (the PGA Tour event in) Palm Springs — you make three pars in a row and drop 20 spots.”
While the city of Boise sits at about 2,700 feet elevation, McGirt said the course is relatively flat so the elevation “isn’t that big of a deal.”
“It goes close to normal distance in the mornings because it takes a few hours to start to warm up; unlike the East Coast, the high temperatures don’t occur until around 5-6 p.m.,” McGirt said. “The lack of humidity let’s the ball go farther too. The air is thin enough that the wind doesn’t affect the ball that much.
“Launch angle and apex height are what determines how much farther it goes. If you’re a high launch, high apex guy the ball will go roughly 10% farther. I think that can work against you because the gaps between clubs get much bigger. Lower launch, lower apex guys don’t get the huge gaps between clubs. It’s a little give and take because you can hit the driver farther but you’re hitting a lot of wedges so you need to keep the ball flight down for better distance control.”
Including the missed cut in Greensboro, McGirt made the cut in three of his last five PGA Tour starts this summer, including a tie for eighth at the Travelers Championship in June.
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