Who’s here, who’s not, how many LIV golfers at the PGA Championship?

article content

ROCHESTER, NY – The world of golf has landed at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, NY, home of the 105th PGA Championship. Most of the golf world, then. For now, the most notable absence is four-time tournament champion Tiger Woods.

article content

Woods is recovering from surgery on his right foot, which he injured in a car accident just over two years ago. The 15-time major champion went under the knife again after the Masters and joins the injured list with Will Zalatoris, who is recovering from microdiscectomy surgery on his back, an operation Woods has performed four times. Zalatoris is the only player in the top 100 in the world rankings not to travel to Oak Hill.

article content

article content

The week’s biggest question mark is fan favorite Jordan Spieth trying to figure out if a recent left wrist injury will allow him to compete. Spieth is just one PGA Championship win away from achieving the holy grail of golf, the grand slam of his career. So expect him to do whatever he can to play. The 29-year-old three-time major champion released a statement on May 8, explaining that the wrist injury was causing severe pain and that doctors said the injury “required rest and limited movement.” Also that his recovery will be assessed “week by week”. A right-handed golfer’s left wrist makes a lot of contact as the clubface moves through the turf, especially on the awkward bumps of a PGA championship.

article content

article content

Enough with the bad news. There are six Canadians in the field this week, two more than at the Masters in April. Leading the group is world No. 29 Corey Conners, who recovered from some unusually inconsistent ball strokes and picked up his second PGA Tour win at the Valero Texas Open last month. On his last start, he finished eighth at Quail Hollow.

Canada has two other recent PGA Tour winners in the field: Adam Svensson (No. 58 in the world) and Mackenzie Hughes (No. 59). Both players won in the fall; For Hughes, it was his second career win. After missing two cuts after the Masters, 32-year-old Hughes comes to Oak Hill with a T14 at last week’s AT&T Byron Nelson Classic.

“I’m a momentum guy and have been able to put them together in bundles in the past,” Hughes told Postmedia on Monday.

article content

Oak Hill will be a new test for Hughes, who at the first tee said his only memory of the course was watching Shaun Micheel’s 7-iron on the 18th, which won him the 2003 PGA Championship.

“And I think they’ve changed course a lot since then,” Hughes said.

Hughes was only 12 years old in 2003, and he’s right: the almost 100-year-old Donald Ross Golf Course recently underwent a major restoration project. After being modified by Robert Trent Jones in the mid-20th century, Oak Hill was further modernized by George and Tom Fazio in the 1970s. The recent restoration by Andrew Green aims to bring the course closer to its Ross roots. The course was also the venue for this championship in 2013, in which Jason Dufner emerged victorious. Jack Nicklaus won here in 1980 when Oak Hill made its PGA championship debut.

article content

The other Canadians in the field are Nick Taylor (No. 64), Adam Hadwin (No. 71) and Taylor Pendrith (No. 121).

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

There are 18 LIV golfers in the field this week and some of them are arriving in good shape. On Sunday, Dustin Johnson defeated Cam Smith and Branden Grace in a playoff to win LIV Tulsa. Major champions Johnson and Smith are unmissable, as is Brooks Koepka, who led the Masters for three rounds and is hoping for his third Wanamaker Trophy. Phil Mickelson returns to the PGA Championship after skipping the event as the defending champion last year.

Sergio Garcia is not in the field, marking the first major championship he is not allowed to compete in since the Open Championship in 1999, the same year he burst onto the scene with his PGA championship duel with Woods in Medinah. Garcia was not offered a waiver by the PGA of America.