Your 2022 picks: Our top 10 PGA Tour stories (No. 1 had to do with a Cam Smith penalty)
While you’re soaking up some holiday cheer (and with the freezing cold temperatures, you’ll need to), we’re closing the books on a year that will leave a lasting impression.
And as part of taking our year-end inventory, we’ve been looking through the numbers and tallying up which stories drew your attention — and sharing the findings with you.
For the final days of 2022, we’re offering up a snapshot of the top 10 stories from each of Golfweek’s most popular sections, including travel, the PGA and LPGA tours, instruction and amateur golf. Here’s what we’ve already counted down.
Here’s a look at the top 10 PGA Tour stories, as clicked on by you (list doesn’t include photo galleries or money lists):
10. Tiger Woods beats Phil Mickelson for $8M PGA Tour Player Impact Program bonus; top 10 revealed
Tiger Woods has won the PGA Tour’s first annual Player Impact Program, the controversial $40 million scheme that rewards players on their ability to engage fans, regardless of on-course performance. Woods receives a bonus of $8 million.
Woods appeared at just one tournament in 2021, the PNC Championship in December, at which he finished second with his son, Charlie. Woods narrowly edged Phil Mickelson for the top prize.
9. In a congratulatory message to PGA Championship winner Justin Thomas, Bubba Watson says he'll be out 4-to-6 weeks
Bubba Watson announced on social media that he’s going to miss the next four-to-six weeks after tearing the meniscus in his knee.
8. Cam Smith's tee shot hit a fan and broke his phone. What he did next was pure class
Cameron Smith had a meaningful interaction with a fan during Saturday’s third round of the FedEx St. Jude Championship. His tee shot on the par-4 seventh hole drifted towards spectators and ended up hitting one. Twitter user Blake Krassenstein was the victim of the errant shot, but what happened next will make you smile.
“Walked over shook my hand, signed his glove for me, wrote down my cell # in his yardage book and ordered me a new phone. Unreal moment,” Krassenstein wrote in a post on Twitter.
7. Geoff Ogilvy Q&A: On LIV Golf, his career regret, rolling back the golf ball and if he wants to become the best course architect of his generation
Geoff Ogilvy said playing at the Barracuda Championship and the Rocket Mortgage Classic wet his whistle. They were his first starts on the PGA Tour since 2018, and so everyone from Webb Simpson to caddies to Tour officials stopped what they were doing to say hello.
“It’s good to dip a toe in the ocean again,” he said.
Our Adam Schupak got some one-on-one time with the 2006 U.S. Open champ.
6. Jason Kokrak DQed from Travelers Championship; could it be an epic walkout from PGA Tour life?
Jason Kokrak’s final shot of the 2022 Travelers Championship was a doozy, and it led to a most unusual disqualification from the tournament.
Having belted a drive of 327 yards into the left rough at the ninth hole of TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut, his final hole of the day, the burly Kokrak had little to play for and it showed. His all-or-nothing shot turned out to be a giant dud, flying over the green and across a road. ShotLink measured it as having traveled “87 yards into the unknown.”
But rather than go back to the original spot and take a penalty and finish out the hole, Kokrak took whatever balls he had left, hopped in his car and went home. He was disqualified from the tournament after failing to finish the hole and record a score and failing to sign and return a scorecard.
We all had a feeling we knew what that meant.
5. Jack Nicklaus goes deep on LIV, gambling and the abundance of young talent on the PGA Tour
As is an annual occurrence, Jack Nicklaus met with the media ahead of the start of The Memorial he hosts at Muirfield Village Golf Club, which he built, and did what he always does – talk at length on a variety of subjects for over more than one hour.
4. Lynch: Phil Mickelson’s mouth has brought him — and his greedy Saudi scheme — to the brink of ruin
An old adage — often wrongly attributed to Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” — holds that if you wait by the riverbank long enough, the bodies of your enemies will eventually float by.
That’s as good a metaphor as any for how some golf industry executives must have felt in the wake of recent comments by Phil Mickelson that incinerated his reputation, alienated most every constituency in the game, exposed him to disciplinary action, and otherwise cast him in a light so unflatteringly amoral that even Greg Norman might hesitate to be seen in his company.
Here’s the rest of Eamon’s column.
3. Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and the players who have supported the PGA Tour over the Saudi Arabia-backed Super Golf League
The professional golf landscape as we know it has changed.
But while some jumped to LIV Golf, players like Tiger Woods, an 82-time winner on Tour, and three-time winner and rising star Max Homa, have been outspoken in their support of the PGA Tour.
We put a list together of those we assumed would not make the jump. For the record, we were wrong on three of these.
2. 'I'm ready': Nick Faldo, golf world react to his retirement after 19 years as broadcaster
It’s the end of an era on the CBS broadcast.
After 16 years wearing the headset for the network, Sir Nick Faldo said goodbye from the booth during the final round of the 2022 Wyndham Championship at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Sunday. The six-time major champion, who has a deep history at Sedgefield dating back to his PGA Tour debut at the 1979 Greater Greensboro Open, was honored with a plaque behind the ninth green on the club’s Wall of Fame where he joins the likes of Charlie Sifford and Arnold Palmer.
1. Cam Smith penalized two shots a day after improper placement and Golf Twitter lost its mind
Cameron Smith woke up believing he was two strokes off the lead heading into the final round of the FedEx St. Jude Championship at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee.
Not quite.
Minutes before his final round tee time, Smith was assessed a two-stroke penalty for “improper placement of the ball” while taking relief on the fourth hole during his third round.
