Sony Open in Hawaii 2018: Schedule, tee times, TV/live stream info, and scores for Jan. 11-14

The Sony Open is one of the good low-key early-season events on the PGA Tour. Here are your nuts and bolts for the 2018 edition and some reasons why you should absolutely watch.

The PGA Tour hops from Maui to Oahu this week for the first full-field event of the year: the Sony Open.

The annual stop at Waialae may tumble to the furthest recesses of your mind by the end of the season, but it has become a highlight of the early-season schedule for the hardcore golf fans. There are stops on the upcoming West Coast swing that will get much more love, but the Sony is a great combination of rookies and vets grinding for solidified PGA Tour card status on a course with a ton of history.

It’s also an opportunity for more prime-time golf following up last week’s little 34-man party that was the Tournament of Champions. I thought the ToC fizzled a bit on the weekend, despite the fireworks from the eventual winner and world No. 1 Dustin Johnson. It was great to watch PGA Tour golf again, and Kapalua was as beautiful as ever. But it ran out of juice in my very subjective opinion.

With a full field and a course that can yield some crazy low numbers, maybe we get a better show this week. Here are some reasons to watch as well as the nuts and bolts for the Sony. We’ll update this as a hub of sorts as the tournament progresses.

Why Watch

1) It’s pretty. This is simple. I won’t try to expound much beyond telling you that this Waialae Country Club layout is easy to look at. The media center is basically on the beach — not that I know from experience; one day, perhaps.

The course runs right up and almost onto the beach — so close that a couple of certain pros going out for a kayak ride in the ocean were easily caught by the golf course cameras and documented in a suffocating barrage of content last year. And you mayyyy see a shot or two of the infamous “W” shaped palms lording over the 18th green.

Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

2) Raynor. I will never pretend to be a golf course architecture expert, although I appreciate those who are and love following the topic. It’s a topic that’s taken on increased interest and debate, thanks to a handful of intelligent voices in social and digital media shining new light.

Waialae is one of a too-small handful of PGA Tour courses with Golden Age roots as it was one of Seth Raynor’s last projects in the 1920s. Raynor has been a poster boy for the increased discussion and appreciation from the aforementioned group on social media. He’s a cult hero for many.

Now, the Waialae of 2018 is different from Raynor’s original intent but there are still elements that make this worth watching, especially with Tom Doak, a modern day architecture cult hero, slowly putting some restorative efforts into the historic course. The redan 17th hole should be the most noticeable change and throwback this year.

I think this is a fascinating topic worth diving into and for more, go to the actual experts. Andy Johnson at The Fried Egg, one of those ascendant golf architecture experts I mentioned, hosted Doak on his podcast this week. They went through some of the original Raynor intent, the restoration efforts, and how the course plays for the best pros in the world on a week like this.

3) #58Watch. Breaking 60 has become somewhat passé, but it’s still an accomplishment that gets you to change the channel to golf once murmurs of a pro going super deep start rumbling on Twitter and elsewhere. Waialae is one of the better opportunities for a pro to break 60 and maybe even match Jim Furyk’s ridiculous 58 from the Travelers a few years ago.

It’s a par 70, and the present day big hitters are taking some ridiculous lines off the tees — nothing that Raynor could have imagined back when it was originally designed. We saw this from Justin Thomas last year when he torched the place for a 59 en route to his second win in the first two weeks of the 2017 season. It’s likely we’re back on #59Watch or maybe even #58Watch again this week.

4) Rookies. With this being our first full-field event of the new year, it’s also a great opportunity to get a good look at this year’s rookie class. Of course, those rookies get some much-needed starts during the wraparound schedule in the fall. But some of these early year events are major chances for them to make hay and solidify their status for the rest of the year, or at least before the priority rankings reshuffle. The Sony Open is one of their best chances to accrue some FedExCup points, with some of the upcoming West Coast swing events having smaller fields that don’t provide starts for rookies with lower priority.

We’ve seen a rookie win this event recently, with Russell Henley going low in 2013 to win the Sony in his PGA Tour debut. There’s a boatload of rookies playing this week — they’re all worth watching but some of the bigger names that may get some love are Peter Uihlein, Tom Lovelady, Aaron Wise, Stephan Jaeger, and Austin Cook, who already won during the wraparound schedule.

You’re going to get plenty of chances to watch the top players in the world rankings in the coming months. This is a good opportunity to see some of the best young up-and-comers — the players who aren’t household names but are worth rooting for and could become one soon.

How to Watch

This is really the last opportunity to watch prime-time PGA Tour golf until the fall, when the Asian swing returns during the wraparound portion of the schedule. The upcoming West Coast swing does allow for some golf to go past dinner time on the East Coast, but not by much given the limited daylight hours this time of year.

The only real options for prime-time golf would be a West Coast venue at either the U.S. Open or the PGA Championship. The USGA is fond of getting the national championship on the West Coast during the longest days of the year, allowing for finishes as late as 11 p.m. ET. But this year, we’re about as far away from the West Coast as possible with the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. So this is it really. Take it in because from here on out, your weekend finishes on the PGA Tour will all slot in during daylight hours.

Like last week on Maui, Golf Channel will have exclusive coverage of the entire tournament over the next four days. It’s that time of year when CBS is still occupied with football on the weekends, and these events aren’t necessarily big enough to get the bump up to NBC. And Golf Channel is plenty capable of just running with the coverage throughout, as we see during the fall series too.

It will, however, be down a man at times this week. Jim “Bones” Mackay (Phil Mickelson’s former longtime caddie, if you’re completely golf ignorant) has become one of the best parts of the Golf Channel/NBC coverage. But this week, he’s picking up the bag again and looping for Justin Thomas, whose regular caddie has to take a few weeks off due to plantar fasciitis.

Bones is going to do double duty, putting on the headset and working as a walking reporter when Thomas is not playing. But given that the defending champ tore this course up last year and will likely play well again, Bones could be on the course as a caddie and not a TV reporter during the late weekend broadcast times.

Here’s your full media schedule for the week:

Friday’s second-round coverage

Television:

7 to 10:30 p.m. — Golf Channel

Online streams:

7 to 10:30 p.m. — Golf Channel simulcast stream

Radio:

5 p.m. — PGA Tour Radio on SiriusXM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)

Saturday’s third round coverage

Television:

7 to 10:30 p.m. — Golf Channel

Online streams:

7 to 10:30 p.m. — Golf Channel simulcast stream

Radio:

5 p.m. — PGA Tour Radio on SiriusXM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)

Sunday’s final round coverage

Television:

6 to 10 p.m. — Golf Channel

Online streams:

6 to 10 p.m. — Golf Channel simulcast stream

Radio:

5 p.m. — PGA Tour Radio on SiriusXM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)

Photo by Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

Tee Times

This is the first full field event of the year. That little party on Maui last week featured just 34 players and was obviously easy to schedule over four days with a ton of flexibility. Now we’re back to the grind of sending two waves off split tees for the first 36 holes.

For the first two rounds, they will start at 7 a.m. local time on Oahu, and the last group will go at 1:30 p.m. local, which is five hours behind ET. So this is a full day from sunup to sundown with 144 players in the field. Here are your Round 2 tee times.

Friday’s tee sheet (all times ET!)

Morning wave off No. 1:

• 12:00 p.m.: Chez Reavie, Jon Curran, Dominic Bozzelli
• 12:10 p.m.: Kevin Na, Whee Kim, Luke List
• 12:20 p.m.: Michael Thompson, Kelly Kraft, Yusaku Miyazato
• 12:30 p.m.: Aaron Baddeley, Gary Woodland, Brian Gay
• 12:40 p.m.: Brian Stuard, Sangmoon Bae, Stewart Cink
• 12:50 p.m.: Ryan Armour, Hudson Swafford, Jim Herman
• 1:00 p.m.: Chris Stroud, Cody Gribble, William McGirt
• 1:10 p.m.: Matt Every, John Peterson, Andrew Landry
• 1:20 p.m.: Jonathan Randolph, Beau Hossler, Hyung-Sung Kim
• 1:30 p.m.: Rob Oppenheim, Conrad Shindler, Satoshi Kodaira
• 1:40 p.m.: Seamus Power, Corey Conners, Gunn Yang
• 1:50 p.m.: Brice Garnett, Keith Mitchell, a-Tyler Ota

Morning wave off No. 10:

• 12:00 p.m.: Scott Brown, Keegan Bradley, Sean O’Hair
• 12:10 p.m.: Scott Piercy, Ricky Barnes, Steve Allan
• 12:20 p.m.: Harris English, Jamie Lovemark, Patrick Rodgers
• 12:30 p.m.: Brian Harman, Billy Hurley III, Smylie Kaufman
• 12:40 p.m.: Mac Hughes, Greg Chalmers, Tony Finau
• 12:50 p.m.: Patton Kizzire, Jimmy Walker, Zach Johnson
• 1:00 p.m.: Justin Thomas, Jason Dufner, Kevin Kisner
• 1:10 p.m.: J.J. Henry, Rory Sabbatini, Jerry Kelly
• 1:20 p.m.: Joel Dahmen, Tom Lovelady, Zecheng Dou
• 1:30 p.m.: Sam Saunders, Tom Hoge, Nate Lashley
• 1:40 p.m.: Kyle Thompson, Xinjun Zhang, Ethan Tracy
• 1:50 p.m.: Martin Piller, Aaron Wise, Abraham Ancer

Afternoon wave off No. 1:

• 4:40 p.m.: Bill Haas, Steve Wheatcroft, Blayne Barber
• 4:50 p.m.: Mark Wilson, Harold Varner III, Ollie Schniederjans
• 5:00 p.m.: Jonathan Byrd, J.J. Spaun, Kevin Tway
• 5:10 p.m.: Vaughn Taylor, Emiliano Grillo, Charles Howell III
• 5:20 p.m.: Kyle Stanley, Russell Knox, James Hahn
• 5:30 p.m.: Marc Leishman, Si Woo Kim, Webb Simpson
• 5:40 p.m.: Xander Schauffele, Jordan Spieth, Daniel Berger
• 5:50 p.m.: Matt Jones, Ryan Blaum, Peter Uihlein
• 6:00 p.m.: Omar Uresti, Bronson Burgoon, Brandon Harkins
• 6:10 p.m.: Brett Stegmaier, Matt Atkins, Tatsuya Kodai
• 6:20 p.m.: Ben Silverman, Roberto Diaz, Eric Dugas
• 6:30 p.m.: Nicholas Lindheim, Adam Schenk, Shugo Imahira

Afternoon wave off No. 10:

• 4:40 p.m.: Danny Lee, Ryan Palmer, Colt Knost
• 4:50 p.m.: Ted Potter Jr., Michael Kim, Richy Werenski
• 5:00 p.m.: Robert Streb, John Huh, Morgan Hoffmann
• 5:10 p.m.: Jonas Blixt, D.A. Points, Vijay Singh
• 5:20 p.m.: Wesley Bryan, Chris Kirk, K.J. Choi
• 5:30 p.m.: Austin Cook, Cameron Smith, Luke Donald
• 5:40 p.m.: Russell Henley, Fabian Gomez, Peter Malnati
• 5:50 p.m.: Chad Campbell, Jason Kokrak, Tyrone Van Aswegen
• 6:00 p.m.: Troy Merritt, Ben Martin, Cameron Tringale
• 6:10 p.m.: Talor Gooch, Lanto Griffin, Daisuke Kataoka
• 6:20 p.m.: Tyler Duncan, Andrew Yun, John Oda
• 6:30 p.m.: Andrew Putnam, Stephan Jaeger, Sam Ryder

Scores

The wind was down a bit in the first round, and while we got a couple low scores, it was not the birdiefest you might be accustomed to at the Sony Open. And we sure didn’t get anything approaching the 59 that Thomas posted in the opening round last year at Waialae. Your leaders are Chris Kirk and Zach Johnson, who was all over the flag with his irons in the afternoon wave. This is a classic setup that should, traditionally, favor the ZJ game and he opened his year with an impressive 63.

Jordan Spieth somehow finished in the red despite posting a snowman 8 on his penultimate hole of the day, which included four shots hitting four trees en route to the green. Not good! But Spieth piled up a bunch of birdies elsewhere and is still in okay shape at 1-under.

I think the most fascinating thing to watch in these early rounds is how some of the classic and restored holes are holding up in a pro event. The redan hole at the 17th, this year’s most dramatic change for the Sony, was worth watching all evening on the Golf Channel broadcast. The Fried Egg picked up on the new challenge.

Spieth will be out in the afternoon wave and in the TV window on Friday. This is a really cool early-season test and I thought Thursday’s opening round was more entertaining than any day last week at Kapalua. Here are your scores after 18 holes: