Sony Open in Hawaii 2018: Results, scores, TV/live stream info for Jan. 11-14

A low-key Sony Open got a little zany on Sunday and it had little to do with the actual golf, which Patton Kizzire played best to win in an interminable playoff.

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.

Results

It was a weird, interminable final round Sunday at the Sony Open. Perhaps the biggest news of the day came when it was still dark out in Honolulu and most were still sleeping. A little after 10:30 a.m. ET, news of a labor dispute between Golf Channel and its live tournament technicians surfaced. We got word that camera operators, audio techs, and others involved in the production of their tournament coverage, had walked out and we’re not going to work on Sunday. It dramatically impacted the Web Tour coverage at 11 a.m. ET and while we didn’t know what to expect hours later at the Sony, we knew it would be odd and completely different than what we were used to from GC.

This is not a good situation for all parties involved. These technicians grind their ass off to bring a broadcast each week, and are legitimately great at what they do. Golf Channel obviously works to try and bring the best, most golf to the people who want it. I know little of the origins of the dispute, but obviously everyone would like to see it resolved as soon as possible.

So with no real crew working at Waialae, the broadcast was obviously thrown into a bit of chaos. What Golf Channel put out was impressive, all things considered. George Savaricas called the entire final round from back in their Orlando studios, with analysts Billy Kratzert and Jim Gallagher at the desk. They patchworked together a few people to operate cameras, many of whom were obviously not the pros that do this. One was even Jerry Foltz, the former PGA Tour player turned on-course reporter. He was up in a tower behind the 16th hole.

The camera work was, as you might expect, not particularly strong. They were set up on only the last few holes at Waialae. There was no audio from the course. Graphics were minimal. There were blimp shots — lots and lots and lots of blimp shots. The whole thing was just surreal. It was an admirable effort given the circumstances, but also made you appreciate what we get each week and what those who were on strike actually provide.

As for the actual golf, well, the GC crew back in Orlando didn’t exactly get a quick and tidy one to call on Sunday night. A playoff between Patton Kizzire and James Hahn went a slogging six holes, going almost to 11 p.m. ET. It finished as sunset in Honolulu was minutes away, with Hahn bogeying the par-3 redan 17th hole. Neither played particularly well, but Kizzire emerges with what is already his second win of the season. He won the Mayakoba back in November during the “wraparound” portion of the schedule.

So it’s just the second week of January and Kizzire is almost locked up for a spot in the final 30 at the Tour Championship in Atlanta about 9 months from now. He’s No. 1 in the FedExCup Standings, which doesn’t mean much, but means something — he should stay in the top 10 for the next several months barring a total collapse.

Kizzire is a horse, a player who can go on streaks, as evidenced by his lights-out season on the Web Tour. The big Auburn product could be an outside contender for a Ryder Cup spot too if he keeps the pedal down and accrues enough points early in the season (he doesn’t get anything for his win in the fall). Despite the weirdness of the day, we got a good winner at the end of it. Here are your final results from Waialae:

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 media schedule for Sunday:

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.

The original 144-man field has been cut down at the customary 36-hole mark, but that doesn’t mean they will now send them off in twosomes all rolling off No. 1. They could do that, starting at about 8 a.m. local time. But, as the AP’s Doug Ferguson explains, this is a solid for the volunteers who have been grinding through the first two sun-up to sun-down days.

We often see the Tour put them off two tees in groups of three on a weekend when severe weather threatens the schedule. This allows them to condense the entire field down into about a two-hour window. It’s exactly two hours this week in Oahu, where the first group on Sunday will not go until after 9 a.m. local. That’s about two hours earlier than Saturday’s schedule, but still gives the volunteers and tourney staff some extra cushion on Sunday morning.

The TV coverage runs until 10 p.m., but the final group should be putting out on the 18th green well before that — sometime around 9 p.m. unless there’s a dramatic pace of play issue.

UPDATE: It turns out the tee times for Sunday were moved up because of Golf Channel technicians’ strike. Unionized employees, such as camera operators, went on strike and walked out on Sunday morning, leaving Golf Channel scrambling to put together makeshift crews of contractors to broadcast their Sunday events on the Web.com Tour, PGA Tour, and Champions Tour.

It’s a very odd situation, which we went through here with comments from one camera operator who walked out at the Web Tour event.

Here’s your full tee sheet for the third round.

Sunday’s tee sheet (all times ET!)

Off No 1 tee:

• 2:20 p.m.: Lanto Griffin, Kevin Kisner, Austin Cook
• 2:30 p.m.: Jason Dufner, Stewart Cink, Jordan Spieth
• 2:40 p.m.: Matt Jones, Nicholas Lindheim, Xinjun Zhang
• 2:50 p.m.: Corey Conners, Keith Mitchell, Jonathan Byrd
• 3 p.m.: Daisuke Kataoka, Gary Woodland, Jerry Kelly
• 3:10 p.m.: Chez Reavie, Emiliano Grillo, Ryan Blaum
• 3:20 p.m.: Ryan Armour, Zach Johnson, Scott Brown
• 3:30 p.m.: Ben Martin, James Hahn, Nate Lashley
• 3:40 p.m.: Talor Gooch, Scott Piercy, Rory Sabbatini
• 3:50 p.m.: Sam Saunders, Webb Simpson, Brian Stuard
• 4 p.m.: Ollie Schniederjans, Cameron Smith, Justin Thomas
• 4:10 p.m.: Kyle Stanley, Chris Kirk, Russell Knox
• 4:20 p.m.: Tom Hoge, Patton Kizzire, Brian Harman

Off No. 10 tee:

• 2:20 p.m.: Brandon Harkins, Adam Schenk, Charles Howell III
• 2:30 p.m.: Daniel Berger, Dominic Bozzelli, Tony Finau
• 2:40 p.m.: Wesley Bryan, Harris English, Xander Schauffele
• 2:50 p.m.: John Peterson, Tyrone Van Aswegen, Marc Leishman
• 3 p.m.: Jason Kokrak, Keegan Bradley, Brian Gay
• 3:10 p.m.: Conrad Shindler, Ryan Palmer, Jonathan Randolph
• 3:20 p.m.: Sam Ryder, Matt Every, Seamus Power
• 3:30 p.m.: J.J. Spaun, Hudson Swafford, Roberto Diaz
• 3:40 p.m.: John Oda, Kevin Tway, Andrew Putnam
• 3:50 p.m.: Si Woo Kim, Shugo Imahira, Stephan Jaegar
• 4 p.m.: Blayne Barber, Vaughn Taylor, Steve Allan
• 4:10 p.m.: William McGirt, D.A. Points
• 4:20 p.m.: Colt Knost, Joel Dahmen

Scores

Round 1 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.

Round 2 Scores:

Brian Harman, perhaps the hottest player on the PGA Tour, backed up his opening round 64 with a 63 early on Friday morning in Honolulu. Harman has been a stud since his junior golf days, but may be settling in now for a sustained run on the PGA Tour. He beat out Dustin Johnson last year at the always tough Wells Fargo Championship for his second career win. He contended on Sunday at the U.S. Open. He finished the the year with seven top 10s.

Harman began 2018 playing in the final Sunday pairing alongside DJ in Maui. People are jumping on the trendy Harman bandwagon and a win this week will only make it more crowded. This Waialae course is perfectly suited for his precision game but he’ll need to keep the pedal down and keep posting rounds in the mid-60s to stay on top of the leaderboard.

That’s because there’s always a mega-low round available out here. We’ve seen players come from way down the board with a 9-under round of 61. We know Justin Thomas can go low after his 59 last year. JT is still well within striking distance, tied for 17th at the midpoint. Jordan Spieth is probably too far gone at just 3-under but he can at least play his way into a late Sunday tee time.

Round 3 Scores:

There were low numbers available out there again on Saturday, but we still have yet to see the one player go crazy low and push 60. The round of the day belonged to Webb Simpson, who matched the round of the week with a 7-under 63. Simpson jumped 39 spots up the leaderboard and into the top 10 for the final round. He doesn’t have much of a great chance of winning, sitting still six shots behind the leading number. But it shows, as always, that big jumps can be made from deep down the leaderboard and I still think we could get a 61 before this Sony Open is over.

The man sitting atop the board with that leading number is now Tom Hoge, who was a shot shy of Simpson’s mark with a 6-under 64 on Saturday. Hoge has never won on the PGA Tour, but has seven top 10 finishes in a youngish career. Now he’s one ahead of Patton Kizzire and Brian Harman, two studs, who are in form, and won last year. It’s likely Hoge will need yet another mid-60s round on Sunday to stay on top and clinch that first career victory. He’s stayed in the range all week with a 65-65-64 run at Waialae, but the odds aren’t exactly on his side with just a one-shot cushion at a place that has seen some leaderboard volatility.

The biggest name within striking distance is probably defending Sony Open champ and reigning player of the year Justin Thomas. He’s also six shots back at 10-under but certainly has the firepower to go low and chase them down. We’re set up for a strong Sunday at the Sony.