Monday Morning Rap: The "A-Tour" And The "B-Tour," The Curious Case of Si-Woo Kim and New-Look Nelly Korda

Andy Lyons. Getty Images.

The "A-Tour" and the "B-Tour"

Back in May, when the PGA Tour was in the kicking-around-ideas stage of reshaping its schedule, I had an illuminating conversation with Matt NeSmith at the Wells Fargo Championship in Maryland. You might never have heard of Matt, but that's kind of the point. He's now in his fourth year on the PGA Tour, having successfully qualified for the FedEx Cup playoffs in each of the first three, but he's done the majority of his damage either in the fall or in weaker-field events. He is, in his own words, a member of the "B-Tour." 

“I joke with Kevin Kisner that I’m always home [in Aiken, S.C.] when he’s playing majors and WGCs, and he’s always home when I’m playing in regular tour events,” NeSmith, now 29 years old and world No. 96, told me. “There’s absolutely an A-tour out here and a B-tour out here.”

That split has been widened by the creation of "designated events," whose aim is to pit the biggest stars on the PGA Tour against each other more often. It happened last week at Kapalua, in the first-ever designated event, which produced an electric Sunday: one blue-chip major championship winner (Jon Rahm) chasing down and eventually leapfrogging another blue-chip major championship winner (Collin Morikawa). Most of the A-tour guys then headed back to mainland to prep for the West Coast swing and its two designated events—the WM Phoenix Open and the Genesis Invitational—while a legion of B-tour reinforcements took their place in Hawaii for the Sony Open. 

There were, it should be noted, some bigger names in the field at Waialae. Each of the 20 Player Impact Program winners are required to play at least three this non-designated events to get their money, and Jordan Spieth decided to knock one off right out of the gate by playing Sony. His opening-round 64 to take the lead was manna from heaven for TV executives, but a second-round 75 saw him fire up the PJ on Friday evening. Tom Kim, perhaps the youngest and most exciting of the tours young and exciting stars, also missed the weekend. So did Sungjae Im. Hideki Matsuyama, who hit one of the shots of the year to win this tournament in a playoff last year, finished 48th. What resulted was a Sunday leaderboard of names familiar only to truly hardcore golf fans. Hayden Buckley. Si-Woo Kim. David Lipsky. Ben Taylor. Chris Kirk. Andrew Putnam. It's a simple numbers game. The lower percentage of recognizable names in a tournament, the lower the chance of a star-studded finish. That, coupled with five compelling NFL playoff games, gave the Sony a fall-event feel. It hardly registered for the casual golf fan who might flip on a tournament Sunday afternoon if he recognizes the names in contention.

That's not how the guys in the mix at the Sony felt, of course, for they are clawing and elbowing to get into that A-tier. That, by the way, is a feature of the PGA Tour, not a bug. One of golf's great charms is its meritocratic nature, and in the age of LIV Golf offering millions of dollars merely for signatures, the PGA Tour has held steady in its commitment to an open path to stardom. Those guys in the Sony can become the Rahms and the Morikawas, but they have to do it by distinguishing themselves in B-tour events. Weeks like the Sony, then, are crucial to the PGA Tour's mission and message—but unless one of the few big-name players in the field challenges for the title, they're not going to draw significant audiences. The tour knows this; it's an inherent risk for of staging 45+ events with a rotating cast of roughly 200 players each year. Their belief is that weeks like the Sentry are not possible without weeks like the Sony. 

The curious case of Si-Woo Kim

Comparing a player's resume to that of Rickie Fowler has been low-hanging fruit for years on Golf Twitter—but sometimes low-hanging fruit looks really freakin' juicy, so we're gonna take a bite. Fowler's one of the biggest stars of his generation, but his CV is conspicuously light on victories. At 34 years old, he has five PGA Tour victories, including the Players Championship. Si-Woo Kim is not one of the bigger stars of his generation. But with his win on Sunday, he now has four victories, including the Players Championship, and he's nearly seven years younger than Fowler. 

The differences in their careers—and we're talking just on the golf course, for Fowler's leading 225-0 in the commercial/marketing department—is consistency. Kim's has made the cut in in 63.1% of his starts, with a career top-10 percentage of 11.8%, and has made the Tour Championship exactly once. Compare that to Fowler, whose made the weekend in 76.0% of his starts, with a career top-10 percentage of 25.3% and six Tour Championship appearances. Those of us inside the golf bubble factor in those kind of stats in our overall assessment of a player. Guys win so infrequently that simply tallying up their victories paints a woefully incomplete measure of their career. This is truer than ever with the explosion of golf gambling and Daily Fantasy, where the difference between a T-7 and a T-18 can be significant. But as time passes, and one crop of players is replaced by a younger one, those kinds of details fade into the abyss. Without looking, how many top 10s did Tiger Woods have? Rory McIlroy? Jack Nicklaus? You have a pretty solid idea of how many wins they have, and you might even know the exact number, but there's a good chance you'd be way off in guessing their non-victory stats. The human brain can only store so much information, and the heuristic approach to judging a career is to frame it with a simple question: How many tournaments did they win?

And so Kim, still 2.5 years away from his 30th birthday, now has four victories, none of which came in fall events. He doesn't have the week-to-week consistency of the top guys—his three finishes coming into this week were T-45, T-52 and T-35—but he is quietly having an excellent career and clearly feels comfortable in high-leverage moments. He takes the chances he gets, and you have to think beating Justin Thomas in the opening match in Sunday singles at the Presidents Cup did wonders for his self-belief. 

“There's a lot to Si Woo as a golfer, especially on the inside,” Adam Scott told reporters of Kim on Sunday. “I think when he's in a position like this, the fire burns hot, and he’s going to be hard to beat if he’s in the lead I would say.”

He's always had one of the most aesthetically pleasing swings on the PGA Tour, but according to his peers, the strength of his game might actually be his chipping. This, from former PGA Tour pro Roberto Castro: 

That chipping proved the difference on Sunday. He chipped in for birdie on the 17th hole before flushing a long iron from the fairway bunker onto the par-5 18th green in two, setting up a two-putt birdie that gave him a one-shot lead over Buckley in the group behind. Buckley missed short and right of the green with his second on 18 and missed an 12-footer for birdie and a playoff. 

As Kim creeps toward 30, he's got a hairy situation to sort out: military service. While the rules about when and how long are rather nebulous, every native South Korean is required to serve their country. The only exceptions for athletes is to win a medal at the Olympics or to win the Asian Games. Kim has done neither; he played in the Olympic tournament in Tokyo but did not come close to medaling, and he has said in the past that he plans to fulfill his service to his birth nation. BTS, the world famous K-pop band, is currently on hiatus as they fulfill their service before a planned reunion in 2025. That should illustrate how seriously the South Koreans take this. If you're curious about the background, history and philosophy behind the compulsion, I wrote a feature about it for Golf Digest in 2021. 

Jordan Spieth, RV guy

The Sony clip that got the most social action last week had nothing to do with golf. Jordan Spieth, who by PIP standards is the third-biggest star on the PGA Tour, will be traveling a bit differently this year: he's going for the RV life. In a typically chatty mood after his opening-round 64, Spieth told reporters of his recent purchase of a "bus" that he'll be staying in during mainland PGA Tour events this year. The idea is to have a consistent home on the road; instead of packing up and moving from hotel to rental house to hotel every week, the Spieths will be able to leave stuff on the bus and have a familiar setup—including a bedroom with the same matrees as their Dallas home, and surely a seating area, for this bus isn't small—at each tour event. They'll even be able to drive from event to event in the RV during the stretches when PGA Tour events are clustered geographically, like on the West Coast and Florida Swings. This is especially useful given Jordan and his wife Annie have a young son, Sammy. 

It's actually not a unique idea. Jason Day first popularized this trend back in the mid 2015s, and I know a group of South African players were doing the same thing before jetting off to LIV. 

"At one point I think there was a dozen guys (living the RV life), four of them went to LIV and sold theirs because they don't really have the whole swings. It's hard to go Saudi to Chicago in a two-week stretch in an RV. I think that had a lot to do with it. But I don't know. I mean, I was next to Jay Day. Obviously Bubba was a guy who had them for a long, time Jason Day got a new one in. Annie is trying to recruit a lot of our friends out here to do it, so we'll see in the next few years if that works or not."

Spieth, of course, has hired a professional to do the driving. But he'll take her for a spin when conditions allow for it. 

"I haven't driven it," he said. "I plan on driving it on an open road stretch at some point when it's not pulling out of Phoenix and not into LA, but maybe switch and do like an hour just because it would be fun…I'm a dad now. Someone wants me to honk, I'll honk."

Mito Pereia and LIV's next move

Richard Heathcote. Getty Images.

The Telegraph's James Corrigan, who might be the most plugged-in reporter when it comes to LIV news, reported last week that Mito Pereira had committed to joining the Saudi-backed circuit. I reached out to what I thought was his management agency to try and confirm the news, and I was told that they no longer represent him—he's now repped by Carlos Rodriguez of GSE Worldwide, the same agency that represents Bryson DeChambeau, Paul, Casey, Abraham Ancer, Joaquin Niemann, Jason Kokrak, Sergio Garcia Loouis Oosthuizen, Carlos Ortiz and Pereira's fellow Chilean/best pal, Joaquin Niemann, all of whom have already signed with LIV. Reading between the lines…Corrigan's on the money again. 

While not yet a needle-mover, Pereira is an established top-50 player and was one decent swing away at Southern Hills from being a major champion. He's a solid get for LIV—but if he is their main addition since the completion of their 2022 season, LIV will have failed in its mission to add more starpower to its 2022 haul. I asked a LIV spokesman when they're planning to release their tournament schedule and the 48 players that will constitute the LIV League in 2023, and the reply I got was: "Soon." 

The question now is whether LIV will be able to secure a name bigger than Pereira's before this upcoming announcement. One of LIV's key selling points for the debut of its "league" format is that the same 48 players will compete throughout the season; thus, there won't be the slow trickle of players making their way over to LIV throughout the year as we saw in 2022. Patrick Cantlay, who has seemed to be one of their top targets (and who has stayed mostly neutral on the topic), is serving as a Player Director on the PGA Tour Policy Board this year and said at the Sentry that he's excited about the PGA Tour schedule and has no plans to move to LIV. That doesn't mean he's not going, but it'd be a dramatic shift. Adam Scott, another guy who'd seem to be a natural fit for LIV—he's over 40, he's not American and he likes to take extended breaks away from the game—was just announced as a member of the PGA Tour's Player Advisory Council. (When this was announced on the broadcast, Sunday, Paul Azinger delivered an awesome line: “I was on that PAC for 13 years,” Azinger began. “I thought it was a colossal waste of time. But you think you’re achieving things, but…”). Xander Schauffele, who's been in LIV rumors, is playing in this week's American Express in Palm Springs, which seems to suggest he wants his PIP money. Who, then, can LIV add to boost their standing? Perhaps it's one of the players mentioned above. Maybe it's someone completely off our radar. Only time will tell. 

Elsewhere…

—A bunch of top DPWT players headed to Abu Dhabi last week for the first-ever Hero Cup, a Ryder-Cup style competition that pits Great Britain & Ireland against continental Europe. The GB&I team, which featured Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton and Shane Lowry, lost 14.5-10.5 to a European team anchored by Francesco Molinari and Thomas Pieters. With some of the bigger-name Ryder Cuppers sitting this one out—Rory McIlroy, Matt Fitzpatrick, Jon Rahm and Viktor Hovland all sat out—this gave European Ryder Cup Luke Donald a chance to see players who will fit out his team at Marco Simeone this fall. It's a new competition, created for profit of course, but also because Europe's Ryder Cup ecosystem needed to do something after the Slaughter by the Water at Whistling Straits. 

—Nelly Korda's making her first start of 2023 at next week's Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions, and she'll debut some new threads and sticks to Orlando. Korda announced over the weekend that she had signed an apparel deal with Nike, and news dropped Monday morning that she'd also signed a full-bag deal with TaylorMade. She's the top-ranked American, the No. 2 player in the world, a major champion and Olympic gold medalist, she's a member of an all-time athletic family and she's good looking. If the LPGA Tour had a Player Impact Program she'd win it. So you now have the top two winners of the PIP—Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy—and the biggest star in women's golf outfitted in Nike and playing TaylorMade clubs. 

—Speaking of that tournament in Orlando…we're playing in it. It's a pro-am, so each pro is paired with an amateur partner throughout the four-day competition. Each of the four of us on Fore Play will play one round alongside an LPGA pro starting on Thursday. It's on Golf Channel, for those interested. 

—The PGA Tour vs. LIV battle has reached peak pettiness. Like, it doesn't get any pettier than this: 

We're talking about wishing two 40-plus men a happy birthday. That's what this has come to?

—I'm not sure if Justin Tucker is a golf guy, but he's definitely a push-draw guy. Watching him on Sunday night, his kicks start down the right-center of the fairway and gently fall left. It's a similar ball flight to a flushed Rory McIlroy 3-wood, and now you're seeing how my brain never really gets a break from golf. 

—Mateo Fernandez de Oliveira won the Latin American Amateur Championship in Puerto Rico, and now has exemptions into the Masters, the U.S. Open (the LAAC champ gets in for the first time this year) and the Open Championship. The senior at Arkansas finished second in the event last year. 

—Our guy Alistair Docherty, the first ever professional golfer to be sponsored by Barstool Golf, is making his debut on the Korn Ferry Tour this week. Alistair opened with a three-under 69 in the Bahamas and, at the time of writing, was tied for ninth midway through his second round. Keep an eye on Alistair as this tournament heads toward its Wednesday finish, and let's pull for him all year. 

—The PGA Tour heads to the California desert this week for the American Express, a tournament that's struggled to attract top talent in recent years…but, for whatever reason, not this year. This isn't an elevated event, and the no-teeth setup tends to piss some guys off—this is the tournament Jon Rahm called a "putting contest" last year—but the field is loaded: Rahm, Cantlay, Schauffele, Tony Finau, Scottie Scheffler, Will Zalatoris, Sungjae Im, Tom Kim, Sam Burns, Cameron Young and Sahith Theegala are all playing. 

—The DPWT has the first of its Rolex Series event this week with the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. The field is headlined by Shane Lowry, Lee Westwood, Tommy Fleetwood, Patrick Reed, Francesco Molinari and Henrik Stenson. As the DPWT season kicks into gear, it's worth noting that the LIV guys can still play in those events.

—I checked out "Break Point," the Netflix tennis documentary that's produced by Box-to-Box films, who are behind both Drive to Survive and the upcoming golf show "Full Swing." I found the first episode in particular to be highly compelling, probably because it focuses on the ultimate sporting enigma in Nick Kyrgios. I don't think golf has any character quite as interesting as Kyrgios, but Box-to-Box's beautifully stylish production was on full display, and it bodes well for "Full Swing." 

Until next week,

Dan