For its first 51 years, the Sanderson Farms Championship navigated an awkward relationship with its own fields.
Weak — or, full of up-and-comers, depending on your point of view. Either way, for literally its entire history, the Sanderson’s not-so-secret secret has been that its fields’ strengths have been…well, not strong.
“In recent years,” columnist Rick Cleveland wrote in August 1993, “the quality [of the field] has worsened rather than improved.”
In 2011, a reporter informed Kenny Perry that his 14 career PGA Tour wins were the most of any player in the tournament. “That can’t be,” Perry said, incredulously. (The reporter followed up by asking Perry to describe his confidence level against that field; “Not very high,” Perry responded.)
Call it a product of playing opposite bigger events. Or of offering the smallest purses on Tour. But the reality has been that, for decades, the Sanderson has relied on local support from fans who haven’t known most of the players on the golf course.
“We may never get the ‘name’ players,” a local columnist wrote after the event’s thrilling inaugural edition in May 1968, “but who needs them when you get golf like we had this past week?”
That has changed.
This year, the Sanderson boasts four of the world’s top-50 players: Brandt Snedeker (No. 41), Cameron Smith (No. 45), Byeong Hun An (No. 48), and Joaquin Niemann (No. 50); the 29th-ranked player, Chez Reavie, committed but dropped out. Jason Dufner, Zach Johnson, and Jimmy Walker — among whom belong four major championships and eight Ryder Cup appearances — also are in the field.
By comparison, in 2018, not a single top-50 player graced the Sanderson. One year ago, the Official World Golf Rankings rated the Sanderson’s strength of field at 25 (for comparison’s sake, the Masters’ field had a strength rating of 794); this year, the Sanderson’s field is rated 106 — more than four times the score it earned in 2018. That’s still a long way from the Masters, but it’s at least shoulder-to-shoulder with comparable standalone events: the John Deere Classic, for example, had a strength of field of 76 earlier this year, and the season-opener at the Greenbrier scored a 154.
There is another factor that underrates Fall events like the Sanderson: the rookies who dominate the field haven’t yet had enough PGA Tour starts to reach a realistic ranking. Max Homa, for example, missed the cut as a rookie at the 2018 Sanderson, which left him ranked 844th in the world; after a full PGA Tour season that included a win, though, Homa is currently ranked 105th.
“A lot of the guys in our field traditionally have been coming off the Korn Ferry Tour,” said Steve Jent, the Sanderson’s tournament director. “If you recalculated our World Golf Ranking at the end of the season, it would be almost doubled.”
Perhaps more importantly, the strength of this year’s field shows demonstrable progress through an objective measurement — while still making room for a slew of rookies and young players. Of the Korn Ferry Tour’s 50 recent graduates, 48 are playing the Sanderson (the two absentees, Tom Lewis and Viktor Hovland, are juggling obligations to the European Tour and will play the BMW PGA Championship in England). Expanding to a full field of 156 players allows the Sanderson to continue making room for young players, with a renewed focus on recruiting names that more casual fans know.
“I think we know that it’s probably gonna take two or three years for word to get around of how good it is here — the golf course, the hospitality,” Jent said. “We know that now we have a chance to get the best players in the world, but there wasn’t a particular number that we had in mind. We know it’ll grow, and it’ll get better over time as everybody figures out that it’s a great spot in the fall and a great golf course.”
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Photo credit: Sanderson Farms Championship
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