Call me lame, but I was pulling for Peter Malnati.
Five years after his win at the 2015 Sanderson Farms Championship, Malnati is even more emblematic of the tournament’s heritage now than the day he lifted the life-sized chicken trophy. At the time, Malnati was 28 years old: fresh-faced, and fresh off a bounce-back year on the then-Web.com Tour that gave him the PGA Tour card he’d lost a year earlier.
Today, Malnati is a veteran — a journeyman, even. He’s played full seasons on the PGA Tour each year since 2015, but he’s never won again. He’s missed more cuts than he’s made in two of the past five seasons, and he’s rarely factored into tournaments’ outcomes (a T9 finish at the 2019 Zurich Classic was Malnati’s only top-10 PGA Tour finish that year…or the year before that, or the year before that).
But that’s the profile of Sanderson champions. When Malnati won the event in 2015, he was the second of six straight Sanderson winners whose victories were their first on the PGA Tour. The Sanderson has long been the PGA Tour’s island of misfit toys: rookies, warhorses past their primes, and rank-and-file Tour players doggedly chasing starts, points, and status. Now 33 years old, Malnati has worn at least two of those labels. He is a fitting Sanderson champion. He would’ve been a fitting champion again.
But this is not your father’s Sanderson Farms Championship; for the second straight year, the strength of the Sanderson’s field took a remarkable step forward. In 2018, the Official World Golf Rankings graded the Sanderson’s strength of field at 25 — just slightly better than the Japan Golf Tour’s Mynavi ABC Championship. Two years later, though, the Sanderson’s strength of field has skyrocketed to 145. That’s still substantially below the range of spring and summer PGA Tour events (earlier this year, the Honda Classic’s strength of field was 261), but strong enough to confirm it as one of the fall’s leading stateside tournaments (the field at the season-opening Safeway Open, in contrast, was rated 111).
This is no accident, of course. When the event pumped up its purse from $4.4 million to $6.6 million in 2019, it expected to attract bigger names. That began unmistakably in 2019, and this year, the metamorphosis was even more pronounced: six former major champions, and enough Ryder Cup veterans to hold a full-blown reunion. The Sanderson still retains some quirks, to be sure, but the tournament is no longer just an island of misfit toys. It wants stars.
Fitting, then, that the event has its first star winner: Sergio Garcia, the 2017 Masters champion and one of the most popular players of his generation (the irony of Garcia, who once made a racist joke about Tiger Woods and fried chicken, lifting a chicken trophy in Mississippi is thick indeed). The Sanderson victory is Garcia’s 11th PGA Tour title, and at least his 35th win worldwide. His gravitas attracts attention across the golf world like few others do, and his dart from 170 yards to within a foot at the 72nd hole immediately became the Sanderson’s trademark moment. Like Garcia or don’t, but there is no doubt that his win further legitimizes a tournament that has spent years seeking precisely that: star-powered legitimacy.
As it was a year ago, the Sanderson’s challenge now is to continue building momentum. Tour players talk: approval ratings for both the event staff and the Country Club of Jackson appear to be high, and word of mouth can only help continue to solidify the Sanderson’s standing in the PGA Tour’s fall swing.
For a tournament that was on life support less than a decade ago, that’s indisputably good news. Would that room remains for a few more Peter Malnatis here and there, though.
. . .
Cover photo: credit Sanderson Farms Championship
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