Kapalua’s Tournament of Champions keeping tabs of golf’s top talent

Each year about this time the folks who run the Sentry Tournament of Champions at Kapalua start to take stock of their potential lineup for January.

They go down the list of winners of qualifying PGA Tour events to date and begin checking off the possible participants — from the perennials and likelies all the way to the prayer shots.

This year, coming off perhaps the most star-studded field in more than a decade, there is more anticipation to the exercise.

A lot of that is optimism surrounding what would be Rory McIlroy’s first appearance and the cross-their-fingers hope that Tiger Woods will put himself back in the picture after a 13-year absence.

Get one or both of them while retaining the young elite that has emerged and you have a field that harkens back to 1999, 2000 and ’01, the years when the Tournament of Champions made the move to Maui from La Costa.

McIlroy has already qualified with a victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and has talked up the possibility of finding his way to the Plantation course.

“A lot of people are working extremely hard to make sure Rory plays the Tournament of Champions,” said Alex Urban, the event’s newly named and Maui-based general manager who moves over from the PGA Tour. “It is one those events that is an inflection point on the Tour schedule. It is a huge event, one that we think he should be playing in. So, I know that our (people) from the highest levels of the tour talk to him all the time about his schedule.”

Urban said, “You know what it is really all about, to me, is that the groundswell of support we have from the top talent on the Tour, especially the younger guys. Rory is close to Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, that group. They’ve had so much fun out here that, hopefully, he’ll want to come join them.”

Johnson (2018), Thomas (2017) and Spieth (2016) have won the past three events at Kapalua. So far, Johnson and Thomas have qualified for return trips in January.

“When you have them, you have a shot at Rory,” said Golf Channel commentator and Maui resident Mark Rolfing.

“They are as vocal supporters as we have,” Urban said.

Woods, who won one of the most memorable TofCs, a sudden death second playoff hole victory over Ernie Els in 2000, hasn’t played the tournament since 2005. He would need to end a PGA Tour victory drought that has lasted since 2013 to qualify.

“He has to win and, when he does, I think there is a chance, a real chance, that he will come,” Rolfing said. “This is a new Tiger, trust me. I spent some time with him down in Florida a couple weeks ago and this is a completely different Tiger Woods. I wouldn’t be surprised, from all the things I’ve seen, if he came to the Tournament of Champions.”

You can probably forget about seeing Phil Mickelson chasing after a runaway ball at Kapalua, however. He last played the course in 2001, and between complaining about downhill lies even then and a heavy early-year schedule, nobody would be surprised to see him continue to give the event a pass.

As for the rest of what would be a remarkable field come January, “If there is one thing that I am, it is an eternal optimist,” Urban said.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.