On the driving range, Tom McKibbin and his entourage were sharing two umbrellas between six of them, huddling for cover and soaked all the same. The rain fell so hard in Charlotte that fans who had paid $76 to watch the first day of official practice for the US PGA Championship were not allowed inside the gates of Quail Hollow. By teatime, the downpours would have tested Noah’s nerve.
Until a week ago, nobody expected to see McKibbin here. When he defected to LIV Golf in January, signing a deal reportedly worth $5 million over three years, it seemed that opportunities like these had been torched in the trade-off. The Open in Portrush was the only Major this season in which his spot was nailed down.
But at the beginning of last week McKibbin and David Puig, another young LIV player, were beckoned from behind enemy lines by the PGA of America and invited to play. Was he as surprised as the rest of us? “I knew I was sort of very, very close,” he said. “I was sort of on the edge of it all year.” Does that sound like it was out of the blue?
Being in the top 100 in the world rankings is not declared as a qualifying criterion for the US PGA Championship, but it is the PGA’s desire to have as many of those players in the field as possible. This year, only the injured Billy Horschel is missing from that list.
McKibbin climbed to 97th in the world rankings at one stage last year, but there are still no world ranking points awarded for LIV events. He produced a couple of good performances in a handful of appearances on the DP World Tour earlier this season, but that couldn’t halt his descent to 124th in the world rankings.
What kind of form does he bring in to this week? Coming from LIV it is always hard to tell. McKibbin had a couple of top 10s early in the year, but in his last four events he has finished down the field. On any other tour, that kind of form would be expensive. On the LIV Tour, he has amassed over $2 million in prize money already this season from just seven events.
“I feel very sort of solid,” he says. “I’ve been very, very lucky to play with a lot of very good players so far this year. I’ve definitely seen my golf game improve playing tough courses like Doral. So, I think it has definitely prepared me [for a week like this].”
It is just McKibbin’s third appearance in a Major. He made the cut in the US Open at Pinehurst last summer, and at the Open in Troon, but neither of them was a comfortable experience. At Pinehurst, he said later, he felt nervous over every shot.
“Pinehurst was obviously a very difficult test of golf. I hadn’t experienced that kind of difficulty before. And then Troon obviously with the weather and the wind. This is going to be something different again. I think these tournaments are about not making mistakes and I think I probably made too many double-bogeys or stupid mistakes last year.
“Knowing how hard the courses were made it a little bit more nerve-racking. You don’t really want to force anything too much, so I think that’s probably something that was a little bit trickier for me. Normally, you’re just trying to get off the fast start and make a few birdies. Whereas, the way these [Major] courses are, if you just try a little bit too hard you could really, really mess it up quickly.”
McKibbin has never played Quail Hollow before, but it is a course that rewards length off the tee, and with significant amounts of rainfall forecast for this week, it is bound to play longer than the 7,626 yards declared on the card.
The stats on LIV Golf are not nearly as detailed as they are on the PGA Tour, but according to their data McKibbin has averaged 322 yards off the tee this season. If those numbers can be trusted, it would put him second on the PGA Tour’s driving stats, and make him, on average, four yards longer than Rory McIlroy. Maybe that part is not credible. His length, though, is not an illusion.
When LIV approached McKibbin, he sought McIlroy’s advice and ultimately ignored it. At the end of last year, he secured his playing rights on the PGA Tour but elected not to accept that opportunity, which makes his invitation to this event all the more curious.
He said he exchanged some text messages with McIlroy after the Masters, but he hasn’t spoken to him yet about his beloved Quail Hollow. Anyway, what difference could that make? What McKibbin needs now is the wisdom of experience.
