Bits

Corey Conners didn’t win the Sanderson Farms Championship on Sunday but his excellent play — a four-under-par 68 marred only by a meaningless bogey at the last — resulting in a career-best runner-up was huge for two reasons. One, Conners played in the final group on Sunday twice last year and performed poorly both times so reversing that trend was important. And two, it puts him in a great position on the FedEx Cup ranking early — 18th — as he seeks to regain his exempt status. Conners is currently in the 126-150 priority ranking category based on his 129th finish on last season’s FedEx ledger. That’s good conditional status and it’ll get better when that category is re-ordered following the RSM Classic. After the Sanderson runner-up, Conners shouldn’t have too much trouble playing a relatively full schedule, beginning this week with the suddenly strong-field Shriners Hospitals for Children Open ×× Should Conners have won yesterday he would have been the fourth Canadian to win the Sanderson Farms. Nick Taylor won it in 2014 while the late Dan Halldorson (1986) and Richard Zokol (1992) won the tournament when it was known as the Deposit Guarantee Golf Classic and played opposite the Masters ×× Conners got married last week and before that held his bachelor party weekend in Ontario’s Kawartha region playing golf with the likes of fellow Kent State and/or Golf Canada alum Taylor Pendrith, Mackenzie Hughes and Albin Choi. Pretty nice little stretch for the sweet swinger from Listowel, Ont ×× How cold is too cold to play golf? Asking for a friend.

Bites

Both Jaclyn Lee and A.C. Tanguay are in excellent shape midway through the LPGA Tour’s Q-Series, which this year replaced the Final Stage of LPGA Q-School. The split-week, eight-round tournament picks up again on Wednesday with Lee in second and Tanguay 10th. The top-45 finishers and ties will receive varying degrees of 2019 LPGA status. Lee, the amateur from Calgary, doesn’t yet have a firm plan as far as turning pro goes should she earn an LPGA card. She will turn pro at some point in 2019 but is currently in her senior year at Ohio State University and would have waited until graduation to play for pay. Earning full status might precipitate her turning pro earlier. Maude-Aimee Leblanc is also in the field and is tied for 60th ×× I’m still up in the air about buying the Tiger Woods-Phil Mickelson match (though admittedly much of that has to do with trying to find time to watch it with two kids.) Frankly, I find the whole thing reeks of the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao boxing bout in that it’s coming about 10 years too late. I would have rather watched a Tiger-Phil match when they didn’t like each other, not now that they’ve become bosom buddies ×× As detailed in releases and by Rick Young here, not much will change, at least in the immediate future, after Golf Town’s merger with Sporting Life. As a frequent customer, I wish the new ownership structure meant an upgrade to Golf Town’s in-store experience. When the big box store first emerged I can remember wanting to spend hours in there. Not so much now with the stores having become rather tired and the vibe dull. An overhaul is probably too costly but I’ll at least be interested to hear what Golf Town’s new Richmond, B.C., store, which is being described by the company as a “next-generation” store is like upon opening in March.

Barbs

The news that Jordan Spieth will this year play a fall-season event for the first time — committing to both the Shriners this week in Vegas and the following week’s Mayakoba Golf Classic — leaves me wondering why more star players don’t tip it up at least once or twice during the long stretch between the previous season’s Tour Championship and January’s Hawaii events. I get that these are the tour’s big boys, but why would any player in this day and age of extreme depth on the tour want to roll into January with exactly zero dollars and zero FedEx Cup points? OK, I understand there are reasons. They either want the long break or they are busy playing important European Tour events as that loop moves towards its own big-money crescendo. But let’s be honest: the chief reason is they simply feel they don’t need to. That come the new year they’ll start bagging top 10s with ease and be in good shape in no time. Maybe so, but playing tour events in such nice locales as Napa Valley, Las Vegas, Mexico and Sea Island, Ga., doesn’t seem like such a hardship. Make an appearance here and there and give those events a boost ×× Good story here from Golf Digest on the revitalization of Houston’s municipal golf courses. In essence, the turnaround is due to the Houston Golf Association — which ran the PGA Tour’s Houston Open — being awarded a long-term lease and operations contract and using money from fundraising efforts to make necessary changes and improvements that have led to full tee sheets. “It’s essentially a non-profit model that has the benefit of lifting the burden of government, outsourcing a non-core business from the city to a non-profit that’s focused on golf,” Steve Timms, the HGA’s president and CEO, is quoted as saying in the article. It makes one wonder if a similar approach could be tried in certain Canadian cities — Vancouver, Toronto, for example — where municipal golf always seems to be under attack. Would it make more sense for an industry organization — a provincial golf association perhaps — to run municipal golf courses rather than the government, which keeps an eye only on the bottom line? Municipal golf courses are vital to the growth of the game and when you see success stories like this one from Houston — which derived inspiration from the 1980s municipal golf turnaround in Baltimore, Md. — and heralded, revamped munis like Winter Park in Orlando, Fla., you can’t help but wish for some good-news municipal golf stories here in Canada rather than the constant do-we-really-need-these arguments that have become political ammo.

Obscure thought of the week: You know you’re a country boy who’s lived in the city for a long time when you forget your car has high beams. Or, as us country folk like to call them, brights.