BOISE, ID – Now comes the knife’s edge, the crucible of the late season of the Korn Ferry Tour, where dreams of the Big Time! and Bigger Money! slumber cheek and jowl with the nightmare of another seemingly interminable year of slogging, soldiering, and soul searching.
Some of these golfers are destined for the PGA Tour next year. Relief! Satisfaction! Success! It’s an overwhelming sense of fulfillment. Years of sacrifice and toil were all worth it in the end. Pop the champagne, propose to the girl, buy the house. For the rest, it’s the Korn Ferry Tour again, if they retain their qualification. Or maybe it’s Q school, a circle of Hell even Dante would have feared. Or perhaps a painful reappraisal of one’s decision-making paradigms.
Knife’s edge is a proper metaphor as golf at the highest level is a game of microns. One groove too high on the club face, one degree too much loft, one dimple short of tumbling into the cup, at some point, one shot will mean the difference between not just victory and defeat, but steak dinners versus ramen noodles.
And this week we approach the swirling center of that vortex. This week’s event, the Albertson’s Boise Open, is the regular season finale before the month-long playoff run culminating in French Lick Resort in Indiana. The top 20 golfers earn their PGA Tour cards for next year. The next 75 stay on the Korn Ferry Tour and continue the quest for the Tour. The rest face a career decision.
The host club, Hillcrest Country Club, is relatively short – only 6,880 yards at a par of 71. But with four-inch rough, tree-lined fairways, and curvaceous greens, the line between birdie and bogey is particularly fine.
“You have to keep going forward; playing defensively doesn’t work on this Tour,” explained rising star Christo Lamprecht, the 6’8” South African who dazzled the golf world as an amateur, first winning the Amateur Championship at fabled Hillside Golf Club in Southport England, then earning Low Amateur and the coveted Silver Medal at the 2023 Royal Liverpool Open Championship. His 6-under 65 Thursday was powered by five birdies and a sensational eagle on the short, 293-yard par-4 15th, where he drove to the fringe, then rolled in the 15-foot putt en route to the 31 on the inward nine.
Lamprecht credits a new “Mini driver” as one of the keys to his success, noting that several holes dog-leg in awkward places, while others pinch tightly at what would be the landing zone for a driver.
“It’s a smaller head driver; it just goes 30 yards shorter than my regular driver. It’s a 12-degree loft, 440, but I set it at 14-degrees, and it’s a regular 3-wood shaft,” Lamprecht explained, a smile broadening on his face as the conversation turned to gear. “Position is important; you can score from there, so it gives me a chance to be aggressive. It’s been in my bag last 4-5 weeks every single day. I hit a lot of fairways with it.”
Lamprecht is riding high from his victory last week at the Pinnacle Bank Championship, his maiden victory on the Korn Ferry Tour. After a second round 69 he stands at 9-under, tied for 18th in a 15-player logjam, four shots behind sole leader Philip Knowles. But he’s one of the few players in the field all but guaranteed a lucrative future. (Hence, he proposed to his pretty Russian fiance Annalise! Honeymoon in Florence, Italy? maybe…)
More than that, across the pond he’s achieved not one, but two moment of immortality. Remember, they revere amateur golf like they revere their mother’s face in the UK, and he took home both the Amateur Championship – the de facto World Championship for amateurs and the Silver Medal from the Open the defacto World Championship of Golf. They were still toasting his accomplishments in front of his photo at Royal Liverpool when Your Author visited there in July during Open week.
Then there’s the story of overachiever Davis Chatfield. Here’s a small-town kid: Attleboro, Massachussetts is a humble burg of just 55,000 souls. That’s ten percent smaller than Utica, New York. Far from the chichi-ness of the Country Club, Eastward Ho!, Myopia Hunt Club, or any of the other opulent Boston clubs, Chatfield’s dream started much like yours or mine. Mom or dad dropped him off at the public course down the street, and he played until he couldn’t see the ball because of darkness. His remarkable golf prowess as a junior heralded a certain Division I career: led by Chatfield’s individual title, Davis’s Massachusetts high school team won the Division II state tournament. The next summer Chatfield won the Rhode Island Amateur, proving he could close in the clutch at a young age. So where would it be? Oklahoma? Texas? Stanford?
He chose the school that countless generations of Boston parents dream about: Notre Dame.
When he makes the Tour – when, not if – he’ll be the first ND grad in in the Tour’s history. Get ready to hear that fight song all over the country from the fans when they start following him, and not just in Phoenix.
“I’m just trying to play as subconsciously as I can. If I’m thinking about technique and swing, then I’m probably not playing well,” he admitted candidly. “I play my best when I just visualize it in my head and them pull the trigger. I like to react to whatever I see out there.”
Playing subconsciously has paid off. He’s won his U.S Open qualifier twice, once advancing to the round of 32 before losing to amateur golf paragon Stu Hagestad, perhaps the greatest amateur match play golf of this generation.
Don’t feel bad kid, legends routinely lose to Hagestad in match play. He feats on them.
Chatfield entered the tournament well inside the top 20 players hoping to secure their card, and was riding a hit streak that’s seen him finish runner-up twice this season. But a pair of 68s got him just inside the cut line to play the weekend. This far for the week he has balanced ten birdies against four costly bogeys – two on the long par-4 eighth where he found the long, thick greenside rough, and another on par-5 third, normally a birdie opportunity.
“Yeah, I just kept hitting up the right side rough,” he snarled acidly as he recalled the mis-step with the typical resolve of the professional athlete who let one get away. Still, Chatfield’s resilience was on full display as the small-town kid from the local par-3 course posted four birdies in a seven-hole mid round stretch to survive that late round bogey at the eighth to nip in under the wire.
Chatfield’s heart and fire are far FAR bigger than his 5’6” height. And before we drag out that tired old maxim of “the spikes are on bigger shoes these days…” remember that Ian Woosnam was only 5’4 and Tom Watson was barely 5’8”, and they both won the Masters. The kid is averaging 315 yards driving distance and even walloped several over 340. And his iron shots are laser beams. While he ranks 55th in putting this week, he’s 21st in putting average for the season and 17th in putts per round: 28.6.
And finally, if you want even more fire than that, I present the colorful and resilient bon vivant, Etienne Papineau, the affable Canadian who followed a dispiriting 72 to open the tournament with a swashbuckling 64 to also make the cut by a stroke. Perhaps nothing illustrates the fine line between the gargantuan gap between success on the Korn Ferry Tour and failure as Etienne’s two post-round interviews. Doing his duty faithfully, and facing the press bravely after a poor showing he simply said, “After a bad round, I’m too hard on myself.”
You couldn’t help but sympathize. He looked like his dog just died.
But cut to 27 hours later and there’s Etienne, all smiles with Dad, his family, and his sponsors. And what did he say?
“I’m too hard on myself,” he laughed, this time beaming broadly with the expression of a fellow taking not one but two Hollywood starlets out for a night on the town.
Actually, it was Olive Garden. I’m not kidding. But after a round like his – a7-under 64 to save his tournament and maybe even his season – I’m sure it tasted like Gordon Ramsay meets Bobby Flay.
Right out of the gate, Papineau played the par-5s at two and three the way a Tour player might – eagle, birdie. He reduced the second hole to cinders: driver, 7-iron from 206 to ten feet. Then his driver, 5-wood to the third green setup the second birdie and he was off and running. More birdies followed at seven, 10, and 12. The birdie on seven was particularly hair-raising as he blistered a 7-iron from amidst a stand of trees though a gap the size of a bedroom window to ten feet and made the putt. Totally clutch. In all, Papineau balanced six birdies and an eagle against a lone bogey at 14.
“That last birdie on 17 when I knew I had to make one coming in, it hit a beautiful draw, it came right in, and I made the putt. Big fist pump,” he roared excitedly. “My patience today was the key. My goal was to have fun. I didn’t have fun yesterday, but I was just too hard on myself.”
It’s hard not to do that with all the world to play for. One budding pro showing as much promise as so many of the others was left to shake his head dejectedly as he left Hillcrest, bemoaning, “I just want to get off this golf course before I break something.”
Meanwhile Chandler Blanchet, destined for the PGA Tour no matter what the result this week, gave his old college stand bag to Hillcrest PGA Head Professional Brien McKinley to present to some member of the local junior golf league. Imagine that! Some kid is going to come watch the tournament this weekend ad go home with a monogrammed bag from the most newly-minted member of the PGA Tour. That’s the joyous side of the Albertson’s Boise Open. It’s $3,000,000 in charity, but it’s also three grillion smiles and memories for the golfers and the fans. Boise makes the whole game look good with its philanthropy and festiveness.
Meanwhile, like students at the end of the school year waiting to see who made honor role and who will be staying back a year, so too these players see the brass ring within reach. Or is it just a will-o-the-wisp? That’s the Shalespearean-in-magnitude sports drama being played out in gorgeous Boise, where the only thing hotter than the high desert heat is the crucible of Korn Ferry Golf.
