Kramer Hickok

With the closet call of his career occurring on a Pete Dye design, Hickok has the potential to take to Harbour Town. An accurate driver of the golf ball, recent weeks have seen the Texan’s driving accuracy dip. In the bottom half of the field in his last three starts, Hickok has posted finishes of T-33 at the Valspar Championship, T13 at the Corales Puntacana Championship, and MC at the Valero Texas Open. Experiencing strong ball-striking efforts the last two times he has visited a Dye design – TPC Sawgrass and PGA West – if able to consistently find the short grass off-the-tee, the 29-year-old should have no issues in his tournament debut.  

The Texas Longhorn had it on a string today with 10-of-13 fairways hit and 15 greens landed in regulation. Yet, 83% of his total strokes gained were added through the short-game departments (+1.3 Around the Green and +1.8 Putting). "I had some great up-and-downs for par and made some good 5-, 6-footers for par throughout the day. But the good shots that I hit were really good so I gave myself a lot of birdie looks so obviously that's important." Hickok is making his third appearance at the Valspar with a T46 and T57 already on his tournament resume. More recently, he was T3 after round one of THE PLAYERS but faded gradually to T42 by week's end.

The University of Texas product gave himself plenty of good looks on his opening nine and converted three of them into birdies. On the back nine, he gave himself just two scoring chances inside of 25 feet but did well with his short game to maintain a clean card while also adding a bonus birdie from 27'1" at the par-3 17th. "I think it's a good round. I had ultimate control over the golf ball today. Conditions were very favorable for us. It was perfect scoring conditions for what this tournament can yield. Last year was super firm and fast, and this is about as soft and pristine as I think I've seen it." Hickok walked off the course ranked 12th in strokes gained off-the-tee and 5th in putting. He'll try to keep the momentum rolling in round two which may or may not happen tomorrow, depending on the weather.

Known for his 8-hole playoff with Harris English at the Travelers Championship, Hickok may have reentered the spotlight with his recent podcast appearance. Discussing the Saudi League with @froggyradio, Froggy asked Hickok if he believes a “major name” would be making the leap. The former Texas Longhorn replied, “Yeah, you’re going to see a lot of big names jump over there. I think there has already been 17 guys that are jumped over. I can’t say who they are, but there are going to be some big names going over there. From what I have heard, the money is very, very appealing. You’re only going to have 12 to 14 events. Those events are going to have huge purses. You’re not going to have to deal with missing a cut anymore, there are only going to be 40 players and 10 of those 14 events will be in the states. Signing bonuses, huge, huge, huge purses, it is going to be very appealing for some of these guys. Especially, the issue we are having on Tour right now is we have The Players purse up to $20 million. The issue we are having on Tour is getting the majors to bump up their purses, cause technically we are getting a small, small piece of the pie. You got The Masters, I don’t know how much money they are making that week, but 12.5-million-dollar purse. I don’t know if I am allowed to say these numbers, but let’s just say we are getting a tiny, tiny percentage of what the PGA Tour is getting of what the total revenue is for all four majors.”