Utah Championship golfers are not famous yet, but they’re getting there

In the seventh and final year of the Provo era for the professional golf tournament then called the Nike Utah Classic, organizers formulated a clever plan to avoid a traditional Sunday finish in the Utah County market. They started the 54-hole event on Thursday and ended on Saturday, the only trouble being that BYU’s high-profile 1996 football game at Washington was televised in the middle of the final round and hardly anyone came to Riverside Country Club.

At one point during the event's 16-year tenure at Willow Creek CC in Sandy, the staff so eagerly wanted to create a good impression for Golf Channel viewers that an 18th-green attendant waved a sign, instructing spectators to cheer loudly as putts rolled toward the hole.

And in two years in Lehi, few people followed the lead group because Thanksgiving Point's property is so difficult to walk.

The Utah Championship, part of the newly named Korn Ferry Tour (the Los Angeles-based executive search firm has launched a 10-year sponsorship, replacing Web.com) has managed to survive in the state for 30 years, other than a two-year break in the late ’90s. Yet the event never really has caught on with Utah golf fans, in person. In a market that consistently supports Triple-A baseball and Double-A hockey, the PGA Tour-branded stop hosted by the Utah Sports Commission exists almost completely via sponsorships, not ticket sales.

Utahns respond well to what they view as big events; the Utah Championship simply has not risen to that level, even with a strong history of champions and other contestants who have gone on to do big things in the game.

That’s mystifying to Tony Finau, as a Utahn. “We have an opportunity here on Utah soil to watch some of the best players in the world,” said Finau, a PGA Tour member whose foundation will stage its annual pro-am event Monday at Oakridge Country Club in Farmington. “In 2014, I was playing the [Korn Ferry Tour]. In 2018, I was on the Ryder Cup team. You could say that about a hundred guys.”

That’s only a slight exaggeration. Starting with an original stop of the Ben Hogan Tour in Provo in 1990, the Utah event has produced some big-name (eventually) players as its winners. John Daly won that first title and has claimed two major titles; so has Zach Johnson, the 2003 champion at Willow Creek. Patton Kizzire, the 2015 winner at Thanksgiving Point, has two PGA Tour victories. Cameron Champ, last July’s winner at Oakridge, won the PGA Tour’s Sanderson Farms Championship in October.

“You’re truly talking about the best players in the world,” Finau said, “and they’re going to prove that to you in the years to come.”

Of course, only one player wins each week. The future reward for fans also comes from saving a Thursday/Friday pairings sheet and seeing how many names become recognizable. U.S. Open champion Gary Woodland, for instance, missed the 36-hole cut at Willow Creek in 2010, but he's part of Utah Championship history.

So is Champ, whose 430-yard drive on No. 15 (No. 6 for club members) remains indelible to Keaton Hyde, of Farmington. Champ needed only a wedge for his second shot into the par-5 hole, while shooting a 10-under-par 61 in the opening round. He shot 24 under in four days, even with one usual par-5 played as a par-4.

“It was amazing to witness world-class golf up close and see up-and-coming players go low on my home course,” Hyde said.

“People don’t understand … they really are watching future PGA Tour players,” said Farmington native Boyd Summerhays, a former touring pro who’s best known as Finau’s coach — and Preston Summerhays’ father.

Preston, the reigning State Amateur champion at 16, will play via a sponsor exemption, as his father and Finau did in their teens. The added attractions this year are Korn Ferry Tour members Zac Blair and Daniel Summerhays (Boyd's brother), Utah natives trying to return to the PGA Tour.

Summerhays, who grew up at Oakridge and won his first State Am title there, will have to do something miraculous in the remaining two months of the regular season, just to qualify for the Korn Ferry Tour Finals. He has made only three cuts in 15 starts this season, earning less than $10,000.

Blair is better positioned; he was 60th in the standings before taking a rare week off. Blair's disappointing performance in the U.S. Open led him to announce he was rededicating himself as a professional golfer, shelving his interests in golf course architecture and marketing the course he hopes to build in Utah.

In any case, Utahns will have their biggest contingent of homegrown players in the field since 2014 at Willow Creek, where Finau finished fifth and Blair tied for 11th.

Best of all, Oakridge is easy to walk.