The annual Aloha Swing on the PGA Tour comes to an end Sunday night, when it will probably be renamed the Justin Thomas Swing for this 2017 season. Thomas holds a 7-shot lead entering the final round, a nice multishot cushion that puts him in a comparable position to last Sunday.
2017 Sony Open: Tee times, pairings for Sunday’s final round
Justin Thomas is set for another primetime march to victory in Hawaii.
Thomas got his first PGA Tour win on American soil last week when he held off Hideki Matsuyama to take the SBS Tournament of Champions at Kapalua. While he already had two PGA Tour wins in the bag (both coming at the CIMB Classic in Malaysia), that was the biggest of his career to date. His buddy Jordan Spieth said it was a potential “floodgates” situation for Thomas, and here we are again a week later, on a new Hawaiian island, with JT dominating the first full field event of the year.
The 7-shot lead was built largely on the back of Thomas’ opening round when he became just the seventh player ever to break 60 on the PGA Tour. (Jim Furyk has done it twice, including a 58 last year.) The first-round 59 was backed up on Friday with a sizzling 64 that set the all-time lowest 36-hole scoring mark in PGA Tour history. That’s a pretty stout accomplishment, given how long the Tour has been around and how many legendary players have posted scores in this game.
There was no relenting on Saturday, either, as JT put up a 65 to get to 22-under and 7 shots clear of the next-closest chaser, Zach Johnson. This Waialae Country Club course obviously permits low numbers, and a chaser can come from deep down the leaderboard with his own round that’s a 60 or something close to it.
That kind of super low round would be useful if the margin was, say, 3 or 4 shots. But it’s 7, which would require a pretty significant implosion from Thomas, the hottest player in the game right now. The chasers all need major help from a guy who hasn’t come close to posting a number in the 70s since he arrived in Hawaii at the start of the new year.
The top two chasers, however, are bona fide stars with major championships to their names. The aforementioned ZJ and Justin Rose will play alongside Thomas for the final 18, going off at 5:40 p.m. ET for the audience back in the continental United States. That should yield a finish right around 10 p.m., which would have been a perfect primetime window before the NFL moved the Chiefs-Steelers game to the evening because of ice storms in KC. Now you will have to toggle back and forth if you’re interested in those more brutish pursuits.
The Tour will send them in groups of three and off-split tees for the final round. Here’s the full tee sheet for the final round from Oahu:
Off No. 1:
- 3:40 p.m.: Satoshi Kodaira, Michael Kim, Pat Perez
- 3:50 p.m.: Cameron Smith, Kelly Kraft, Daniel Berger
- 4:00 p.m.: Jason Bohn, Ben Martin, Mackenzie Hughes
- 4:10 p.m.: Tim Wilkinson, Shawn Stefani, Kevin Na
- 4:20 p.m.: Billy Hurley III, Luke List, Webb Simpson
- 4:30 p.m.: Hideki Matsuyama, Henrik Norlander, Ryan Brehm
- 4:40 p.m.: Jim Herman, Bill Haas, Brian Gay
- 4:50 p.m.: Daniel Summerhays, Marc Leishman, Branden Grace
- 5:00 p.m.: Russell Henley, Tony Finau, Charles Howell III
- 5:10 p.m.: Ollie Schniederjans, Brian Harman, Hideto Tanihara
- 5:20 p.m.: Russell Knox, Kevin Kisner, Jordan Spieth
- 5:30 p.m.: Gary Woodland, Hudson Swafford, Jamie Lovemark
- 5:40 p.m.: Justin Thomas, Zach Johnson, Justin Rose
Off No. 10:
- 3:40 p.m.: Seamus Power, Sean O’Hair, Robert Streb
- 3:50 p.m.: James Hahn, Bryson DeChambeau, Andres Gonzales
- 4:00 p.m.: Rory Sabbatini, Vaughn Taylor, Richy Werenski
- 4:10 p.m.: Chez Reavie, Y.E. Yang, Scott Piercy
- 4:20 p.m.: William McGirt, Kyle Stanley, David Lingmerth
- 4:30 p.m.: Peter Malnati, Stewart Cink, Miguel Tabuena
- 4:40 p.m.: Jared Sawada, Rod Pampling, Vijay Singh
- 4:50 p.m.: Michael Thompson, Bryce Molder, Billy Horschel
- 5:00 p.m.: Brian Stuard, Trey Mullinax, Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano
- 5:10 p.m.: Fabian Gomez, J.T. Poston, Jon Curran
- 5:20 p.m.: Ken Duke, Zac Blair
- 5:30 p.m.: John Huh, Scott Brown
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