SBS Tournament of Champions 2017: Tee times, pairings for Thursday’s round

The PGA Tour is back! While most of the United States starts the New Year frozen, the Tour makes its annual start over on the Hawaiian island of Maui. There is no real offseason in golf, but December is the deadest month of the year. As soon as the calendar flips to January, however, the Tour hits the ground running that first weekend with back-to-back events in Hawaii.

The first is the Tournament of Champions at the Plantation Course at Kapalua. The event moved to Maui in 1999, and it’s one of the smallest fields of the year. The Tour decided to switch up formats and worked to entice a strong field. To get a spot in the field, you have to be a winner of one of the PGA Tour’s official events from the preceding year. Most players accept the invite -- if nothing else, it’s free family vacation to Maui in early January. You’re going to make a nice chunk of change because there’s no cut and last place last year earned around $60k. So it’s a pretty good deal.

The ToC, however, still struggles to attract the European players. Many of those stars tend to begin their years over on the Euro Tour, which starts with a lucrative Middle East swing through much of January. It’s an understandable decision -- these guys like to stay loyal to their “home” tour while also still playing enough events to be PGA Tour members too. So two of last year’s major winners — Henrik Stenson and Danny Willett -- are absent. So is Rory McIlroy, the defending FedExCup champion. That’s some serious firepower, but there’s still plenty of superstars in the field, and the point is it’s just good to have golf back.

While this is the first event of the year, it’s not the first event of the “season.” Close PGA Tour followers are accustomed now to the “wraparound schedule,” which counts seven events from the fall towards the following year’s schedule. So we already have seven winners from October and November with FedExCup points counting towards 2017. But in reality, this is the start of the season everyone recognizes.

The PGA Tour has put the top guns at the bottom of the tee sheet, with Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson anchoring everything in the first round. They will go at 5:50 p.m. ET and will be a prominent focus of the Golf Channel broadcast, which will run from 6 to 10 p.m. ET on Thursday night.

Here’s the full tee sheet for Thursday’s opening round in Maui (all times ET):

3:20 p.m. — Cody Gribble, Mackenzie Hughes

3:30 p.m. — Rod Pampling, Pat Perez

3:40 p.m. — Aaron Baddeley, Greg Chalmers

3:50 p.m. — Vaughn Taylor, Brendan Steele

4 p.m. — Billy Hurley III, Brian Stuard

4:10 p.m. — Charley Hoffman, Tony Finau

4:20 p.m. — Branden Grace, Jim Herman

4:30 p.m. — James Hahn, Fabian Gomez

4:40 p.m. — Daniel Berger, Jhonattan Vegas

4:50 p.m. — Bubba Watson, Will McGirt

5 p.m. — Si Woo Kim, Jason Dufner

5:10 p.m. — Jimmy Walker, Brandt Snedeker

5:20 p.m. — Justin Thomas, Hideki Matsuyama

5:30 p.m. — Ryan Moore, Russell Knox

5:40 p.m. — Patrick Reed, Jason Day

5:50 p.m. — Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson