The Players Championship may receive the rarest gift of all
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — As the action around the 7th hole of the Players Championship ground came to a halt, Ludwig Aberg and Si Woo Kim stood by a clump of trees and waited.
Again he waited.
In total, the duo of Kim and Aberg spent more than 20 minutes on the tee box at No. 7, the longest wait of any player during the opening two days of this Players Championship. The two men took the occasion to heart: Kim, who paused to rest a cigarette under a palm canopy, and Aberg, who stood out in the sun as he stared intently at the horizon.
“Yeah, it was a challenge for sure,” Aberg said later. “It’s no secret that I’m a fast player and I like fast.”
In golf as in life, waiting is the hardest part. Tom Petty found out when he wrote the song that made his name, “The Waiting,” in 1981. That song and album, Hard Promiseshelped propel Petty into his era of becoming one of the greatest musicians of his time. All that waiting paid off – Petty eventually became popular enough that people listened to him for a while see is waiting, gathering several thousand fans in the monstrous commercial center at TPC Sawgrass on Friday afternoon.
Inside the marquee or inside the ropes, it’s hard to keep your temper at TPC Sawgrass. Winning the Players Championship can change the course of your life, as Kim knows all too well. He won here as a 21-year-old in 2017, becoming the youngest champion in tournament history and setting up a PGA Tour career that will celebrate the decade mark in 2026.
“I just survived after the first year [on Tour],” said Kim on Friday.” “This journey is not easy to live every year. It was a great victory.”
The problem is that career-changing victories – to be crowned victory – like Kim’s did not always come to the players. The last three winners of this tournament have all been two of the best players in the world, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, and not as hard as Cameron Smith won in 2022 than a winner from a class of (at the time) very young professionals.
Two days into this Players Championship, however, the leaderboard has other ideas. Neither McIlroy nor Scheffler are within ten shots of the lead heading into Saturday morning. (McIlroy, who arrived in town Wednesday with a bad back, is 1 over and 13 shots off the lead; Scheffler, his worst driver of the calendar year, is one shot short, also 1 over.) Of the six players within five shots of the weekend lead, four of them the youngest (Ludvig Young and Seppka Aberg), the two remaining Stray Coremeners, Two Coremeners (Xander Schauffele and Justin Thomas) face the chance to rewrite an unusually quiet 12 months in their career with a victory on Sunday.
“It will be difficult for me this weekend,” said Thomas. “It will be fun though.”
Of course, for any of the non-major four winners, a victory at TPC Sawgrass would represent something far greater: a moment of promise and fulfillment that comes so rarely for patrons of the island green.
“Sawgrass is also a golf course where you have to play golf, and I like the golf course because it’s right in front of you,” said Aberg, who leads the doubles trial and uses TPC Sawgrass as his home course during the season.
Of course, there’s a difference between loving the course and conquering the course, but Aberg looked like a man with the ability to do the latter on Friday. He shot an elusive, one-under 63 on a golf course that was firming under his feet on Friday afternoon to leave the field in two shots.
“Is there any profit? [to playing here regularly]?” Maybe,” he said with a smile on Friday evening. “But you still have to shoot.”
Profit or not, there is no question that Aberg is the favorite. At 12 under, he will enter Saturday’s third round with a chance to revive the buzz of last summer’s golf season.
Aberg doesn’t want to face the kind of speculation that abounds Friday evening with a two-shot lead in golf’s biggest event of the season. But you can bet the PGA Tour’s new CEO, Brian Rolapp, stopped long enough on Friday to envision the Swede holding the trophy.
Rolapp has been fanning the flames of a major tournament position in the backfield, and a crown victory bodes well for major tournament hopes. Even if the players never a major championship, its “better than others” status could certainly do worse than accepting the crowning achievement of a rising star like Aberg, Young or Straka, or returning to glory with an established stud like Schauffele or Thomas.
In any case, the results of these players become a kind of unusual gift for the champion and Rolapp’s Tour. But like Aberg’s long, hard look at box 7 on Friday afternoon, the answers to that trip will be needed slowly to wait a little longer.
