The PGA Tour…New Year’s in October

For many of us October ushers in a fall season full of falling leaves, pumpkin festivals and Oktoberfest. But that’s not the case for the PGA Tour.

For Tim Finchem and the mighty and all powerful PGA Tour October isn’t a time when we are heading into the end of the year it is actually the start of a new year. Yes, as only The Great and Powerful Finch can do, he has brought New Year’s into October. 

This week the PGA Tours celebrates their New Year and the Frys.com Open sends the players off in their quest for the 2015 FedEx Cup Championship.

Oh my, it seems like yesterday when Billy Horschel was winning back to back at the BMW and then the Tour Championship to end the ’14 season with the FedEx Cup.

While Billy Ho finished last season (last season already? sounds strange so soon) with a bang no player got more of a boost from the inaugural wrap around season start than Jimmy Walker.

Walker started with his first career win at the Frys and kept it going with a win in the first full field event in ’14 at the Sony. The following month in February he claimed his third victory at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am on his way to a great season.

Walker finished with three wins, ten top tens, earned $5,787,016 for fourth on the money list and played well during a difficult Ryder Cup.

The Frys.com Open will also mark the return to the PGA Tour of the feel good story of the week and maybe the year, when Jarrod Lyle returns to the tour.

Lyle has fought off leukemia not once but twice in his life and the well liked Aussie Monday Qualified for his spot at the Frys.com.

He last played on tour in 2012 and then spent the next two years battling and recovering from his cancer.

He also has a sponsor’s exemption into next week and plans to change his routine to try and conserve his energy in order to build up his strength. He is playing on a major medical exemption which gives him twenty events to earn $283,825 to secure his tour card for next season.