PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – As the action around the 7th tee at The Players Championship came to a screeching halt, Ludvig Aberg and Si Woo Kim stood by a clump of trees and waited.
AND RECEIVED.
However, the pair of Kim and Aberg spent more than 20 minutes on the tee box at no. 7, the longest player wait over the opening two days in this Players Championship. Both men took the occasion in stride: Kim, who paused quietly to smoke a cigarette under a canopy of palms, and Aberg, who stood out in the sunlight as he stared stoically 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 knew this when he wrote the song that first coined the phrase, “The Waiting,” in 1981. That song, and album, Difficult promiseshelped launch Petty into his crowning moment as one of the greatest musicians of his time. All that waiting paid off—Petty eventually became so famous that people listened to him in the meantime they hosted, which included several thousand fans in the monstrously large merchandise center at TPC Sawgrass on Friday afternoon.
Inside the marquee or inside the ropes, it’s hard to keep your temper at TPC Sawgrass. A win at 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 tour history and setting the course for a PGA Tour career that will celebrate a decade in 2026.
“I was just surviving after my first year (on tour),” Kim said Friday. “This tournament is not easy to survive every year. It was a big win.”
The problem is that career-changing wins— coronation victories – like Kim’s have not often come to the Players. The last three tournament winners have all belonged to the two best players on earth, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, and not since Cameron Smith’s breakthrough victory in 2022 has a Players winner come from the (then) less professional class.
However, two days into this Players Championship, 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, whose driver turned in his worst performance of the calendar year, made the one-shot cut, also at 1 over.) Of the six players within five shots of the lead heading into the weekend, four are the bigs, Camereigenberg Sepp Straka, while the other two (Xander Schauffele and Justin Thomas) face the chance to rewrite a remarkably quiet 12 months in their careers with a win on Sunday.
“It’s going to be tough for me this weekend,” Thomas said. “It will be exciting though.”
Of course, for any of the four non-major winners, a win at TPC Sawgrass would represent something far greater: a moment of promise and fulfillment that only rarely comes to the green island’s patrons.
“Sawgrass is also a golf course where you have to hit shots, and I love the golf course because it’s right in front of you,” said Aberg, who runs the course from two and uses TPC Sawgrass as his home facility during the offseason.
Yes, there’s a difference between loving a course and conquering a course, but Aberg looked like a man who was quite capable of the latter on Friday. He shot an impenetrable back-nine 63 on a golf course that was firming under his feet on Friday afternoon to leave the field by two shots.
“Is there any advantage (to playing here regularly)?” Maybe,” he said with a smile Friday night. “But you still have to hit the shots.”
Advantage or not, there is no doubt that Aberg is the favorite. At 12, he will enter Saturday’s third round with a chance to reignite whispers of a breakout season that swept the golfing world last summer.
Aberg doesn’t want to address the kind of rampant speculation that fills a Friday night with a two-run lead in golf’s biggest game of the season. But you can bet the PGA Tour’s ambitious new CEO Brian Rolapp stopped long enough Friday to imagine the Swedish phenom holding the trophy.
Rolapp has shamelessly fanned the flames of major league status for back-to-back players, and crowning victories bode well for major league hopefuls. Even if the Players are never a major championship, his “better than the rest” status could certainly do worse than welcome the crowning achievement of a rising star like Aberg, Young or Straka, or the return to glory for an established stud like Schauffele or Thomas.
In any case, the results for this Players are shaping up to be a rare gift of sorts for the champion and for Rolapp’s tournament. But like Aberg’s long, hard look at the 7th tee on Friday afternoon, the answers to that drive will only take one LESS a little more waiting.
