Colorado Golf Hall of Famer Wyndham Clark gears up in a hurry in 2025, with The Sentry in Hawaii and the inaugural TGL match in Florida crammed into less than a week
By Gary Baines – 1/1/2025
Denver native Wyndham Clark has competed in just one big golf tournament since Oct. 1 — the Hero World Challenge in early December — but after a laid-back end to 2024 he’ll certainly start 2025 with a flurry.
In the first seven days of the new year, the Valor Christian graduate will tee it up for four days in the PGA Tour season opener (Thursday through Sunday at The Sentry in Maui), travel roughly 4,800 miles to Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., then compete on Tuesday night in the inaugural competition for TGL, the partially-simulator-based primetime indoor team golf league.
Clark, a three-time winner on the PGA Tour who was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame on Dec. 1, comes into 2025 ranked seventh in the world. After two victories on Tour in 2023 — including the U.S. Open — he prevailed at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am last year by closing with a course-record 12-under-par 60 at Pebble Beach Golf Links.
The PGA Tour starts its 2025 season with a bit of a bang as The Sentry at the Plantation Course at Kapalua is the first of eight “signature events”, with a $20 million purse up for grabs for the 60-man field. The winner will receive a whopping $3.6 million.
The Sentry field is limited to tournament winners from 2024 and the top 50 from the 2024 FedExCup standings. Though Scottie Scheffler withdrew after suffering a hand injury on Christmas day — and Rory McIlroy is skipping the event as usual — many of the world’s top players will be on hand, including Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Ludvig Åberg, Hideki Matsuyama and Clark, along with Justin Thomas. Winners of big events in Colorado who are teeing it up — in addition to Clark — include Keegan Bradley (2024 BMW Championship), Nick Dunlap (2023 U.S. Amateur) and Will Zalatoris (2020 TPC Colorado Championship on the Korn Ferry Tour).
For Thursday’s tee times in Hawaii, CLICK HERE.
Following The Sentry — and the long trip to Florida — Clark will take part in the first TGL match at the SoFi Center, with ESPN televising the action from 7 to about 9 p.m. (MT) on Tuesday. In the team competition, Clark’s Bay Golf Club (featuring Åberg, Shane Lowry, Min Woo Lee and Clark) will face the New York Golf Club (Schauffele, Rickie Fowler, Matt Fitzpatrick and Cameron Young).
Each of the six teams in TGL plays five regular-season round-robin matches. (Clark’s Bay Golf Club also competes Feb. 17 twice, Feb. 25 and March 3.) The top four teams in the regular season advance to the playoffs, which include the semifinals March 17 and 18, then a best-of-3 Final Series March 24 and 25.
In TGL, players hit full shots — off real grass and sand — to a 64-foot-by-53-foot simulator screen, before moving to a 22,000-square-foot short-game area, which includes putting on an adjustable green. All told, there’s 250,000 square feet of playing area .
“Bringing golf into a stadium is so unique, and I think you’re going to see a lot of interesting things from us,” Clark said during a visit to the SoFi Center about a week before Christmas.
“This is something new and innovative that is going to really help grow the game of golf. It will give people a new perspective of us in a different arena where it’s more intimate and you kind of get to see our personalities.”
Meanwhile, as for other major tours with competitors with strong Colorado connections … the LPGA (Jennifer Kupcho) will debut for 2025 Jan. 30-Feb. 2 at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions in Orlando; PGA Tour Champions (Shane Bertsch) Jan. 16-18 at the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai in Hawaii; the DP World Tour (Davis Bryant and Yannik Paul) resumes individual events Jan. 16-19 at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic; and the Korn Ferry Tour starts the year with The Bahamas Golf Classic Jan. 12-15.
About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com