Upper Midwest Connection of the Week Ending 19 May 2024

 Having started a YouTube channel affiliated with this blog, I recently got clearance to add community posts, including polls. To that end, I decided to run a viewer/reader poll on people's opinion of who should be crowned Upper Midwest Connection of the Week. Although the poll is still running, I decided to cut off consideration for the "people's choice" alongside my own opinion.

Since YouTube limits polls to five choices but more than four Umcees made the cut at their respective tournaments (at least seven did), I took a representative sample of Umcees, basing my selections on the principle of one per event. In the end, Tom Hoge at the PGA Championship, Van Holmgren at the Korn Ferry Tour's AdventHealth Championship, Kim Kaufman at the Epson Tour's Copper Rock Championship and Thomas Longbella at the PGA Tour Americas' Inter Rapidisimo Golf Championship made the poll. By popular vote (if one vote counts as such, since that's how many I got), Van Holmgren was people's choice for the week. To his credit, unlike the other three finalists, Holmgren lacks full membership on the tour he primarily plays on these days but made the cut and finished in the top twenty and ties. This sufficed to get him into this week's Visit Knoxville Open in Tennessee, which is the third event in this reshuffle period. After next week's UNC Health Championship in Raleigh, North Carolina, the reshuffle falls again, and players will be ordered for priority reasons according to their points-list position. Holmgren is in a very good position to get more starts on the Korn Ferry Tour this year.

However, this is a time when expert or semi-expert opinions trump those of the crowd. See, I don't even consider Holmgren's performance the second-best of the week in tour golf. Two golfers from the Dakotas top my list. Kaufman had the better rank and moved up in the Epson Tour's Race for the Card with her simple T10, but given that she played just three rounds (the length of most Epson Tour events), she just loses out to...

Tom Hoge finished T23 at Valhalla (Fargo Forum).

Tom Hoge.

Hoge has made the cut at every PGA Championship since Harding Park 2020, and this year fit the bill as well. His finish of three-way T23 at Valhalla Golf Club was his second-best major finish ever only to a T9 at Southern Hills in 2022, also at the PGA Championship. He moved up to #21 in the FedEx Cup, and his OWGR remained at the minimum #60 to enter the U.S. Open, no qualifiers needed.

Speaking of U.S. Open qualifiers, another Umcee, Erik van Rooyen, secured his exemption straight to the event at Pinehurst as the fifth-leading FedEx Cup placement among those not yet exempt by any other category, including world rankings, after the PGA Championship. His T53 at Valhalla got him 10 FedEx Cup points, which enabled him to edge out Patrick Rodgers by about six points for the final spot for now.

Anyway, this week's action revolves mostly around the PGA and Korn Ferry tours. The Inter Rapidisimo wrapped up the Latin American Swing on the PGA Tour Americas, and a series of Q-school events follow to help fill fields for the North American (mostly Canadian with one U.S. event) Swing. As for the Epson Tour, it has the rest of the month off, both for Memorial Day and the week of the U.S. Women's Open, two weeks before the men's version (Kaufman did qualify for the former). Three Umcees--Hoge will be joined by Troy Merritt and Zach Johnson, both of whom are struggling to keep PGA Tour membership--will contest the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial National in Fort Worth, Texas. The aforementioned Visit Knoxville Open involves two more, as Holmgren is joined by Frankie Capan III, who missed the cut last week but remains in the top 30 of the KFT points list. The only other Umcee of note is O.J. Farrell, former Wisconsin Badger, who is on the Clutch Pro Tour in his native England. Farrell competed in European Q-school last winter but missed the 72-hole (out of 108 holes) cut, losing access to DP World Tour events and having few opportunities to play the Challenge Tour.

Edward the Scop