Jimmy Walker seeking a third consecutive Waialae win
Jimmy Walker has been, well, dynamite in his last eight competitive rounds at the Sony Open in Hawaii.
Walker is 40 under par between the 2014 and ’15 editions of the PGA Tour’s first full-field event of the calendar year, and that kind of dominance has him vying for a third consecutive win at host Waialae Country Club.
Were Walker to win this week and complete the three-peat in Honolulu, he would join three others as the only PGA Tour players to win the same event three years in a row or more since 1981, including Tiger Woods, Steve Stricker and Stuart Appleby. Walker realizes that joining the likes of Woods, who has accomplished the feat six times at five different events, and Stricker, in the field this week with renewed vigor, will be difficult.
“I saw something the other day about the list of people that have won an event three times in a row and have won event four times in a row, and it’s small and there’s some really good names on it,” Walker said Wednesday. “Seeing how many times Tiger has done it at different tournaments. I mean four, he did four in a row like at three events.”
While Walker has been consistently excellent at Waialae, his two wins tell completely different stories. In 2014, Walker beat Chris Kirk by just a shot for his second PGA Tour win. A year later, it wasn’t much of a contest. Walker won by nine shots over Scott Piercy, blowing away the field and the Seth Raynor-designed host course, which is undergoing a restoration under the watchful eye of designer Tom Doak. Several hundred trees have been removed, while greens have been modestly enlarged or reshaped to look more like the original design.
Walker sees those changes as good for saving par, which he hasn’t had to do a lot of the last two times here.
“It’s not going to help you with like birdies,” he said. “It’s going to help you alleviate bogeys, I think.”
In the short fall portion of this 2015-16 schedule, Walker made a significant change to how he drives the ball, which was a huge strength for him in winning this event the last two years. However, Waialae is one of the true putting contests on the PGA Tour, and that’s where he believes he has exceled on this course.
“I felt like last year I really got into a good groove of putting and really seeing the greens and the grain and the breaks and just making a lot of putts,” he said. “And that was the difference.”
Ryan Ballengee is a Yahoo Sports contributor. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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