The Illinois PGA has four major tournaments for its members each season, and Brian Carroll won the third of 2024 last week.
Carroll, the head professional at The Hawk in St. Charles, captured his second Illinois PGA Professionals Championship in three years. The first, in 2022, was a springboard for Carroll to win the 2023 Player of the Year award, and it might be again. He’ll have to overtake Andy Svoboda, in his first year at Butler National in Oak Brook, to do it, though.
Svoboda maintains a comfortable lead in the Bernardi point standings heading into the final of the section’s four majors – the IPGA Players Championship Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 at The Glen Club in Glenview.
In last week’s IPGA Professionals Championship Carroll passed defending champion and 14-time winner Mike Small in the second round and then held off Matthew Rion, of Briarwood in Deerfield; Svoboda and 2021 winner Andy Mickelson of Mistwood in Romeoville.
Carroll was at 15-under-par 201 in the 54-hole event at Elgin Country Club. Rion was two shots back in second and Svoboda and Mickelson shared third, five strokes off the pace.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to play well in that event over the years,’’ said Carroll. “Typically over three days I know that if I play my game and limit my mistakes I’ll be close at the end. My whole golf career was a series of runnerups and close calls until two years ago, so it’s nice to get a string of majors over the last couple years.
After winning his first IPGA title at Makray Memorial, in Barrington, in 2022, he added the IPGA Players in 2023 and now another IPGA Professionals Championship.
“The initial goal last week was to make the PGA Professional (national) Championship,’’ said Carroll. “That’s really important to me to qualify each year, and I’ve made it eight years in a row now.’’
The IPGA tourney is a qualifier for the national event, coming up in April in Port St. Lucie, FL. The Illinois section will have 11 players in the next national event there.
For now, though, the challenge is to chase down Svoboda in this year’s last big local event, the IPGA Players. Svoboda, who was the Connecticut PGA Champion last year, had a big year since taking the Butler National job. He qualified for both the PGA Championship and U.S. Open, was runner-up to Medinah’s Travis Johns in the IPGA Match Play tourney and the low IPGA player with a tie for seventh at the Illinois Open.
LIV tourney is next
Chicago gets its third visit from the LIV Golf League next week. The first two visits from the Saudi-backed circuit were played at Rich Harvest, in Sugar Grove. This year’s event will be Sept. 13-15 at Bolingbrook Golf Club.
Bolingbrook gets a more important event than Rich Harvest did. Next week’s stop is the LIV individual championship, which will decide a season-long point race that includes 12 tournaments around the world.
Only Jon Rahm and Joaquin Neimann are still mathematically in contention for the season’s top prize, an $18 million bonus.
Rahm, a former world No. 1, left the PGA Tour for LIV at the start of the season. He didn’t win his first LIV tournament until July and lost in a playoff to Brooks Koepka in the last event two weeks ago. This week he was quick to discredit media reports, stemming from unnamed sources, that he regrets leaving the PGA Tour.
“There is zero validity to that, and I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why they feel the need to say that some of us are unhappy when we’re not. I’m very comfortable with my decision, very happy with my decision,’’ he told the New York Post. “And, I’m very, very eager for the future of my team and the league.’’