This Players Championship could receive the rarest gift of all

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — As the action around the 7th tee box at the Players Championship ground to a screeching halt, Ludvig Aberg and Si Woo Kim stood near a bushel of trees and waited.

And waited.

All told, the twosome of Kim and Aberg spent more than 20 minutes on the tee box on No. 7, the longest wait of any players through the opening two days at this Players Championship. The two men took to the occasion appropriately: Kim, who quietly stopped for a cigarette break under a canopy of palms, and Aberg, who stood out in the sunshine as he stared off into the horizon stoically.

“Yeah, it was a challenge for sure,” Aberg said later. “It’s no secret that I’m a fast player and I like it fast.”

In golf as in life, the waiting is the hardest part. Tom Petty knew it when he wrote the song that first coined the phrase, “The Waiting,” in 1981. That song and album, Hard Promises, helped propel Petty into his crowning moment as one of the greatest musicians of his time. All that waiting proved helpful — Petty eventually grew famous enough that people listened to him while they waited, which included a few thousand fans in the horrifyingly large merchandise center at TPC Sawgrass on Friday afternoon.

Inside the merch tent or inside the ropes, it’s hard to keep your patience at TPC Sawgrass. A victory 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 tournament history and charting the course of a PGA Tour career that will celebrate the decade mark in 2026.

“I was just surviving after the first year [on Tour],” Kim said Friday. “This Tour is not easy to survive every year. It was a huge win.”

The problem is that career-altering victories — crowning victories — like Kim’s have not arrived often at the Players. The last three winners of the tournament have all belonged to the two best players on earth, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, and not since Cameron Smith’s propulsive win in 2022 has a Players winner come from the class of (at the time) major-less pros.

Through two days at this Players Championship, though, the leaderboard has other ideas. Neither McIlroy nor Scheffler is within ten shots of the lead heading into Saturday morning. (McIlroy, who arrived in town on Wednesday with a bad back, is 1 over and 13 shots off the lead; Scheffler, whose driver delivered its worst performance of the calendar year, made the cut by one shot, also at 1 over.) Of the six players within five shots of the lead heading into the weekend, four of them are major-less (Ludvig Aberg, Cameron Young, Corey Conners and Sepp Straka), while the remaining two (Xander Schauffele and Justin Thomas) face the opportunity to rewrite an unusually quiet 12 months in their careers with a victory on Sunday.

“It’ll be tough for me this weekend,” said Thomas. “It’ll be exciting, though.”

Of course, for any of the four non-major winners, a victory at TPC Sawgrass would represent something much bigger: a moment of promise and fulfillment that arrives only very rarely to the patrons of the island green.

“Sawgrass is also a golf course where you have to execute golf shots, and I love the golf course because it’s right in front of you,” said Aberg, who leads the proceedings by two and utilizes TPC Sawgrass as his home facility during the offseason.

Yes, there is a difference between loving a course and conquering a course, but Aberg looked like a man who was plenty capable of the latter on Friday. He fired an unfathomable, nine-under 63 on a golf course that was firming under his feet on Friday afternoon to move clear of the field by two shots.

“Is there an advantage [to playing here regularly]?” Maybe,” he said with a grin on Friday evening. “But you still have to hit the shots.”

Advantage or not, there’s little question that Aberg is the favorite. At 12 under, he’ll enter Saturday’s third round with a chance to reignite the whispers of a breakout season that carried throughout the golf world last summer.

Aberg is loath to address the kind of rampant speculation that fills a Friday evening with a two-shot lead at the biggest non-major of the golf season. But you can bet the ambitious new CEO of the PGA Tour, Brian Rolapp, stopped for long enough on Friday to envision the Swedish phenom holding the trophy.

Rolapp has been coyly fanning the flames of major championship status for the Players from behind the scenes, and crowning victories are good for major championship hopes. Even if the Players is never a major championship, its “better than the rest” status certainly could do worse than to welcome the crowning achievement of an ascending star like Aberg, Young or Straka, or the return to glory for an established stud like Schauffele or Thomas.

In any case, the outcomes for this Players are shaping into a rare kind of gift for the champion and for Rolapp’s Tour. But much like Aberg’s long, hard stare on the 7th tee box on Friday afternoon, the answers to that journey will require just a little bit more waiting.

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