For fans and players, new 2025 PGA TOUR season alive with possibilities

Paola Isabel Campos. Molly Grace Thomas. Bennett Scheffler.

The firstborns of Rafa Campos, Justin Thomas and Scottie Scheffler, respectively, are among the swaddling teachers to us all this holiday season, especially, but also heading into the Opening Drive. With the arrival of The Sentry at Kapalua, Maui, we see everything anew as if through the eyes of a child, blinking in countless possibilities wild and vast.

Flip the Etch-A-Sketch and shake vigorously, for this week all are all bogey-free and unbeaten for the new season.

How will it go? What marvels and revelations lay before us in the vein of Nick Dunlap at The American Express becoming the first amateur to win on the PGA TOUR in 33 years?

“I’m kind of just looking forward to going to Hawaii for two weeks,” Dunlap, 20, said recently as he accepted the Arnold Palmer Award for Rookie of the Year. “I think that’ll be kind of fun.”

That sentiment, too, should be a teacher to us all as we stand at the precipice of the new season and at the altar of not knowing. Uncertainty? Embrace it. Savor it. Let the year come together one week, one day, one swing at a time. Let ’em play, as a certain Rules official used to say.

Take it all in through fresh eyes. Embrace the beginner’s mind. Relinquish control.

We could not have guessed a tearful Campos, six days after becoming a dad to Paola, would win the 2024 Butterfield Bermuda Championship after dropping to FedExCup No. 147 on the heels of five straight missed cuts and another streak of eight straight weekends off before that. From concerned for his job to making the trip to Hawaii in a matter of weeks, he illustrates how quickly things can change.

Ditto for Peter Malnati, who broke a nearly nine-year winless drought at last year’s Valspar Championship, crying his own tears of absolution after a victory that seemed like it would never come.

So it went for the nearly unbeatable Scottie Scheffler, on the medal stand as the strains of the Star-Spangled Banner worked their way into him after he’d won gold at the Paris Olympics. He also broke down, shoulders heaving as he showed an altogether new vulnerability.

The dam broke, too, for Rory McIlroy, whose sixth Race to Dubai title, equaling the late Seve Ballesteros, was fraught with meaning, especially, perhaps, after his U.S. Open heartbreak at Pinehurst. One of the hard-to-shake images of the season: McIlroy walking New York’s High Line, just a man alone with his thoughts, trying to figure it out like everyone else.

Who saw that one coming?

For that matter, we could not have forecast Scheffler winning four Signature Events (half of them), or a total of nine times worldwide in 2024. He is out this week after an unexpected injury, cutting his hand on a broken glass while preparing Christmas dinner. Xander Schauffele was another whose career changed last year, as he parlayed distance gains into his first two majors after a series of close calls.

Wyndham Clark was left to ponder the physics after his ball went down into the 18th hole at THE PLAYERS Championship, had a look around, changed its mind, and spun out. Was it Bernoulli’s principle? Bohr’s theory? A glitch in the matrix?

Speaking of boomerangs, you had to see it to believe it when Keegan Bradley, the 50th and last man into the BMW Championship, won the tournament. There was a time he didn’t even think he would be in the field, only gaining entry after Tom Kim’s misfortune on the final holes. Then he won at Cherry Hills – the third win in the last two seasons for the 38-year-old – to earn a Presidents Cup captain’s pick that atoned for the previous year’s emotional Ryder Cup miss. And now Bradley, after being left off the team that went to Rome in 2023 will lead the U.S. into the super-charged setting of the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, where he once practiced as a kid at St. John’s.

It was like an outtake from “What About Bob?” when Patton Kizzire hugged a tree and recorded a rap song for his mental coach on the way to winning the Procore Championship.

All of which should remind us to give our big brains a rest and let the eggnog settle. To sit back and watch The Sentry, starting Jan. 2, as though we, like 2025 itself, were one day old.

All will be revealed in due time.

Perhaps Scheffler will make it an unprecedented three in a row at THE PLAYERS, or karma will come back around for Clark. What will Schauffele do for an encore? Can McIlroy win a historic fourth FedExCup title, or that long-awaited major after more than a decade of waiting? How many first-time winners, like Campos in Bermuda, will be so moved as to bring us along with them? Can Sahith Theegala, who shot 28-under par at The Sentry last January only to finish second to Chris Kirk, finish one better this time around?

We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know. But we can hardly wait to find out.

Let ’em play.