Ryan Armour isn’t in the field at the Sentry Tournament of Champions, meaning he’ll have to wait another week to break a longstanding PGA Tour record. Not that he’ll be sitting around at home nervously biting his nails. There’s a good chance he doesn’t know about it.
Armour is coming off a solid fall in which he made the cut in all five of his starts and finished T-15 at the RSM Classic in his final tournament of 2018. But in addition to carrying over into 2019 the $269,911 he’s earned, the one-time PGA Tour winner will also start the new year on a crazy streak. The 42-year-old has hit 52 fairways in a row.
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Yep, that’s 52 fairways in a row. Or, essentially four straight tournament rounds of not hitting a tee shot on a par 4 or par 5 in the rough. And nope, that’s NOT the PGA Tour record. That distinction belongs to Brian Claar, who hit 59 in a row in 1992, which happens to be the first year the tour began keeping consecutive fairways as an official stat. Yeah, we’re guessing you didn’t know that one.
Claar played for more than a decade on the PGA Tour and went on to become a Champions Tour rules official. Although the PGA Tour’s Rookie of the Year in 1986 never won at the game’s highest level (His best finish was a T-2 at the 1991 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am), he etched his name in the tour’s record book thanks to hitting all 56 fairways at the 1992 Memorial during a T-26.
According to the tour, which goes farther back in recording perfect tournaments off the tee, that was one of four times this feat has been accomplished. David Frost also pulled it off at the 1988 Northern Telecom Open and Calvin Peete did it in back-to-back years (1986 and 1987) at the Memorial. Those fairways at Muirfield Village are pretty generous, huh?
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Considering Frost’s and Peete’s prowess for accuracy as well as others before 1992 (Ben Hogan was known to hit a few fairways in his day), it’s likely Claar’s mark was topped along the way at some point, but technically, he holds the record. And no one has broken it since (D.A. Weibring’s 56 consecutive fairways in 1994 is the closest).
But now Ryan Armour is closing in on Claar. But like a pitcher throwing a no-hitter, it’s best not to talk to him about it.
“The important thing is not to think of it,” Frost told the PGA Tour of his streak.
Sorry, Ryan. Forget we mentioned it.