This week former PGA Champion Hal Sutton announced that he will be returning to the Champions Tour and playing 20 tournaments. He wants to “Quit the game correctly”. “I have unfinished business and I’m doing this for me. Failure brought me back I need to finish this the way I should have done. This last hill is a personal hill, I’ve got to find the best version of Hal.

Hal, 60, has been running his Academy outside of Houston, but began to think about returning when his fellow professionals had said they missed seeing him on tour.

It’s a long way since he won the PGA Championship and 13 other tournaments on rhe PGA Tour, when he looked like this

He has since had a mild heart attack, two hip replacements and four divorces. He is now remarried to his fifth wife. He was battered after his captaincy of the United States team at the 2004 Ryder Cup at Oakland Hills, Detroit, not least by Phil Mickelson for pairing him and arch rival Tiger Woods together. During that Ryder Cup at the Opening Ceremony he couldn’t remember how many children he and current wife Ashley had together. “Four” she corrected him.

He spoke about that captaincy and the way that he had spoken to his side when they fell behind: “my job as the captain of this team is to fall somewhere between loving you and beating the shit out of you”.

Interesting.

He said that he took the failure on himself and felt that he let his whole team down. In hindsight he wouldn’t have paired Woods and Mickelson together.

”I quit the game as a failure” he said “and I’m back to finish my career and get closure on my own terms”.

The best of British luck to him. Really not sure about this unfortunate painting of him at the top. That hand is not connected to his body. It reminds me of the hand called thing that came out of the box in the TV version of the Addams Family. Either that or it’s someone else handing him a drink.