What a difference a year makes for Eric Cole, who enters the opening event of the PGA Tour this week in a completely life arc than where he was to start 2023.
For starters, Cole wasn’t even part of last year’s The Sentry at Kapalua, Maui, Hawaii. The field is made up of tournament winners from the previous season, as well as the top 50 from the FedEx Cup standings.
But after a coming out party in 2023 that earned Cole the Arnold Palmer Award as the PGA Tour’s Rookie of the Year, he is getting his opportunity to play with the best of the best to begin the 2024 schedule.
“It’s an award in golf where you only get one chance to win it, which is a little bit unique,” Cole said Wednesday from Maui. “To win that and be voted by my peers is pretty incredible, and it’s just a huge honor.”
It was an honor the 35-year-old Cole earned on his own. He was the only rookie to qualify for the BMW Championship and finished 43rd in the FedEx Cup standings.
Cole did not make the cut in his first four events of the 2022-23 season before making his charge. He was 15th at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February then nearly won the Honda Classic later in the month, missing out in a playoff. There was also a tie for fifth place at the Mexico Open and a tie for 15th at the PGA Championship.
Another top-10 finish came at the Canadian Open and he was on his game to approach the FedEx Cup playoffs with a tie for 14th at the Wyndham Championships in August. When the playoffs began, he had a tie for 31st at the FedEx St. Jude Championship and a tie for 25th in the BMW Championship.
As if that wasn’t enough to change his life, after the BMW Championship, Cole was married and also had four top-five finishes during the FedEx Cup Fall campaign.
“Yeah, it was a long year,” Cole said. “I got a lot of comments that I played a lot, but I was just so happy to be out on tour finally and any chance I had to compete on tour just felt like a huge privilege.
“I didn’t get off to the best start missing some early cuts, but then kind of got it together a little bit and started to play really consistently and pretty well there the last half of the year and kind of capped it off with a pretty good fall.”
As the second oldest to win a rookie-of-the-year award, after 39-year-old Todd Hamilton in 2004, Cole believes he has a different perspective on the road ahead than some younger recipients of the honor.
“One of the things with being an older rookie and taking so long to get out here is, a lot of younger guys try and change a lot when they get to the tour, and it’s been a big goal of mine to change as little as possible,” Cole said. “The game that takes you to the tour, in my opinion, you can have a lot of success with that same game.
“So as far as looking forward to this year, it’s not going to be changing a whole lot of stuff, just keep doing what I’ve been doing and hopefully just keep it rolling.”
–Field Level Media
