Latest news with #McGavin
Sydney Morning Herald
23-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
What shortage? Australia's bumper olive oil season – and one company's American dream
This story is part of the May 24 edition of Good Weekend. See all 17 stories. The most eagerly anticipated moment of harvest time has arrived. Dressed in high-vis vests and grandma hairnets, we focus intensely on a machine's wide spout as the first drops of extra virgin olive oil from Australia's 2025 olive harvest appear. In his 27 years of running the country's largest olive oil producer, Cobram Estate Olives, co-founder Rob McGavin has never witnessed this moment. His general manager, Ruth Sutherland, hands us small, blue plastic cups for tasting; it's throat-grippingly peppery and pungent, with hints of green banana. Once we slosh the oil onto some swiftly produced sourdough, the camo-green juice becomes truly delicious. As we tuck into morning tea in the factory kitchen, I ask McGavin if he is relieved to start picking his 40 billion (you read that correctly) olives this year. 'I won't be happy until the $150 million crop swinging out there in the breeze is off the trees and into tanks,' he says. Supermarket shoppers will welcome this early autumn harvest almost as much as McGavin and the shareholders in his nearly $800 million listed company. Hours earlier, we had walked into Cobram's main storage and delivery depot on the fringe of Geelong – only to see the cavernous space almost empty. McGavin was shocked. 'We are really scrounging for stock,' one of the warehouse workers explains to him. The full harvest of the 2.6 million trees from Cobram's two main groves in Boundary Bend and Boort, and the smaller Wemen grove, all near the NSW border in northern Victoria, is still three weeks away. When the tides of oil start properly flowing, they will be rushed onto shelves just before an Australia-wide shortage sets in. Our demand for olive oil has surged in the past 25 years. In 2001, Australians consumed one litre per person a year, with 95 per cent of it imported from European countries, particularly Spain and Italy. Today it's two litres per head, with 50 per cent produced in Australia. Cobram supplies 70 per cent of our locally grown oil. 'There is Cobram Estate and then there is daylight as far as the next biggest producer is concerned,' says Australian Olive Association CEO Michael Southan. It will be a bumper olive-oil harvest in Australia this year, powered partly by a warm and stable growing season and the fact that olive trees have an 'on year, off year' fruiting pattern. This year, it's all on. Three hundred pickers will converge on Cobram's groves, harvesting day and night for 10 weeks. By mid-June, more than 14 million litres of oil will have been picked, crushed and bottled in Australia, at least 12 million litres of it coming from Cobram. As soon as the Geelong warehouse brims with oil again, McGavin and Cobram co-chief executive Leandro Ravetti will turn their attention to another harvest across the globe – specifically, in the Sacramento Valley in California. The company owns 1000 hectares east of the grapevine-lush Napa Valley, and is in the process of adding another 1500. After 11 years of planting olive seedlings, Ravetti claims Cobram is poised to become the biggest producer of US olive oil in the next two to three years. Probably the darkest moment in McGavin's career came in 2009, the year Cobram nearly collapsed, and when he succumbed to swine flu. Over the previous decade, he and co-founder Paul Riordan, a mate from Geelong's Marcus Oldham College, had slowly built the business through a process he jokingly refers to as 'trial and terror'. They had asked friends and family to pitch in to help them raise the $7 million needed to plant trees on the upper banks of the Murray at Boundary Bend. Near a now-dilapidated Telstra phone booth surrounded by wild asparagus, they had spotted an old olive tree. 'We thought, 'Well, if that can grow well here, we can plant more,' ' McGavin says. Starting in 1999, they planted, ripped up, replanted, tended and harvested different types of olive trees, including picual, hojiblanca, arbequina and coratina, to see which suited the climate and conditions best. But in 2009, a partner they relied on heavily for business, Timbercorp, went bankrupt. Cobram took over Timbercorp's properties, including its olive groves and processing plants. This takeover pushed Cobram to the brink of collapse and it ended up in court fighting to harvest $30 million worth of olives. It was eventually able to do so – and recover – but 'for 10 months it was grim,' McGavin says. 'It was next-level stress. I ended up getting swine flu, then pneumonia, and I just could not get over it. My doctor told me that if I did not take time off, he would stop treating me because there was no point,' McGavin says. 'I could not lose hope, though. There were too many friends and family who had invested in us, trusted us with their money.' Grit was ingrained in McGavin very early in life. He grew up on a farm called Jubilee Park, a 13-hour drive inland from Brisbane in a tiny town called Barcaldine. His dad, Bob McGavin, farmed 8900 hectares, working at least 12 hours a day, even on Christmas Day, to make money from the sheep and cattle they ran. 'There were no holidays, no sport, no TV,' McGavin says. 'We would not really see any other people much. We were either asleep or working.' School was an optional extra. 'One term, I missed 36 days. Dad would say, 'You learn more from mustering anyway.' ' It sounds brutal, but it wasn't, says McGavin. 'I honestly think if you grow up on a farm you've won the Lotto in life. You learn to solve your own problems, and you learn how to create your own fun.' Fun for McGavin, his older sister Sue and younger brother Tim, came often in the form of a cockatoo, creatively named Cocky. 'We had him for years. He would somehow know when we were returning home from a day mustering, and he'd fly two kilometres out to meet us, then hitch a ride home on our heads.' When McGavin was seven, his mother died of breast cancer. 'I remember her empathy and kindness. She was a Christian and every Sunday would pack us into our Kingswood station wagon, and we'd go to church.' McGavin's dad, already a workaholic, coped with her death by working even harder. 'When you lose one parent, it makes you anxious about the other. I used to spend a lot of nights by the front fence waiting for dad's ute.' When Bob was 48, he was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer and given two years to live. But he lasted another 13 years. 'For the last three years, he walked around with a morphine syringe in his pocket and would inject himself if the pain got too much. He had a catheter as well. One day in the yards, a ram ripped it out. He just washed it and reinserted it back into his old fella himself.' Losing both parents to cancer contributed to the evangelical zeal McGavin has about the health benefits of olive oil. 'Mum didn't drink or smoke, but she died at 39. We ate meat; we grew on the farm, had vegetables from the vegie patch. But we had a lot of seed oil, refined oil and oils that were probably rancid.' Dietitian Susie Burrell says there is some evidence that rancid oil may lead to cellular damage over time, but 'the primary issue is that the flavour of the oil is unpleasant and nutritional benefits are depleted'. 'Health officials ... still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat.' Rob McGavin Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in our understanding of a food that's been on humanity's menu since 5000BC. Not surprisingly, McGavin and his senior executives frequently tout the benefits of olive oil, especially fresh extra virgin olive oil, and in this they have scientific backing. 'The diet that many in the scientific community agree is the best for disease prevention is the Mediterranean diet, of which extra virgin olive oil is a staple. It should be the main added fat we use in our cooking,' says Professor Catherine Itsiopoulos, associate deputy vice-chancellor of RMIT University and an olive oil expert. But she warns, 'olive oil is not a drug you can just take on its own; take a couple of tablespoons and everything will be OK. It is not enough. You need to change your diet.' Loading What makes olive oil different from seed oils such as vegetable, canola and sunflower is that it contains polyphenols. These polyphenols (often detected as the 'throat-gripping' bitterness in oil) act as antioxidants and, importantly, contain anti-inflammatory properties, Itsiopoulos says. The growing acceptance that olive oil can reduce cholesterol and inflammation, along with the risk of cancer and heart disease, has encouraged Cobram to fund research, establish the Olive Wellness Institute, and lobby the government to change the current food health-star rating system, which rates olive oil as 3.5 stars. 'I feel so let down by the health officials in this country who still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat while ignoring the health benefits of it,' McGavin says. Helicopters and light planes are to McGavin what Ubers are to city dwellers. He spends considerable time flying between the Boort and Boundary Bend groves, and the farm he lives on with his wife, Kate, and three adult sons in western Victoria. We fly in to Boundary Bend just as giant trucks are bringing the first lot of olives in from the groves. McGavin explains the oil-making process as the olives are sent jostling along a belt where they are stripped of leaves, stems and dud specimens. In a three-step 'crush, mix, spin' process, olives are pulverised into a paste, the flesh ripped and torn to release the oil, stored in sacs. This crude tapenade is then churned for 30 minutes to bond the tiny oil droplets together. The mix is then funnelled into a centrifuge that separates the oil from the water and flesh of the olive. The first drops of oil we capture come from coratina and picual olives, two of the 30 varieties Cobram grows. They will go into specifically labelled First Harvest bottles. The aim is to pick most of the 40 billion olives at what McGavin calls 'peak oil accumulation'. This is still three weeks off. The First Harvest olives have a lower oil-accumulation ratio but are very high in polyphenols, and picking them is a way to test the machinery before the army of contractor pickers converge on the groves. Many of the incoming pickers are 'grey nomads' – older, retired couples who arrive in their camper vans to set up home near the Boort and Boundary Bend groves. Their job is to operate the 28 apartment-sized picking machines, reverently referred to as either Colossus or Optimus, for 12-hour shifts. McGavin, Ruth Sutherland and I walk behind a lumbering Colossus as it pushes along a row of arbequina trees at a top speed of 400 metres per hour. A column of plastic claws shakes each tree to strip it of olives and feeds them onto a conveyor belt and into a waiting truck which, once full, will head straight to the nearby mill. Loading Company policy dictates it must take no longer than six hours from tree to tank – from the olives being plucked then crushed and pumped into storage vats ready to be bottled. 'The faster the process is, the more health benefits are kept in the oil,' McGavin says. 'If you leave the olives sitting around off the trees, they start to ferment.' McGavin's aim is to make the healthiest oil – with the highest content of polyphenols – for the cheapest price. A 750ml bottle of Cobram Estate oil cost $20 two years ago. Today it is $25, a hike blamed on higher production costs. At the same time, the price of imported olive oil has risen by 70 per cent; this is attributed to severe droughts in Europe causing a global undersupply of oil, according to the Australian Olive Association's Southan. 'But we are not seeing demand drop,' he says. 'It seems we are still willing to pay for olive oil even while prices rise.' Demand is expected to rise 5 per cent a year over the next five years, with the total value of the Australian market forecast to reach more than $500 million by 2030. This may seem massive, but is a thimble compared to the size of the American market, currently worth $US3.1 billion ($4.8 billion) and predicted to grow by 7 per cent a year to 2030. This explains why Cobram is looking to the US with a confidence not shared by many other Australian companies now, especially in light of the US-imposed tariffs. Ravetti, who was born in Argentina, says Americans still largely think, as Australians did 20 years ago, that the best olive oil comes from Europe. The US produces only five per cent of the olive oil it consumes, mostly in California, which has textbook-ideal growing conditions for olives. The rest is brought in from places like Spain and Italy. It has not been an easy ride for Cobram since it started planting groves in California in 2014. 'American retailers didn't want to know about a little Australian company, even if it was making the oil locally,' says Ravetti. But by 2022, the business began ramping up its operations, and has planted 200 to 400 hectares of olive trees every year since then. Ravetti predicts that in five years' time, Cobram's revenue will be higher in the US than in Australia. McGavin aims to supply 'locally grown, high-quality extra virgin olive oil to retail outlets across the USA'. It's a bold ambition. But the boy from Barcaldine is on a mission.
The Age
23-05-2025
- Business
- The Age
What shortage? Australia's bumper olive oil season – and one company's American dream
This story is part of the May 24 edition of Good Weekend. See all 17 stories. The most eagerly anticipated moment of harvest time has arrived. Dressed in high-vis vests and grandma hairnets, we focus intensely on a machine's wide spout as the first drops of extra virgin olive oil from Australia's 2025 olive harvest appear. In his 27 years of running the country's largest olive oil producer, Cobram Estate Olives, co-founder Rob McGavin has never witnessed this moment. His general manager, Ruth Sutherland, hands us small, blue plastic cups for tasting; it's throat-grippingly peppery and pungent, with hints of green banana. Once we slosh the oil onto some swiftly produced sourdough, the camo-green juice becomes truly delicious. As we tuck into morning tea in the factory kitchen, I ask McGavin if he is relieved to start picking his 40 billion (you read that correctly) olives this year. 'I won't be happy until the $150 million crop swinging out there in the breeze is off the trees and into tanks,' he says. Supermarket shoppers will welcome this early autumn harvest almost as much as McGavin and the shareholders in his nearly $800 million listed company. Hours earlier, we had walked into Cobram's main storage and delivery depot on the fringe of Geelong – only to see the cavernous space almost empty. McGavin was shocked. 'We are really scrounging for stock,' one of the warehouse workers explains to him. The full harvest of the 2.6 million trees from Cobram's two main groves in Boundary Bend and Boort, and the smaller Wemen grove, all near the NSW border in northern Victoria, is still three weeks away. When the tides of oil start properly flowing, they will be rushed onto shelves just before an Australia-wide shortage sets in. Our demand for olive oil has surged in the past 25 years. In 2001, Australians consumed one litre per person a year, with 95 per cent of it imported from European countries, particularly Spain and Italy. Today it's two litres per head, with 50 per cent produced in Australia. Cobram supplies 70 per cent of our locally grown oil. 'There is Cobram Estate and then there is daylight as far as the next biggest producer is concerned,' says Australian Olive Association CEO Michael Southan. It will be a bumper olive-oil harvest in Australia this year, powered partly by a warm and stable growing season and the fact that olive trees have an 'on year, off year' fruiting pattern. This year, it's all on. Three hundred pickers will converge on Cobram's groves, harvesting day and night for 10 weeks. By mid-June, more than 14 million litres of oil will have been picked, crushed and bottled in Australia, at least 12 million litres of it coming from Cobram. As soon as the Geelong warehouse brims with oil again, McGavin and Cobram co-chief executive Leandro Ravetti will turn their attention to another harvest across the globe – specifically, in the Sacramento Valley in California. The company owns 1000 hectares east of the grapevine-lush Napa Valley, and is in the process of adding another 1500. After 11 years of planting olive seedlings, Ravetti claims Cobram is poised to become the biggest producer of US olive oil in the next two to three years. Probably the darkest moment in McGavin's career came in 2009, the year Cobram nearly collapsed, and when he succumbed to swine flu. Over the previous decade, he and co-founder Paul Riordan, a mate from Geelong's Marcus Oldham College, had slowly built the business through a process he jokingly refers to as 'trial and terror'. They had asked friends and family to pitch in to help them raise the $7 million needed to plant trees on the upper banks of the Murray at Boundary Bend. Near a now-dilapidated Telstra phone booth surrounded by wild asparagus, they had spotted an old olive tree. 'We thought, 'Well, if that can grow well here, we can plant more,' ' McGavin says. Starting in 1999, they planted, ripped up, replanted, tended and harvested different types of olive trees, including picual, hojiblanca, arbequina and coratina, to see which suited the climate and conditions best. But in 2009, a partner they relied on heavily for business, Timbercorp, went bankrupt. Cobram took over Timbercorp's properties, including its olive groves and processing plants. This takeover pushed Cobram to the brink of collapse and it ended up in court fighting to harvest $30 million worth of olives. It was eventually able to do so – and recover – but 'for 10 months it was grim,' McGavin says. 'It was next-level stress. I ended up getting swine flu, then pneumonia, and I just could not get over it. My doctor told me that if I did not take time off, he would stop treating me because there was no point,' McGavin says. 'I could not lose hope, though. There were too many friends and family who had invested in us, trusted us with their money.' Grit was ingrained in McGavin very early in life. He grew up on a farm called Jubilee Park, a 13-hour drive inland from Brisbane in a tiny town called Barcaldine. His dad, Bob McGavin, farmed 8900 hectares, working at least 12 hours a day, even on Christmas Day, to make money from the sheep and cattle they ran. 'There were no holidays, no sport, no TV,' McGavin says. 'We would not really see any other people much. We were either asleep or working.' School was an optional extra. 'One term, I missed 36 days. Dad would say, 'You learn more from mustering anyway.' ' It sounds brutal, but it wasn't, says McGavin. 'I honestly think if you grow up on a farm you've won the Lotto in life. You learn to solve your own problems, and you learn how to create your own fun.' Fun for McGavin, his older sister Sue and younger brother Tim, came often in the form of a cockatoo, creatively named Cocky. 'We had him for years. He would somehow know when we were returning home from a day mustering, and he'd fly two kilometres out to meet us, then hitch a ride home on our heads.' When McGavin was seven, his mother died of breast cancer. 'I remember her empathy and kindness. She was a Christian and every Sunday would pack us into our Kingswood station wagon, and we'd go to church.' McGavin's dad, already a workaholic, coped with her death by working even harder. 'When you lose one parent, it makes you anxious about the other. I used to spend a lot of nights by the front fence waiting for dad's ute.' When Bob was 48, he was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer and given two years to live. But he lasted another 13 years. 'For the last three years, he walked around with a morphine syringe in his pocket and would inject himself if the pain got too much. He had a catheter as well. One day in the yards, a ram ripped it out. He just washed it and reinserted it back into his old fella himself.' Losing both parents to cancer contributed to the evangelical zeal McGavin has about the health benefits of olive oil. 'Mum didn't drink or smoke, but she died at 39. We ate meat; we grew on the farm, had vegetables from the vegie patch. But we had a lot of seed oil, refined oil and oils that were probably rancid.' Dietitian Susie Burrell says there is some evidence that rancid oil may lead to cellular damage over time, but 'the primary issue is that the flavour of the oil is unpleasant and nutritional benefits are depleted'. 'Health officials ... still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat.' Rob McGavin Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in our understanding of a food that's been on humanity's menu since 5000BC. Not surprisingly, McGavin and his senior executives frequently tout the benefits of olive oil, especially fresh extra virgin olive oil, and in this they have scientific backing. 'The diet that many in the scientific community agree is the best for disease prevention is the Mediterranean diet, of which extra virgin olive oil is a staple. It should be the main added fat we use in our cooking,' says Professor Catherine Itsiopoulos, associate deputy vice-chancellor of RMIT University and an olive oil expert. But she warns, 'olive oil is not a drug you can just take on its own; take a couple of tablespoons and everything will be OK. It is not enough. You need to change your diet.' Loading What makes olive oil different from seed oils such as vegetable, canola and sunflower is that it contains polyphenols. These polyphenols (often detected as the 'throat-gripping' bitterness in oil) act as antioxidants and, importantly, contain anti-inflammatory properties, Itsiopoulos says. The growing acceptance that olive oil can reduce cholesterol and inflammation, along with the risk of cancer and heart disease, has encouraged Cobram to fund research, establish the Olive Wellness Institute, and lobby the government to change the current food health-star rating system, which rates olive oil as 3.5 stars. 'I feel so let down by the health officials in this country who still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat while ignoring the health benefits of it,' McGavin says. Helicopters and light planes are to McGavin what Ubers are to city dwellers. He spends considerable time flying between the Boort and Boundary Bend groves, and the farm he lives on with his wife, Kate, and three adult sons in western Victoria. We fly in to Boundary Bend just as giant trucks are bringing the first lot of olives in from the groves. McGavin explains the oil-making process as the olives are sent jostling along a belt where they are stripped of leaves, stems and dud specimens. In a three-step 'crush, mix, spin' process, olives are pulverised into a paste, the flesh ripped and torn to release the oil, stored in sacs. This crude tapenade is then churned for 30 minutes to bond the tiny oil droplets together. The mix is then funnelled into a centrifuge that separates the oil from the water and flesh of the olive. The first drops of oil we capture come from coratina and picual olives, two of the 30 varieties Cobram grows. They will go into specifically labelled First Harvest bottles. The aim is to pick most of the 40 billion olives at what McGavin calls 'peak oil accumulation'. This is still three weeks off. The First Harvest olives have a lower oil-accumulation ratio but are very high in polyphenols, and picking them is a way to test the machinery before the army of contractor pickers converge on the groves. Many of the incoming pickers are 'grey nomads' – older, retired couples who arrive in their camper vans to set up home near the Boort and Boundary Bend groves. Their job is to operate the 28 apartment-sized picking machines, reverently referred to as either Colossus or Optimus, for 12-hour shifts. McGavin, Ruth Sutherland and I walk behind a lumbering Colossus as it pushes along a row of arbequina trees at a top speed of 400 metres per hour. A column of plastic claws shakes each tree to strip it of olives and feeds them onto a conveyor belt and into a waiting truck which, once full, will head straight to the nearby mill. Loading Company policy dictates it must take no longer than six hours from tree to tank – from the olives being plucked then crushed and pumped into storage vats ready to be bottled. 'The faster the process is, the more health benefits are kept in the oil,' McGavin says. 'If you leave the olives sitting around off the trees, they start to ferment.' McGavin's aim is to make the healthiest oil – with the highest content of polyphenols – for the cheapest price. A 750ml bottle of Cobram Estate oil cost $20 two years ago. Today it is $25, a hike blamed on higher production costs. At the same time, the price of imported olive oil has risen by 70 per cent; this is attributed to severe droughts in Europe causing a global undersupply of oil, according to the Australian Olive Association's Southan. 'But we are not seeing demand drop,' he says. 'It seems we are still willing to pay for olive oil even while prices rise.' Demand is expected to rise 5 per cent a year over the next five years, with the total value of the Australian market forecast to reach more than $500 million by 2030. This may seem massive, but is a thimble compared to the size of the American market, currently worth $US3.1 billion ($4.8 billion) and predicted to grow by 7 per cent a year to 2030. This explains why Cobram is looking to the US with a confidence not shared by many other Australian companies now, especially in light of the US-imposed tariffs. Ravetti, who was born in Argentina, says Americans still largely think, as Australians did 20 years ago, that the best olive oil comes from Europe. The US produces only five per cent of the olive oil it consumes, mostly in California, which has textbook-ideal growing conditions for olives. The rest is brought in from places like Spain and Italy. It has not been an easy ride for Cobram since it started planting groves in California in 2014. 'American retailers didn't want to know about a little Australian company, even if it was making the oil locally,' says Ravetti. But by 2022, the business began ramping up its operations, and has planted 200 to 400 hectares of olive trees every year since then. Ravetti predicts that in five years' time, Cobram's revenue will be higher in the US than in Australia. McGavin aims to supply 'locally grown, high-quality extra virgin olive oil to retail outlets across the USA'. It's a bold ambition. But the boy from Barcaldine is on a mission.
USA Today
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Christopher McDonald hysterically brought back Shooter McGavin for the WM Phoenix Open
A familiar face made an appearance during Saturday's WM Phoenix Open, and he was back to his jacket-stealing ways. Actor Christopher McDonald, also known as pompous golfer Shooter McGavin from the classic comedy Happy Gilmore, briefly reprised the character this weekend at the golf tournament to help promote the film's upcoming sequel. McDonald recreated McGavin's infamous runaway sequence after stealing Adam Sandler/Happy Gilmore's yellow jacket at the end of the first film, with a bunch of WM Phoenix Open fans chasing after him to get it. McGavin is returning for the second Happy Gilmore film, so it's pretty fun that McDonald slipped back into character for such an occasion. The new film is due out later this year. SHOOTER MCGAVIN STEALS HAPPY GILMORE'S GOLD JACKET AT THE WM PHOENIX OPEN 16TH HOLE — Netflix (@netflix) February 8, 2025 Remember at the end of Happy Gilmore where @ShooterMcGavin_ steals the jacket and is being chased by fans. They recreated that at the @WMPhoenixOpen as fans were running to the 16th hole 😂 @12News — Troy Lynch (@mrtroylynch) February 8, 2025
USA Today
08-02-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
2025 WM Phoenix Open highlights: Leaderboard, updates from second round at TPC Scottsdale
2025 WM Phoenix Open highlights: Leaderboard, updates from second round at TPC Scottsdale Show Caption Hide Caption Shooter McGavin crashes Justin Thomas interview at WM Phoenix Open Shooter McGavin, aka Christopher McDonald, crashed Justin Thomas' interview at the 2025 WM Phoenix Open. The second round of the 2025 WM Phoenix Open is in the books. There were 13 golfers who didn't complete their second rounds Friday, which was suspended for darkness. Same thing happened on Thursday. This is the 90th playing of the fifth oldest event on the PGA Tour. For the 39th time, the tournament is being played at TPC Scottsdale's Stadium Course in Scottsdale, Arizona. The tournament has gone to a playoff in six of the past nine years. WM Phoenix Open 2025 leaderboard Stay up-to-date with all the scores from TPC Scottsdale. Hotshot amateur Luke Clanton out of Florida State made a late run with birdies on Nos. 15 and 17 but fell a shot short of making the cut and earning a 20th point in the PGA Tour U standings, which would have secured his PGA Tour card. It hadn't happened at the WM Phoenix Open since the final round of 2022 but on Friday, Emiliano Grillo made a hole-in-one on the 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale during the second round of the 2025 WM Phoenix Open. And he did it dunking style, his ball going straight into the cup, and even swirling around the jar. Thomas Detry shoots 66-64 to get to 12 under Detry, who has nine top 10s in 67 starts on the PGA Tour, is still seeking his first victory. After a second-round 64, which included a birdie on the raucous 16th hole, Detry is at 12 under and walked off the course with a two-shot lead. Detry, a 32-year-old from Belgium, said he had perfect yardage with his tee shot on the par 3. "The wind kind of switched a little bit, so instead of being off the right and in, it was slightly down, so it was a perfect wedge for me," he said. "The greens are so firm that you kind of want to come in with full shots, kind of coming from high, full shots with spin. So it was perfect full wedge, and it pitched in a perfect spot, and I think it spun a little bit. Just a kick-in birdie." Six-way tie atop leaderboard at 2025 WM Phoenix Open It's getting crowded in Scottsdale. And we don't mean the fans. There's a six-way tie atop the leaderboard midway through the the second round of the 2025 WM Phoenix Open. In other news: Tiger Woods will tee it up at the Genesis Invitational Woods committed to the Genesis Invitational on Friday. It's one of the three player-hosted signature events on the PGA Tour. It'll be held at Torrey Pines in 2025 due to the destructive fires near the Pacific Palisades part of Los Angeles. The tournament will return to Riviera Country Club in 2026. Rickie Fowler withdrew from the WM Phoenix Open on Friday morning, citing illness. Fowler is a fan favorite everywhere but has a special bond with the Thunderbirds and the tournament, which gave him a sponsor invitation in 2009. -Adam Schupak First-round leader Wyndham Clark has gifts for fans on 16th hole Clark opened his week with a 7-under 64 and held a one-shot lead after 18 holes. He also told fans via social media to be ready for him to come through the 16th hole Friday as he would have some goodies to give away. Clark started on the back nine for his second round and should be at the 16th hole at about 10 a.m. local time (noon ET).
USA Today
08-02-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
These PGA Tour rookies went from standard bearers to in the field at WM Phoenix Open
These PGA Tour rookies went from standard bearers to in the field at WM Phoenix Open Show Caption Hide Caption Shooter McGavin crashes Justin Thomas interview at WM Phoenix Open Shooter McGavin, aka Christopher McDonald, crashed Justin Thomas' interview at the 2025 WM Phoenix Open. Matt McCarty is making his debut at this week's WM Phoenix Open, but it won't be his first time seeing the famed par-3 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale up close and personal. As a teenager growing up in the Valley of the Sun, the 27-year-old PGA Tour rookie used to sneak on the course with some help from a friend working in the bag room. 'We kind of like would weasel our way in, always create a little gap in the fence," he recalled, "so we'd show up on 16 at like five in the morning for a couple years, be like the first ones out there.' McCarty doesn't have to sneak on anymore. He was the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour Player of the Year after winning three times and leading the season-long money list, and he isn't alone among rookies in the field with a strong connection to the WM Phoenix Open held in Scottsdale, Arizona. Frankie Capan III, 25, was born in Minnesota, but he spent the majority of his childhood about 15 minutes from the course, where his parents still live. He shot 59 at Omni Tucson National to win the state championship in high school, too. Capan has made the cut in his first three starts as a rookie this season but his number wasn't going to get called for the 120-man field. So, he wrote a four-page letter to WM Phoenix Open tournament director Chance Cozby, detailing his ties to the tournament. When Capan was in elementary school, he served as a Phoenix Open standard bearer for Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson and Bill Haas. He and his two sisters participated in the area's junior version of the People's Open, the Itty Bitty Open, where top finishers were later honored at TPC Scottsdale during the big tournament. Cozby told him it was the longest letter he'd ever received and granted him one of the tournament's four sponsor exemptions. 'For me, that was kind of cool but I didn't try and add unnecessary information. I just kind of wanted them to learn a little bit about me and my past,' said Capan, who shot 58 and won the Korn Ferry Tour's Veritex Championship among seven top 10s last season. 'I just wanted to highlight that a little, and then just all the relationships that my family and I have formed in the valley. Other than that, mainly just kind of updating him a little bit about how the last couple years have gone for me and just given him a little bit of insight into my golf career so far.' McCarty, who won the PGA Tour's Black Desert Championship last fall in Utah, was a Phoenix Open standard-bearer, a volunteer who follows a group of players on the course and displays their scores on a sign for spectators, as a junior golfer, too. He recalled Ken Duke, who currently plays on PGA Tour Champions, making an impression. 'A lot of guys are locked in out there, but I remember he was kind of talking to us walking down the fairways and stuff, and I thought that was a really cool experience,' McCarty said. Every once in a while, being a standard bearer inspires a kid to chase the dream of making it to the pro ranks. It panned out for Korn Ferry Tour pros Jimmy Stanger and Nick Gabrelcik, who both worked the practice range and as standard bearers at the Valspar Championship. And it's not lost on Capan and McCarty that it wasn't long ago that they were the star-struck kids on the other side of the ropes living and dying with every autograph they got. 'I'm not crazy far removed from wanting golf balls and gloves and whatever,' McCarty said. 'Just to have fun and kind of interact with the crowd this week is kind of a good goal for me.'
