Jimmy Walker started his PGA Tour rise at the Frys.com Open
Last fall Jimmy Walker started his rise to prominence.
He hopes playing in the autumn of the PGA Tour's calendar this year will yield similar results to stay his ascending course.
Walker was winless in 187 starts in eight years when he played last year's Frys.com Open, the kickoff for the Tour's inaugural wraparound season.
But trailing by three entering the final round, Walker shot 66 to win by two.
He cracked the top 50 in the world ranking for the first time with his maiden triumph, earned his first invitation to the Masters (where he tied for eighth) and rode the wave of confidence to victories in the Sony Open in Hawaii and the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in the next four months.
He also stood atop the FedExCup standings for 30 consecutive weeks and made his debut in the Ryder Cup, where he scored 2.5 points for the U.S. two weeks ago in the loss to Europe.
"It's always nice to start quickly and play well," Walker said this week ahead of the Frys.com Open at the Silverado Resort & Spa's North Course in Napa, Calif., where he'll make his first title defense as the 2014-15 season begins. "I couldn't have scripted it any better the first couple months of the season.
"It would be nice to do that again, obviously."
That's also on the minds of the other 143 players in the field this week.
While some of the game's biggest names shut their games down this time of the year, others look at this portion as a possible opening to bigger things.
Last year, four the six winners during the fall qualified for The Tour Championship by Coca-Cola, with the two others nearly made it to East Lake Golf Club.
In all, 25 of the 29 players in The Tour Championship played at least one event of the fall swing.
So despite less than a week's of "rest and detox," he said, Walker is back on the course less than a month after the last Tour season ended, hoping to tap into the adrenaline flowing through him during the Ryder Cup and rekindle last season's good fortunes.
"Nothing has really changed for me as far as going about doing things that I do, golf, how I do it, how I practice," Walker said. "I feel like I've got a good formula going, but I'm always continuing to try to get better, and looking at the stats for last year, where can I improve, what can we do, as far as that goes.
"I'm still always trying to keep the pedal down and look down the road."
CHIP-INS: With a 66 and a birdie on the second hole of an eight-man playoff on Monday, Jarrod Lyle, following a two-year battle against leukemia for the second time in his life, qualified for the Frys.com Open.
Lyle, 33, left the PGA Tour in March 2012 when he was diagnosed with leukemia, the same cancer he had fought as a teenager. He last played a Tour event at the February 2012 OHL Mayakoba Classic in Mexico. He returned to competitive play in November 2013, making the cut at the Australian Masters at Royal Melbourne. He said his health is fine.
"I'm just going to take a penicillin tablet every day for the rest of my life, and that's just precautionary type thing," he said. "But in terms of treatment, there's nothing. I've just got to have obviously regular blood tests and things."
Lyle, who played four Web.com Tour events in 2014, has 20 starts to earn $283,825 to extend his medical exemption for the rest of 2014-15. His last appearance on the PGA Tour came at the 2012 OHL Classic at Mayakoba.
"I've been working really hard on my golf game and getting back into good shape, and to come out and achieve my first goal this week, which was to Monday qualify, it's got the year off to a really, really good start," he said. …
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