Chicago Recap: Stingers fail to flourish at Bolingbrook; Grace suffers relegation
BOLINGBROOK, Illinois – Stinger GC arrived at Bolingbrook Golf Club in search of much greater consistency after a hit-or-miss season but they ended their week at LIV Golf Chicago in a very disappointing 13th place.
Branden Grace was their best player in the final round, closing with a 2-under 68 that included four birdies and two bogeys and earned him a tie for 34th on the individual leaderboard at 2-over.
However, it was not good enough to lift him out of the Drop Zone. Regular LIV Golf team members placed 49th or lower in the final points standings suffer relegation out of the league and Grace, at 51st, was among them.
Stingers captain Louis Oosthuizen signed off with a 69 in the final event of the regular season while Dean Burmester carded a 73 and Charl Schwartzel returned a 74. That gave the all-South African combination a cumulative score for the round of 4-over, and a 6-over total for the week.
All in all, very frustrating for a team who have hit the high points this year, along with the lows. In their 13 LIV Golf starts during the 2024 regular season, they have clinched four podium finishes while also producing six results of ninth or worse.
Their best performance was a runner-up spot in Adelaide, where they were beaten in a playoff for the title by Ripper GC, while their lowest moment came in Las Vegas, where they struggled in surprisingly cold temperatures before finishing 12th out of 13.
"I don't know why we have been so up-and-down," Oosthuizen, who finished sixth in LIV Golf's season-long Individual Championship, said of his team's roller-coaster form this year. "It just seems like the four of us either play really well or we pick the same day to not play well. If you look at the other teams, they have two guys playing really well and the other guy playing average. I don't think we do that.
"Either all four of us are firing on all cylinders or we have that day where we come and you're like, 'Man, we were the Stinkers today, not the Stingers, because we couldn't get it going.' Hopefully next year as a team we are, scoring-wise, a little bit better."
Oosthuizen had made an erratic start to his week at Bolingbrook, opening with a 69 and then struggling to a 73 on day two. However, he bounced back from that quickly on Sunday with three birdies in his first eight holes. When he rolled in a five-footer to birdie the par-3 13th, that got him to 3-under for the day and 1-under for the tournament.
Oosthuizen then parred the next seven holes before bogeying the third and fourth en route to a 69 that earned him a share of 30th place at 1-over. Grace finished one stroke back in a tie for 34th while Burmester and Schwartzel were joint 42nd at 4-over.
The Stingers are currently seventh in the season-long standings and they will consequently be seeded seventh at the September 20-22 Team Championship in Dallas where they will bid for their first team victory of the year.
They will look to improve on memories of last year's Team Championship in Miami where Burmester and Grace both ended the 2023 season by firing sparkling 5-under 67s at Trump National Doral to earn the Stingers fifth place.