Vacation Watch: When Will The World’s Best Golfers Return To Action?

Golf’s short-lived offseason is almost fully upon us. When will the world’s best golfers be back in action?

Whether it was Rory McIlroy’s tear in the FedEx Cup to help salvage a major-less 2016, the thrilling Ryder Cup at Hazeltine or Hideki Matsuyama’s two-month romp through Australasia, there’s no doubt that this year’s post-major season was an all-timer.

Sadly, all must good things must come to an end. Unless you’re the type that can get the juices flowing by tuning into the Franklin Templeton Shootout (God, bless you), than the completion of last week’s Hero World Challenge/Tiger Woods Jamboree ushers in as close to a true offseason as one can have in the 365-day-a-year world golf circuit.

I’m intrigued to see how the pairing of Bryson DeChambeau and Lexi Thompson plays out down in Orlando this weekend and the Hong Kong Open has a few good names (Rose, Reed, etc.) but for all intents and purposes I’m ready for Kapalua to get here any day now. Good thing that day is coming in just a month on Jan. 5.

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Golf is an interesting sport in a lot of ways, one being an individual sport with each golfer free to play just about whenever or wherever he or she wants. Some are packing it in until as long as February or March, while others are only taking a few weeks off because they have no other choice. Perhaps Matsuyama will look to find a mini tour event to enter just to keep the good times rolling.

There are golfers who are pretty clear to the media what their offseason plans are or at least have developed a consistent schedule for fans to make educated guesses of where they’ll be next. Others are a little bit coy, waiting to feel out their schedule by the shape of their game and status on tour. Many just plain don’t know where they’ll be any further than a week in advance .

With all that in mind, I’ll give it my best effort to map out the offseasons for the world’s top 10 (and a couple of other notable names) based on what we know and/or have seen in the past.