The corn fields adjacent to John Deere headquarters in Silvis, Illinois, typically are knee-high by the 4th of July. That’s how Webb Simpson remembers them as he returns to this northwestern corner of the Land of Lincoln for the first time in a dozen years to play at TPC Deere Run in the PGA Tour’s John Deere Classic, which is celebrating its 50th edition.
Simpson, winner of the 2012 U.S. Open among his seven Tour titles, is back in America’s Heartland to pay a debt of gratitude to longtime tournament director Clair Peterson, who is retiring this year, and gave him a sponsor’s exemption in 2008.
“I was elated because there’s so many uncertainties when you turn pro as a young player,” said Simpson, who graduate from Wake Forest that summer. “You don’t know which tour you’re going to be playing on, if any tour.”
The John Deere Classic grew in meaning to Simpson when he returned to the Quad Cities to compete a year later as a rookie and proposed to his wife, Dowd, the mother of his five children, the night before the final round.
“She knew the question was coming in the next few months, so I thought I’m going to get her when she least expects it,” he said. “Decided right by the river’s a beautiful area, I can take her to dinner, I can surprise her.”
Simpson’s caddie secured the ring and he dropped to one knee on a dock along the Mississippi River, which divides Bettencourt and Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois.
“I was more nervous about dropping it than her saying yes,” said Simpson, who claimed to be 99 percent sure she would say yes.
Fast forward to March at the Valspar Championship and Simpson told Peterson to count him in for his farewell tournament. With the pre-tournament withdrawal of Daniel Berger due to injury, Simpson, at No. 58 in the Official World Golf Ranking, represents the highest-ranked player in the field, but he downplayed any talk that he should be the favorite.
“A hundred guys could win this week,” Simpson said. “Just because the field isn’t as strong as other weeks it’s still going to take a really low number(to win).”
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With the tournament going up against the second event of LIV Golf, the upstart league that has wooed the likes of Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and former JDC champion Bryson DeChambeau, and scheduled between the U.S. Open and British Open, Peterson knew his event would be a…
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