IVINS, Utah — Keep an eye on Frankie Capan III this week at the Bank of Utah Championship. He plays his best golf, it appears, when he struggles to keep his eye on the ball.
Capan birdied three of his last five holes Thursday for an opening five-under 66 at Black Desert Resort, just a stroke behind early clubhouse leaders Thorbjorn Oleson, David Lipsky and Jesper Svensson. The Minnesota native collected eight birdies against three bogeys despite a severe infection in his right eye that landed him in the hospital on the eve of the tournament.
Advertisement
“I’ve actually played with worse, but, yeah, this was a pretty good round with the adversity I’ve sort of had this week,” Capan (pronounced SAP-in) said casually, still wearing the Oakley shades he purchased yesterday after spending nearly five hours at Intermountain Health St. George Regional Hospital.
Ranked 137th in the FedEx Cup fall standings and in desperate need of a strong finish to his rookie season, Capan noticed redness in his eye late last week and simply assumed he might have contracted pink eye, which he began to treat with eye drops. He traveled to Wisconsin over the weekend for his grandfather’s 90th birthday, but his eye condition deteriorated. A physician in Wisconsin diagnosed him with cellulitis and prescribed an antibiotic and new eye drops. He struggled through a Monday pro-am, but his eyes grew increasingly sensitive to light due to the new round of treatments.
RELATED: PGA Tour winner reveals the random, and heavy, object in his bag he makes his caddie carry
“I’m left-eye dominant, so I actually practiced a few shots on Tuesday with my [right] eye closed to see if I could play that way,” he admitted. “My eye was so puffy that it was almost shut anyway. It looked disgusting.”
Advertisement
Fearing he would have to withdraw, he went to the hospital Wednesday morning and underwent several tests and a CT scan. It turns out that he had contracted a staph infection, which required a stronger antibiotic, Azithromycin, and steroid eye drops.
/content/dam/images/golfdigest/fullset/2025/10/frankie-capan-utah.png
He teed off at 9:23 a.m. mountain time Thursday with his eye still blurry and light sensitive. He had never played a round of golf with sunglasses. A few times, depending on his position on the course, he had to back off a shot because the sun was hitting the right side of his face and getting to the corner of his eye. On the reachable par-5 ninth hole, his final hole of the day, he had to hit 3-wood off the tee because the glare emanating off the top of his driver was blinding him. He laid up and birdied it after a wedge to three-and-a-half feet.
“I was kind of thinking, ‘this might be bad,’ but I ended up feeling good enough to try,” said Capan, 25, who is coming off his first individual top-10 of the year at the Sanderson Farms Championship. (He finished third in the Zurich Classic team event with Jake Knapp.) “It wasn’t fun. But with how I was feeling today and how I feel like I’ve been hitting it and rolling it, I figured I could get it around. Thankfully it was a good day. We played really well.”
Advertisement
Capan hit 15 greens in regulation and made nearly 115 feet of putts, which ranked second among players in the morning wave.
Strangely coincidental, Capan has dealt with vision problems before—and flourished. In the 2024 Veritex Bank Championship, Capan set the Korn Ferry Tour scoring record with a first-round 13-under 58 at Texas Rangers Golf Club in Arlington, Texas. In the process, he also broke the course record held by Scottie Scheffler.
He played most of that round dealing with blurry vision. Weird.
RELATED: Here’s the prize money payout for each player at the Bank of Utah Championship
As for competing despite more challenging maladies, Capan said he once won a tournament in Japan with a hip injury that made a clicking sound at the top of his backswing. “I think I took eight months off after that,” he said. Another time he teed it up two days after tearing the labrum in his right shoulder. He got through it with “a lot of ibuprofen.”
Advertisement
Ranked 236th in the world, Capan brushed off the latest adversity with a shrug.
“I’ve played with all sorts of crap going on,” he said. “I used to play football, so I’m used to some aches and pains. I played with Hogan [Hatten, of the Detroit Lions] all the time. I mean those boys deal with a lot worse. So I can handle a little bit of blurriness.”
Apparently, he can more than handle it.
