The 3M Open is the land of golfers looking for something.
Its place on the PGA Tour schedule heightens the urgency of the search process. Form, points, success, it’s all a near requirement in the second-to-last event of the regular season.
With a few notable exceptions — Tony Finau, Sam Burns, Chris Gotterup, to name a few — most golfers come to Blaine this week because it’s where they desperately hope to find whatever it is they’re in search of.
And some do.
Alex Noren was an example on Friday. The Swede battled injuries early in the year before returning to competition in May. The early results were positive, but he came to TPC Twin Cities having missed three of his last four cuts. He shot a 1-under round of 70 in the first round on Thursday that left him lapped by the field.
But something clicked in round 2. Noren captured a feeling of hitting in front of the ball, which created the sense of a lower ball flight he’d craved. The result was total control and a 9-under round of 63 that leaves him 10-under for the tournament, good for a tie for eighth.
“Today, I understand why I love golf so much,” Noren said. “It’s a fantastic sport, because it is tough. And then when you get it right, it’s lovely.”
Noren is four shots back of the current leader, Thorbjørn Olesen. He fired a 5-under round of 66 on Friday, not bad for a guy who hadn’t logged a top-30 finish since the second weekend in May. With a win, Olesen would be projected to move from No. 129 in the FedEx Cup standings all the way to No. 56, punching his ticket to the playoffs.
That’s the dream — find your game, get hot and save your season. It’s a formula that’s worked in Blaine in recent years for the likes of Cam Champ (2021 3M Open champ) and defending champion Jhonnatan Vegas.
Points matter, particularly at the moment. Jake Knapp is currently in second place, a stroke behind Olesen. If he stayed there, Knapp would move from No. 55 to No. 37 in the season-long standings. The top 50 at the end of the playoffs are locked into next year’s elevated events that come with guaranteed prize money and points.
Chris Kirk (who’s currently tied for fifth) and Emiliano Grillo (who’s tied for eighth) and both projected to move into the top 70 — the cutoff mark for who makes the playoffs — with their current positions on the leaderboard.
“You know, yeah, I definitely would like to make the playoffs, that’s kind of one of many goals at the start of the year,” Kirk said. “Hasn’t been my best year, for sure, but I feel like I’ve been playing some decent golf lately, so excited to have a chance this weekend.”
Not everyone does. Frankie Capan III is in that unfortunate collection of golfers who didn’t find what they were looking for this week in Minnesota. It would’ve been a tremendous story had the North Oaks’ product — who’s struggled on the course for months now — found some magic in his home state and turned the tide of his season.
Instead, Capan shot a 77 on Thursday, the worst score on the course, and withdrew later that evening due to a wrist injury.
He’s hovering around 150th in the standings with a driver that won’t cooperate off the tee and irons that are also doing him little favor. Capan was working on alignment this week ahead of the tournament — anything to get the game back on track. He was hopeful pre-tournament that he’d started to play better and results would soon follow.
The wait continues.
It’s a tough place to be as a pro golfer when you’re traveling across the country week after week, hoping your game will eventually join you at one of the destinations. It’s a position Max Homa knows all too well. Homa lost his PGA Tour card not once, but twice in his first two seasons on the top tour in men’s pro golf. In his second go around on the PGA Tour, he made the cut just twice in 17 starts.
Finally, Homa found his footing and eventually became one of the game’s stars, who won events and played for the U.S. in international events. But the last two seasons have served as another downturn on the rollercoaster. Homa currently sits outside the top 100 in points.
He has two top-20 finishes on the season. After missing the cut at The Players in March — the fourth of five straight missed cuts in that time, to go along with a handful of bottom-barrel finishes in no-cut events — Homa told PGATour.Com “The way I work, I feel like I deserve to be the best player in the world at some point.”
He nearly broke into tears in the conversation.
“I know that sounds crazy, but that’s how I approach each day, is to be the best at it,” Homa said, “and I’m going the complete opposite direction.”
Perhaps the worm is starting to turn for Homa, who logged a top-five finish at the John Deere Classic earlier this month and made another cut here in Blaine, where he enters the weekend in a tie for 24th, six shots off the lead.
Homa is armed with the security of being exempt on the PGA Tour through 2028 thanks to his past successes. Others aren’t so lucky.
If Capan’s fortunes don’t change either next week at the Wyndham Champion — which he’s currently a question mark to compete in depending on the status of his wrist, though he’s currently committed to play — or in the Tour’s fall events, he could very well be back on the Korn Ferry Tour next season, which he graduated from in 2024 after a third-place finish for the season.
That’s not a death sentence. After a rookie year that didn’t go as planned last summer, Pierceson Coody returned to the Korn Ferry Tour this year. He’s currently in sixth place on the feeder tour and in excellent shape to again be promoted to the PGA Tour next year.
With that promotion essentially secured, Coody feels freed up to play PGA Tour events when the opportunities arise, as one did this week.
He’s currently sitting in a tie for third place, and two good rounds away from his career changing for the better in an entirely unexpected way.
“I feel like I’m still early in my tour career and just trying to get the most out of my rounds, become the best player I can and kind of just see where that takes me over the next 10 to 20 years,” Coody said. “I feel like I have a lot to prove out here and I think that I have the game to do it, so excited for the weekend.”
That’s the funny thing about golf, a sport where everything can change at the drop of the hat, for better or worse. And you’re seemingly never too far from what you’re searching for — you just have to keep looking.
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