OWINGS MILLS, Md. – As Patrick Cantlay warmed up on the left side of the range at Caves Valley Golf Club ahead of the 2021 BMW Championship, his long-time instructor Jamie Mulligan watched him hit one wedge and gushed, “That’s it.”
Cantlay hit another ball and Mulligan offered the same response. Cantlay shot him a quizzical expression.
“I told him, ‘That’s our look. Stay in that bubble. Your pace is great, your club is in the perfect position and I love the way the ball has been coming off your putter,’ ” recalled Mulligan, who runs Virginia Golf Club in Long Beach, California, where Cantlay learned the game and is a member to this day.
If anyone should know if Cantlay was on the verge of arguably his greatest run of golf to date, it was Mulligan, who knew from the first time he set eyes on Cantlay as a kid that he was special.
What he did at the 2021 BMW Championship at Caves Valley Golf Club was nothing short of brilliant, shooting a total of 27-under for 72 holes — and 31 birdies for the week — and it still wasn’t enough to win in regulation. Cantlay would have to duel six holes in a sudden-death playoff with Bryson DeChambeau before he could drive off with his third trophy of the season.
Finally, Cantlay sank the decisive blow as his 18-foot birdie putt on No. 18 toppled in. There will be other thrilling duels to come at the BMW Championship, which is back at Caves Valley this year, but it’s hard to imagine a player will putt out of his mind the way Cantlay did for one remarkable tournament. Cantlay made more than 537 feet of putts for the week and gained 14.58 strokes on the field with his putting, the most strokes gained putting in a 72-hole event since tracking began on the Tour in 2004.
And yet the numbers almost don’t do it justice.
Asked if he could recall a similar performance from Cantlay with the short stick, Mulligan said, “I don’t think anybody’s ever putted that well.”
Four years later, Cantlay has returned to Caves Valley and he recently added a new putting coach to his team. Phil Kenyon, who has turned Scottie Scheffler’s lone weakness into a strength, has added Cantlay to his stable.
“I’ll do anything to make a few more putts,” Cantlay said during his pre-tournament press conference on Tuesday ahead of the BMW Championship. “Having somebody who’s an expert eye at that can only be helpful.”
Cantlay always has been an above-average putter but he’s steadily declined in Strokes Gained: Putting since that win here in 2021. In 2022, he ranked 28th in SGP, 47th the following year, 53rd in 2024 and entered the week at No. 78 this season, his worst performance since 2017-18.
Cantlay said it’s not unusual for he and his team to drill down at his game and ask, “Is there something else we can do to get a little better?”
Cantlay got off to a good start with Kenyon, finishing T-9 last week at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, his fourth top-10 finish of the season and improved to No. 19 in the FedEx Cup season-long standings. He’s poised to move on to East Lake for the Tour Championship next week but he knows it would behoove him to turn one solid week into a hot three-week run in order to make a good impression with U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley.
Cantlay played a nine-hole practice round with Bradley on Tuesday but said that they play together regularly back home in Florida and that it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
“It would be nice to go out the next two weeks and have some nice finishes and play well. After last week, I feel like I have some momentum going in the right direction, and I feel really good about the things I’m working on in my game,” he said.
It wouldn’t hurt if he were to shift into ‘Patty Ice’ mode again. Cantlay has been stuck on eight career wins on the PGA Tour since the 2022 BMW Championship. But it was here at Caves Valley that his fan support reached new heights when someone exclaimed, “Patty Ice is rad.”
Within two holes, Mulligan said, the gallery adopted the nickname, a twist on Matty Ice, the moniker of NFL quarterback Matt Ryan.
“I was surprised when I first heard it, and I kind of heard it on the weekend for the first time really that tournament. I think it had to do with me making all those putts. Some of them I even surprised myself with how many putts I was making,” Cantlay recalled.
If Cantlay can channel something resembling that 2021 BMW putting performance this week again, he’ll be a shoe-in for Bradley’s Ryder Cup team.
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