The final round of the PGA Tour season suddenly has tons of intrigue.
Rory McIlroy shot a scintillating 63 Saturday at East Lake. Adam Scott and Ludvig Aberg carded matching 65s from the same group. The leaderboard got real bunched, real quick, leaving 12 of the event’s 29 players within six shots of the lead.
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One of them is your 54-hole leader, Victor Hovland, who is looking to join McIlroy, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson as multi-time Tour Championship winners. Hovland carded a 65 of his own, and seemed mighty pleased with himself and his one-shot lead at 15 under. It helps when you’re leading the field in putting.
“I’d say the last few weeks I have been putting a lot better, but it’s been hard to put together consistently good days in a row,” Hovland said Saturday. “I mean, that’s kind of how putting is. You can putt great one day, and the next one, putt not so great. Yeah, it’s been just one of those weeks where I’ve been able to put it together every single day for three days. So that’s really cool.”
It sure is. Not always so cool on the greens is the best player in the world, Scottie Scheffler, who sits just three back. Scheffler hit 14 of 18 greens Saturday, but is 18th out of 29 in putting, which he considers a result of tricky pins and finding himself with cross-grain, cross-slope putts.
“A lot of these pins, they put on a lot of grain changes, so you can have 10- to 12-footers with multiple grain changes,” Scheffler said. “It’s challenging to hole putts. I’ll just keep giving myself the looks, and hopefully they’ll drop tomorrow.”
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McIlroy hooped a bunch of putts Saturday, including a torrid finish of 17-, 16- and 12-foot birdies on 15, 16 and 17. East Lake seems as gettable as it has ever been, with all players shooting under par during Thursday’s first round. But going extra low, like McIlroy did Saturday, only really has felt attainable by one or two players each round. McIlroy, five back, thinks it may take another 63 to leapfrog the rest of the field.
“I would say, if I were to go out tomorrow and shoot the same score as I did today, I’d say that would have a very, very good chance.”
If you ask McIlroy, the Player of the Year race has already been decided, in Scheffler’s favor, but Chris Gotterup could win for a Tour-leading fourth time Sunday. The New Jersey-native shot his second-straight 67 and sits at 12 under, just three back.
Gotterup was asked an interesting question Saturday evening. He suggested that Sunday will require some player to go out and make birdies to win, but also not over-pursue. There’s too much trouble surrounding the greens that bogey can reach up and grab you.
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But how do you do that, he was asked. How do you make birdies without being overly aggressive?
“Don’t be an idiot basically,” he said. “If I don’t have it, don’t push it, but when I can push it, push it.
“I feel like this golf course, you get some holes where you can push it, and there’s some where — to I think his question you were asking him before about — you’ve just got to hit it to 20 feet and take your medicine and move on. Maybe tomorrow come towards the end if I need to push it, I’ll push it, but we’ll see when that time comes.”
It sounds like a bit of a NASCAR race, the way Gotterup puts it. Everyone will have the same number of laps to make a push, and on certain turns they’ll have to flip it into high gear. And on other turns, when it gets tight, they may need to idle a bit and take what’s given to them.
Or, as he stated so perfectly, just not be an idiot.
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