Berger holds off St. Jude field from clubhouse

Welcome to this week’s edition of Numbers To Know, where we’ll take a look at the best stats from the week that was at the Travelers Championship. Dustin Johnson won his 21st PGA TOUR title and won for the 13th consecutive season. Let’s get started. 1. GREAT SINCE ’08: Johnson won his first PGA TOUR title at the 2008 Turning Stone Resort Championship. This week’s win tied him with Tiger Woods for the most on TOUR since 2008. They have three more wins than Rory McIlroy, who’s the only other player with more than 15 victories in that span. 2. END THE DROUGHT: The win was Johnson’s first since last year’s World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship, ending a 490-day winless drought. That matched the longest drought of Johnson’s career. He’s had only three victory droughts that lasted longer than a year. 3. GOIN’ LOW: Johnson’s score of 19-under 261 at TPC River Highlands tied the lowest 72-hole score of his career. It included a career-best 61 in the third round. After opening with a 1-under 69, Johnson shot 64-61 in the second and third rounds to earn a spot in the final group. His 194 score for 54 holes also was the lowest of his career. A final-round 67 gave him a one-stroke victory over Kevin Streelman. Johnson was in 79th place after the first round. That’s the worst first-round position by a winner in more than a year. Graeme McDowell was in 81st place after the first round of the 2019 Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship. Johnson had never been worse than 28th after the first round of any of his wins. 4. TEE BALL: Johnson achieved another milestone of sorts. Fourteen of his 21 victories have come in events where all four rounds were measured by ShotLink. This was the first time he won while losing strokes off the tee. He’s averaged 4.8 strokes gained from the tee in those 14 wins, and has led the field in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee in half of those 14 wins. This was just the third time he’s ranked outside the top 10 in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee in a victory. Johnson hit just half his fairways Sunday, including an out-of-bounds tee shot at the par-5 13th. “I wasn’t driving it good, wasn’t driving it really good all day, but I was hitting my irons well, and I felt like all week I’ve hit my irons really good,” Johnson said after the win. He finished the week ranked 47th in fairways hit (35 of 56, 63%) and 27th in driving distance (294.4 yards). He hit 12 of 14 fairways in his third-round 61, but hit just 23 of 42 (55%) the rest of the week. Johnson has ranked inside the top five in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee in each of the previous six seasons, but is 13th this season. He was either first or second in that statistic in every season from 2015-18. 5. FOUR!: A player of Johnson’s length is usually known for dominating the par-5s, but that wasn’t the case this week. He played TPC River Highlands’ two par-5s in just 2 under par for the week, ranking 47th in par-5 scoring average. As Johnson said, his iron play was strong. He ranked sixth in Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green (+6.01). His good approach play was shown by his strong play on the par-4s. He led the field in par-4 scoring average (3.7) and birdies or better on par-4s (18). He made birdie or better on par-4s a field-leading 37.5% of the time.

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NAPA, Calif. – World No. 1 Jon Rahm will head into the Ryder Cup after missing only his second PGA TOUR cut of 2021 at the Fortinet Championship at Silverado. After settling for a par at the par-5 18th hole, where his drive sailed into the right fairway bunker, he gave his ball and glove to a cluster of boys on the way to sign his card after an atypically flat performance. Although his pre-tournament odds to win were the likes of which no one had seen since Tiger Woods in 2013, Rahm came down with a stomach ailment early in the week, missed the pro-am Wednesday, and never got it going at Silverado on either Thursday (72) or Friday (71). “It’s very simple: not my best ball-striking-wise,” he said. “Still wasn’t bad. Could have been better on the greens, you know. Feel like I might have made a couple of mistakes mentally on some approach shots, maybe I could have focused a little more, visualized better, but I think I left a lot of shots on the greens.” Rahm hit just 11 of 26 fairways over two rounds at tree-lined Silverado. He also struggled on the greens with 30 putts on Thursday and 27 on Friday, throwing his head back in anguish several times. It was Rahm’s first missed cut since the Wells Fargo Championship in May, his only failure to make the weekend in a season that saw him capture his first major title at the U.S. Open. The Fortinet marks the opening week of the 2021-22 wraparound season. “It’s unfortunate to start the year with basically one of my worst TOUR rounds in a while,” he said. “It’s what it is. Course was tough out there today and just need to be better.” Rahm’s rare off week came two weeks after he finished second to Patrick Cantlay at the TOUR Championship at East Lake, and one week before the Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits. After coming to Napa with his wife and son, Rahm said he didn’t sleep well Monday night and wasn’t feeling great during his nine-hole practice round Tuesday. Then his stomach ailment knocked him for a loop, and he missed the Wednesday pro-am as he rested in bed. “Just a little run down from the season,” he said. “That’s my best guess. Maybe having a little bit too much good rich food Monday and Tuesday just did it for my stomach.” It was the latest development in a topsy turvy 2021. Rahm led by six shot at the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday but was forced to withdraw after the third round after testing positive for COVID. He also missed the Olympics in Tokyo after testing positive. He was asymptomatic both times, and wonders if he might have edged Cantlay for Player of the Year without those setbacks. At the Fortinet, he said, he felt much worse. Then his usual dominant game went missing. “Well, I’ve got two more days off,” he said. “I think it’s primarily rest. I just, you know, I feel like with having those stomach issues early, I wasn’t nearly as rested as I could have been, my body got a little bit tight, but I’m feeling good today. It was a tough course out there. “If anything,” he continued, “I get to rest a couple extra days and be able to figure out what’s going on with my swing, which technically is not really anything bad. It’s just I think a lot of those swings were made to look worse because of how tough it is out there. It’s firm, it’s fast, the fairways are hard to hit.”

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What will happen on the final day of the Presidents Cup? We keep an eye on every match to see how it all ends.

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