AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Round 2: Leaderboard, tee times, TV times

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – This season started with Kevin Tway becoming a first-time winner in his 91st career start on the PGA TOUR. Since then, we’ve had Matt Kuchar ending his drought after 116 starts, followed the next week by Charles Howell III winning for the first time in 333 starts and nearly 12 years. Last week, Rickie Fowler returned to the winner’s circle for the first time in nearly two years. That brings us to 29-year-old Tony Finau. Since his lone win in a playoff against Steve Marino at the 2016 Puerto Rico Open, he’s made 78 TOUR starts. He’s come close several times to that elusive second win – four runner-up finishes, including a playoff loss last fall to Xander Schauffele at the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions. He’s posted 20 top-10 finishes since his breakthrough win, and last season was the highest-ranked player in the FedExCup standings without a victory. He’s given himself opportunities. He’s made noise in the big events (three top-10 finishes in majors last season). He’s shown the ability to handle pressure; his opening tee shot at last year’s Ryder Cup still resonates as a defining moment, as does his 2-1-0 match record in Paris – one of just four Americans over .500 in an otherwise losing effort. “I played well on a big stage,� Finau said – and he hopes to do so again in December at the Presidents Cup in Australia. He’s among the biggest hitters on TOUR, his putting made a big leap in improvement last season, he’s easy-going and seems ultra-steady and calm inside the ropes. At the Masters last year, he even showed super-human recuperating powers, overcoming a dislocated left ankle while celebrating an ace in the Par-3 Contest to finish T-10. There’s a lot to like about Finau’s game, his demeanor and his future success. In this season of drought-busting, Finau would seem to be next on the list – perhaps starting with the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Even if it doesn’t happen this week, Finau is confident it will happen soon. “I’ve gotten a lot better every year and in every part of my game,� he said Wednesday. “And if that trend continues, then I know I’m going to win some golf tournaments. “That’s all I can do is try and get better, and my coach and I have worked on a lot of great things over the past few seasons and the progress has been continuous. And in the process of getting better, I’ve had some nice results. “That’s all I’m trying to do is continue to get better, and I’ve done that these last few seasons. If I continue to do that, then I know some wins will be on my resume this year.� Not a win. Some wins. That’s the expectation level that Finau asks of himself, and that’s probably an accurate assessment of what the golf world also expects of him. But it’s not easy. Fowler showed that last week at TPC Scottsdale. A five-shot lead disappeared in two holes, starting at the 11th when Fowler ran his third shot through the green and into the water, then suffered an additional penalty shot when his placed ball on the downslope rolled back into the water while he was on surveying his line on the green. He would go on to card a triple bogey, and then bogeyed the next hole, eventually falling one shot behind Branden Grace. Fowler managed to shake off the two-hole disaster and regain the lead to win for the fifth time on TOUR. Finau, who missed the cut last week – just his second missed cut in his last 24 worldwide starts – was an interested observer of how Fowler persevered. “To be able to finish in the fashion he did after basically something tragic in the middle of your tournament happens. … That’s a tough pill to swallow for anybody,� Finau said. “I feel like mentally I’m pretty strong when I play. And Rickie’s the same way, and he showed his true colors.� Finau led by three shots after 54 holes in Shanghai last October and shot a respectable 71 on the final day, only to be caught by Schauffele, who made an unlikely birdie at the 71st hole, then won the playoff with another birdie. Since then, Finau worked with swing coach Boyd Summerhays on a higher swing plane in hopes of avoiding the flat swing that sometimes got him in trouble. He called it a minor adjustment, but with additional practice time, he finally committed to it in the off-season. The results were immediate – a runner-up finish to Jon Rahm at the 18-man Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. “Someone being my height,� said the 6-foot-4 Finau, “I think it’s a lot better to swing up and down more so than around you.� But more than the physical work for Finau, it’s the mental approach he wants to improve on the most. His off-season wasn’t spent so much on pounding balls each day but working on the proper mindset to turn those second-place finishes into wins. “Getting my mindset right and seeing what I can learn from,� he said. He thinks he’s on the right track, but validity will come only with a big trophy. “I look forward to the season,� he said. “I think it’s one that I carry a lot of momentum from last season.� Rain is in the forecast for the final three days this week at Pebble Beach. That should make the courses play longer, giving Finau and the other big hitters in the field an even larger advantage. Wet and favorable conditions – seems like a good week to end a drought.

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Tiger Woods will be at Albany Golf Course as tournament host for this week’s Hero World Challenge and will address media on Tuesday morning. Woods will speak to a broader group of media in the Bahamas at 9 a.m. ET, the first time he will have held a press conference since being involved in a single-car accident last February. Woods suffered extensive damage to his legs in the accident, including multiple fractures, leaving his playing future in doubt, however the 82-time PGA TOUR winner has taken to rehabilitation like the many previous occasions in his life. And with vigor. He set the golf world alight on Nov. 21 with a quick three-second video post of his swing with the caption “making progress.” It led to speculation Woods might be trying to get fit for the PNC Championship (Dec. 16-19) in Orlando where major champions team up with a member of their family in a team format. Tiger and his son Charlie competed in the event in 2020 for the first time and finished seventh. It was the last event Woods played before the accident, and he underwent back surgery soon after. In recent weeks friends such as fellow TOUR player Justin Thomas have given insight into Woods’ condition. The underlying theme has always been one of downplay, yet one of hope. “I know that he’s going to try,” Thomas said of a comeback on the No Laying Up podcast. “I don’t see him ever playing if he can’t play well. He doesn’t strike me as a guy who’s played at home and he’s shooting a bunch of 75s and 76s, and he’s like, ‘OK, I’m going to give Augusta a try this year.’ That’s not really going to be him, at least from my understanding, what I know of him. “He knows that there’s a pretty good chance that that was the last chance he really ever had, before that, of making another run, but at the same time, I know how determined he is and I know he’s going to want to at least try to give something again. “Obviously I hope he does. But at the same time, as I said after the accident, as long as he can be a dad and be normal with that again, that’s the number one priority, and the rest of this is a bonus.”

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ATLANTA — For the second day in a row, no one had a better score than Jon Rahm at the TOUR Championship. That’s just what he needed to make up ground on Patrick Cantlay going into a weekend chase for the FedExCup. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Jordan Spieth reveals that couple is expecting first child Rahm birdied his last three holes Friday for a 5-under 65. Cantlay birdied his last two holes for a bogey-free 66 to keep one shot ahead. It’s not quite a two-man race for the FedExCup with 36 holes still to play at East Lake, though it was shaping up as a possibility. Bryson DeChambeau was the next closest player, and his 67 lost ground Friday. He was six shots behind. “We definitely feed off each other,” Rahm said. “And that’s probably why you see the difference in the scoreboard right now.” Cantlay looked as though he was protecting a lead, often playing to the fat of the green. That was more a product of showing respect to an East Lake course that punishes even slight misses on the wrong side of the hole. He hit 16 of 18 greens, and only twice did he have par putts from about the 5-foot range. “I’m playing really well, and I think I’m playing the golf course the right way,” Cantlay said. Cantlay started the TOUR Championship at 10-under par because he was the No. 1 seed in the FedExCup. Rahm began four shots back. Asked if the idea was to chip away at the lead, Rahm replied, “What other strategy is there?” “As soon as we teed off, that didn’t matter,” he said of the four-shot deficit. “There’s a lot of golf to be played, even now.” The reason for Cantlay’s pre-tournament advantage was because of last week at Caves Valley. Cantlay and Rahm played in the final threesome, along with DeChambeau, going into the weekend at the BMW Championship. Cantlay finished 66-66 and won in a playoff. Rahm closed with 70-70 and tied for ninth, dropping to the No. 4 seed. That now seems long ago. The TOUR Championship, to a degree, feels normal now. Cantlay was at 17 under. He and Rahm will be in the final group again. DeChambeau had more work to do, as did Justin Thomas, who made two bogeys and failed to birdie the par-5 18th in his round of 67. He was seven behind. “A place like this, there’s not really a lead that’s safe with how tough it it can play,” Thomas said. “But at the end of the day, I can’t worry about what the other guys are doing. I just have to go out and try to make some birdies and stop making mistakes.” Harris English made his share of mistakes with five bogeys in his round of 69, leaving him in the large group at 9 under. So did Jordan Spieth. He was going for his fourth straight birdie to get right in the mix, facing a 10-foot putt on the 13th hole. He three-putted, lost momentum and shot a 67. Spieth, Rory McIlroy (66) and Louis Oosthuizen (67) were at 8 under. Gone are the low scores from the opening FedExCup Playoff events, at rain-soaked Liberty Natitonal and Caves Valley, where players at each course had a putt at 59. The best anyone has managed at East Lake, still slightly soft from rain and a light breeze, had been a 65. So it’s tougher for players to make up a lot of ground unless the leaders come back, and there has been little indication Cantlay and Rahm are going to do that. Cantlay had plenty of looks at birdie, and didn’t hear many calls of “Patty Ice” because not many of those putts were going in. He got up-and-down from a bunker on the par-5 sixth. His wedge into the 13th spun back to an inch of the cup. Rahm holed a 35-foot putt from off the green at the 13th, gave it back with a bad drive to the right on the next hole, and then closed the gap to one shot with a 10-foot birdie on the 16th. The final two holes felt like a duel, even for a lazy Friday afternoon. Rahm poured in a 25-foot birdie putt on the 17th, and Cantlay matched his birdie from 15 feet, the first time he had made a putt longer than 5 feet all day. On the closing hole, Rahm blasted out of the front bunker to tap-in range. Cantlay chipped down the slope and with the grain — one of the few times he was out of position — and watched it trail off 8 feet from the hole. He made that to regain the lead. “When you have somebody like him who played a round with very few mistakes — you could argue that it could have been a lot lower — it only motivates me to keep doing a little bit better,” Rahm said. “Even though I want to focus on myself, you know he’s not going to let up and he keeps putting it in the fairway and on the green and in the fairway and on the green. “It can raise your playing level a little bit,” he said, “as well as me raising his level when I’m making birdies.”

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