Woodland aims to hold off big names in pursuit of first major championship

NAPA, Calif. — Justin Lower weathered the wind and birdied the 18th hole Saturday to take a one-shot lead into the final round of the season-opening Fortinet Championship. Lower shot a 3-under 69 to get to 13 under at Silverado Resort & Spa, with his fifth birdie of the round giving him his first career 54-hole lead in his 29th start on the PGA TOUR. He’s looking for his first TOUR victory. Defending champion Max Homa and Danny Willett were a shot back after even-par 72s. Byeong Hun An had a 71 to get to 11 under. While several players who went out early in the day posted low scores in good playing conditions, the course got much harder late in the day when the wind picked up to wreak havoc on the players. Willett took several minutes on the eighth green clearing off blowing leaves just before making a birdie putt that put him briefly in the lead at 13 under. Workers with leaf blowers came out on the next hole to keep the green clean but Willett made a double-bogey 7 after his approach shot flew past the green. There were few birdie chances available with players happy with pars late in the day. That led to a very condensed leaderboard with eight players within three shots of the lead headed into Sunday. An moved into a one-shot lead when he hit a solid tee shot on the par-3 15th came and then made a birdie from about 6 feet to get to 13 under. But he gave it back and more with a double bogey in the par-5 16th when his second shot got caught near the root of a tree. That opened the door for Lower, who put his second shot on the par-5 18th just off the green and then made the short birdie putt. It’s been quite a few weeks for Lower, who appeared to lose his TOUR card after three-putting the final hole of the Wyndham Championship for a bogey when he only needed a par to remain in he top 125. Lower found his way back into the top 125 and is taking advantage of it in the first tournament of the new season. Conditions aren’t expected to be much better in the final round, which has already been altered by an ominous forecast with rain and wind. The leaders will tee off several hours earlier than scheduled with the final round featuring threesomes off split tees. Davis Thompson and Harrison Endycott shot the low rounds of the day with 65s that left Harrison in a four-way tie for fifth place with Paul Haley II, Matt Kuchar and Adam Svensson. Endycott was a stroke behind in a four-way tie for ninth. Endycott the first player out on the course and played as a single in his first career tournament make the cut with a birdie on the the final hole of the second round. He overcame a broken driver early in that round and was happy to have all of his clubs available Saturday. “Definitely helps when you’ve got a driver in the bag after yesterday’s shenanigans with the cracked driver face,” he said. “This golf course is tough hitting 3-wood everywhere. So it was nice to get freed up, played some good golf today.” Haley, who had gone 3,315 days between appearances on the TOUR from the 2013 Wyndham Championship and the start of this tournament, was tied with Thompson in the group at 10 under after a 66.

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This week is the 10th anniversary of Jordan Spieth’s first start on the PGA TOUR, the AT&T Byron Nelson in his hometown of Dallas. Here’s a look back at PGATOUR.COM’s coverage of that week in 2010 at TPC Four Seasons Resort as Spieth entered Sunday in contention as a 16-year-old amateur RELATED: Read 16-year-old Spieth’s letter to the AT&T Byron Nelson requesting a sponsor exemption in 2010 Setup HE’S JUST 16, BUT SPIETH IS THINKING BIG THIS WEEK Jordan Spieth knows the odds are against him winning this week’s Byron Nelson Championship. After all, he’s an amateur playing in his first PGA TOUR event on a sponsor’s exemption. Oh, and he’s also just 16 years old. But while the rest of us expect this week’s champion to be someone, er, older, the reigning U.S. Junior Amateur Champion is not about to dismiss the notion completely. “Nobody that’s here enters a tournament if they don’t think they can win — at least in their own minds think they can win,” Spieth said Tuesday from the TPC Four Seasons at Las Colinas. “Obviously I know the percentage chances of me winning an event like this right now. “But anything can happen.” The reality, of course, is that Spieth will be quite happy if he can simply make the cut and play on the weekend. Another Dallas product, Justin Leonard, did it as an amateur playing on a sponsor’s exemption in 1993 when he finished tied for 56th. Leonard, though, was a college player at Texas and about to turn 21. Spieth doesn’t turn 17 for two more months and is still a junior in high school at Dallas’ Jesuit College Preparatory School. He’s slated to graduate next year. “Making the cut would be something special in itself,” said Spieth, the youngest amateur given a sponsor’s exemption at the HP Byron Nelson and the first in 15 years. “But obviously you try and get it going and see where that takes you. It’s all about momentum out here. See where it goes.” Certainly, golf fans will be interested to see where Spieth’s career goes. He’s currently No. 1 in the American Junior Golf Association’s Polo Rankings and claimed the U.S. Junior Amateur title last year after reaching the semifinals as a 15-year-old in 2008. If you’re looking for the next big thing in golf, maybe Spieth is the kid you should watch. Just ask the locals who know all about him — Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, who’s ranked No. 1 in Golf Digest’s top athlete golfers, stays in contact with Spieth and recently played a few holes with him in South Carolina. But even with expectations rising with every swing, Spieth appears to be well-grounded, his demeanor calm. That’s the approach he plans to take this week on a course he’s played many times and a tournament he’s attended as a fan since he was 5 years old. “You’ve got to think of it as another tournament,” he said. “Obviously with what we’re doing here and all the interviews and cameras and the big guys out there, all the manufacturers, it’s quite a bit different than anything I’ve ever seen before. “But once you get on the course, if you’re just thinking you’ve got a 7-iron in your hand, you’ve got to think of it as something you’re hitting on a driving range, a shot that you’ve hit thousands of times and not make it bigger than it needs to be.” Make no mistake, though — this is big. It may not exactly be a coming-out party, but you can consider it an introduction. But before Spieth tees off Thursday afternoon with playing partners Blake Adams and David Lutterus, he has high school classes to attend on Wednesday morning in English, Spanish and Physics. If there’s any homework, he may not get to it until this weekend. Unless he makes the cut. Then it may take him a while longer. Making the cut A VERY SURREAL – AND HISTORIC – DAY So you’re 16 years, 9 months and 24 days old. Hundreds of your classmates have ditched high school to watch you achieve the improbable. Word spreads through the course and now others want to join the fun. You just might do this thing. You just might make the cut. You reach the final few holes and the decibel level rises. The gallery chants your name. One of your playing partners, one of the great untold stories of this tournament, is shooting lights-out and will eventually claim a share of the clubhouse lead. But this moment is for you. You’re the rock star. You’re the flavor of the day. And when it’s over, when you had made par at 18 (although you really should’ve rolled in the 9-footer for birdie) and you had sealed your spot for the weekend — the sixth youngest player to ever make the cut at a PGA TOUR event — things should have slowed down. Sorry, think again. There were autographs to sign. Everybody wanted to talk with you. Radio stations. Television stations. You climbed into the booth where Nick Faldo and Kelly Tilghman were waiting. That was pretty cool. After all, you watch Golf Channel all the time. “Sir Nick” — you call him by his knighted name; how cute — has a few majors in his pocket. Kinda nice to rub those elbows. You tape an interview with ESPN that will air on SportsCenter. Then time to entertain the golf media in the press room. They hang on your every word. You even crack a joke or two. They laugh. It’s all pretty amazing (especially the jaded reporters laughing part). “Almost surreal,” you say. Wrong. It is surreal. A day like this doesn’t come around often, when a 16-year-old turns a PGA TOUR event on its ear. No one expects Jordan Spieth to win this week’s Byron Nelson Championship — although Spieth himself isn’t ruling out the possibility — but no one will forget the buzz he produced on Friday when his 1-under 69 left him at 3 under for the tournament, safely inside the cutline. There were other players Friday who produced more fireworks. Cameron Beckman went out and tied the course record at TPC Four Seasons Resort, shooting 61 to grab a share of the second-round lead at 10 under. One of Spieth’s playing partners, Blake Adams, is also at 10 under after his impressive 64. Adams is the hardest-luck story you’ve ever heard, a former Nationwide Tour player whose battle against an inhumane succession of injuries — torn rotator cuffs, bulging disk, arthritis, broken ankle, broken fingers, bad hip, etc. — is a study in resiliency. Perhaps any other day, the spotlight would belong to him. Perhaps any other day, the loudest cheers would be in his name. “I kinda almost felt bad for Blake because everybody was screaming my name out there and he was tied for the lead,” Spieth said. “But you know, that’s him. He doesn’t mind, I’m sure.” Adams doesn’t mind because he knows the crowds — including hundreds of students at Jesuit College Preparatory School — came out to watch the Dallas teen. At 7:15 a.m. local time Friday, when Adams, Spieth and the third member of their group, David Lutterus, resumed their first round, roughly 200 people were in attendance. “I don’t think too many people would want to come out here to see me play at 7:15 in the morning,” Adams said, ‘but there was a lot of folks out there to watch him. “It was a great atmosphere.” Once the group finished their first round, Spieth shooting 2-under 68 with two birdies on his last three holes, they took a quick 30-minute break before starting their second round. One hole into the round, Speith mistakenly played out of turn, having forgotten that this was a new round and not just the continuation of the previous round. When his caddie informed him of the faux pas, Spieth quickly apologized to Lutterus. No harm done. It helped to have a couple of laid-back players — Adams lives in southern Georgia and Lutterus is an Australian currently living in Fort Worth — accompanying the high school junior on this two-day emotional journey. Spieth said he learned a lesson by watching the calm demeanor that Adams displayed while moving up the leaderboard. “The guys that I was playing with were great,” Spieth said. “Awesome guys.” Meanwhile, Spieth just kept firing at pins. He played with his usual aggressiveness and he didn’t seem unnerved at all on a course he’s played plenty of times. He got to 4 under at one point. Playing well, feeling the moment — it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to him. So what if the rest of the guys in the field are fighting for the cash, fighting for the livelihoods. They don’t have to take final exams in a couple of weeks. Besides, as you’ve said all week, anything can happen. “I don’t want to think of myself as the amateur out here,” Spieth said. “I want to think of myself as a contender.” Will reality set in at some point? Perhaps so. Perhaps Spieth will get a first-hand look at what Moving Day means on the PGA TOUR each Saturday. Perhaps he’ll make the mistake of reflecting on what has happened in the past two days and struggle with the enormity of the stir he’s created. If nothing else, though, he knows the last two days have been fun. And if he continues to handle the situation with the kind of steadfastness and maturity he’s displayed this week, it will continue to be fun. And as for the gallery members who cheered his every move, called out his name, turned TPC Four Seasons Resort into Friday Afternoon Lights? Spieth said it best — “really cool.” “It’s a new experience for me,” he added. “I could get used to it.” So could the rest of us. Final result THRILLS FOR US, VALUABLE LESSONS FOR SPIETH The word “surreal” has not been a regular part of the Spieth family vocabulary. But this week, that’s the most appropriate way to describe the thrill ride that 16-year-old Jordan Spieth gave the Byron Nelson Championship. “We’ve used the word ‘surreal’ about three times as much as we had cumulatively up until now,” said Spieth’s dad Shawn as he waited for his son to get out of the scorer’s trailer following his 2-over 72 that left him in a tie for 16th. Certainly the amount of attention that Jordan Spieth brought to this week’s event at the TPC Four Seasons Resort course went beyond the wildest expectations of anyone associated with the event. By becoming the sixth-youngest player to make the cut at a PGA TOUR event, Spieth became the story of the week, and golf fans in the area took notice. Spieth and playing partner Corey Pavin, the U.S. Ryder Cup captain, had the largest gallery of the day. The size of the crowd was, dare we say, Tigeresque. “I was walking to the fourth hole and it looked like there was a thousand people following him,” said eventual champion Jason Day, who was playing alongside Blake Adams. “I turned to Blake and said, ‘There are more people following that young amateur than us.'” Day, in fact, was glad to fly under the radar while the spotlight shined on the high school junior from Dallas. As for Spieth, it was a week unlike any other. The key will be to learn from all the pros he played with and benefit from the experience. “I definitely loved being able to learn from the guys I was playing with, and just on and off the course, seeing how they were approaching their pre-round routine and stuff,” Spieth said. “That was pretty neat to get that kind of experience.” Shawn Spieth knows once all the dust settles, once Jordan and the family get to reflect on what happens, that the reigning U.S. Junior Amateur gained some valuable lessons playing with Blake Adams, David Lutterus, Tom Pernice Jr. and Pavin this week. “He’ll look back and learn from playing with the guys he played with this week,” Shawn said. “Everybody he played with played at a slower pace, real calm — he knows he has to channel his energy that way to continue to get better and better.” In fact, Jordan said that was one of the issues in Sunday’s round. After shooting three rounds in the 60s, he struggled out of the gate Sunday, failing to get the quick start he needed to get the crowd revved up. With bogeys at the second and third holes, Spieth dropped to 4 under and eliminated any outside chance he had to contend. He bounced back with birdies later in the front nine but rode a rollercoaster on the back side with two birdies, two bogeys and a double bogey. “It’s all business out there,” Jordan said. “They (TOUR pros) remain neutral. They know that they can’t get too excited or too down on themselves. I did today. I got way too down on myself early, and then I got way too excited at some point in the round, too. It messed me up a little bit.” Still, the Spieth family will never forget the outpouring of support for Jordan, with people following his every move. They even broke out in a chant late in Jordan’s round. “It’s been great for our family,” said mother Chris Spieth. “Just a great experience.”

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