Cantlay has one-shot lead into final round at BMW Championship

The reigning FedExCup champion and the only two-time winner of the TOUR’s season-long points race both confirmed their presence at the first two events of this season’s FedExCup Playoffs. Tiger Woods and Justin Thomas have committed to THE NORTHERN TRUST and Dell Technologies Championship. THE NORTHERN TRUST will be played Aug. 23-26 at Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, New Jersey, while the Dell Technologies Championship will make its annual return to TPC Boston on Aug. 31-Sept. 3. Thomas is second in the FedExCup thanks to two wins this season (CJ CUP @ NINE BRIDGES, The Honda Classic). He is trying to become the first back-to-back winner of the FedExCup. Woods, winner of the 2007 and 2009 FedExCup, will be making his first appearance in the Playoffs in five years. He won five times in 2013 before finishing second to Henrik Stenson in the final standings. Thomas won last year’s Dell Technologies Championship en route to taking home the FedExCup. “I’m really excited to get back,� said Thomas, who shot a final-round 66 at TPC Boston to finish three shots ahead of Jordan Spieth. “It’s a place that I liked when I first went there. … It’s a fun week. I love the city of Boston.� Woods won at TPC Boston in 2006, before the advent of the FedExCup Playoffs. He is 47th in this season’s FedExCup standings thanks to four top-10s in 12 starts. He is coming off a T6 at The Open Championship.

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Akshay Bhatia joined a short list - one that includes Jack Nicklaus - with his performance Thursday at the AT&T Pebble Pro-Am. Pebble Beach is known for its tiny greens but Bhatia hit all 18 of them in his first-round 64. He is the first player since 2008 to hit every green in a round at Pebble. RELATED: Full leaderboard "It was a good day," the 19-year-old said. He is just the seventh player since 1983 (when the TOUR started keeping hole-by-hole statistics) to hit all 18 greens in a round at Pebble Beach, including both the AT&T and the four U.S. Opens held at Pebble Beach in that span. A total of 10,303 PGA TOUR rounds have been played at Pebble Beach since 1983, meaning a player has hit all 18 greens just 0.07% of the time or once in every 1,472 rounds. Last season, Pebble Beach had the eighth-hardest greens to hit on TOUR (62.9%). Bhatia also gained more than three strokes on the greens, holing three putts from outside 15 feet. A recent switch from an arm-lock to a short putter paid off. "It's probably the first time I've ever putted this well," he said. The longest one he made was a 21-footer for birdie on his first hole of the day, the par-4 10th. He added birdies on 14 and 17 to make the turn in 3-under 33. Bhatia added birdies at Nos. 2 and 3 and 6-8. His last birdie came after a 207-yard dart to 3 feet on the eighth hole, which requires an approach over the cliffs to a tiny green. It was the most difficult hole Thursday, playing to a 4.23 average and allowing just five birdies. It helped that Bhatia was more concerned with his snack than the daunting approach. "I was peeling an orange and it was so bad that I was just thinking about the orange and my caddie goes, ‘OK, we got 207.' I said, ‘OK, I got to (hit),'" Bhatia said. "Just kind of hit-and-see kind of thing. It was a great birdie to steal there." He had no bogeys Thursday. Bhatia, 19, is making his fifth start of the season. He finished T9 at the Safeway Open, making him the youngest player to finish in the top-10 of a stroke-play event on TOUR since Justin Rose finished fourth at the 1998 Open Championship. Bhatia also part of another interesting note this week. His presence in the field means that Phil Mickelson has played the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am with players born in every decade from the 1920s to the 2000s.

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Collin Morikawa is finally getting a weekend off. After making his first 22 consecutive cuts as a pro, the second longest streak in the last 30 years (Tiger Woods, 25), the high-flying Morikawa came back to earth and will miss the weekend rounds at the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands. RELATED: Full leaderboard After shooting an opening-round 72, Morikawa could only manage one better Friday, finishing at 3 over for the tournament and well off the projected cut. “It was bound to happen at some point,” he said. “Who knows when that was going to be. But now I guess we’re going to stop talking about it and I can go and just go on to next week.” Morikawa said he will take a week off, then pick back up again for the two tournaments at Muirfield Village in Columbus, Ohio. Just two weeks ago Morikawa lost a playoff to Daniel Berger at the Charles Schwab Challenge, the first tournament back after a three-month hiatus on the PGA TOUR due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He faltered slightly with a final-round 74 and a T64 finish at the RBC Heritage, which he said led to his struggles at the Travelers, where “I just couldn’t get the ball in the hole.” Morikawa, 23, graduated from Cal Berkeley (Business Administration) in the spring of 2019, turned pro, and took off like a rocket. He was runner-up to friend Matthew Wolff at the 3M Open, finished T4 at the John Deere Classic, and won the Barracuda Championship. Along with Wolff and Puerto Rico Open winner Viktor Hovland, who is in contention at the Travelers, Morikawa is a key cog in of one of the most celebrated rookie classes in decades. He was 20th in the FedExCup and had climbed to 29th in the world heading into the Travelers. “I’m going to learn a lot from this week,” he said. “I missed the cut as an am at the Safeway Open in 2016, and I learned more then, in those two days, than I did in a lot of my events so far as a pro. I’m going to learn a lot from this week and just move forward.”

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