2017 Travelers Championship, Round 3: Leaderboard, tee times, TV schedule

In temperatures that dipped to 45 degrees and winds of up to 34 mph, J.B. Holmes grinds out a 1-under 70 in the final round for a one-shot win over fellow Kentuckian Justin Thomas at the Genesis Open. Welcome to the Monday Finish, where Holmes made crucial par saves on 13 and 16, enjoyed his career-best putting week, and picked up his fifth PGA TOUR win. FIVE OBSERVATIONS 1. Kentucky won J.B. Holmes is from Campbellsville, Justin Thomas from Louisville.  One way or the other, the Bluegrass State was going to win. It’s just that it always looked like it would be Thomas, who took a four-shot lead into the final round. “Yeah, it was great being able to go out and play with him and battle it out,â€� said Holmes, who at the end of a 34-hole slog Sunday and played a steadier back nine (36) while Thomas struggled (38). “He’s such a great player, so it was fun being out there, talking and just battling it out.â€� Holmes recalls playing golf with Thomas for the first time when Thomas was 12 or 13.  “It was in Kentucky and I knew he had a chance,â€� Holmes said. “At that age, you’ve still got a lot of stuff to go through, but he was definitely a talent and I thought he would get out here and he’s done that and some.â€� Thomas remembers being “7 or 8 or 9â€� when Holmes first pulled him inside the ropes at the PGA Championship. “I just never thought, you know, 15 years later he would beat my ass at Riviera,â€� Thomas said. “That was a bummer.â€� 2. Hard work paid off You’d never have thought so in watching him play at the Genesis, but on the season Holmes had just one top-10 finish, a 9th at the season-opening Safeway Open.  The reason: Shoddy work on the greens. “Really bad putting is an understatement the last few weeks,â€� he said.  Buckling down with his coach, Matt Killen, Holmes went to work at Riviera. “We spent a lot of time this week with the coach and getting on the green and trying to find the right ball position and how it set up and putting through some gates, making sure I was starting the ball online,â€� Holmes said. “I putted for several hours throughout the week. In the morning, we changed our routine and we had a string and a mirror and just made sure that everything was dialed in, and then I could trust it and go out there and make confident strokes.â€� None were bigger than his 12-foot par save at the 13th hole (while Thomas was four-putting) and 11-foot save at the 16th. 3. Wind frustrated Thomas It has not been a Chamber of Commerce West Coast Swing, what with the rainy final round at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, plus the delays at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Genesis. The challenging conditions got the better of Thomas on the final day at Riviera. “I really struggled putting in that wind out there,â€� he said. “It’s something that I’ve needed to get better at and it unfortunately just kind of showed a flaw in my game.â€� There was a lot that stood out between the four-putt double-bogey on 13, and the three-putts at 10 and 14, but Thomas was still irritated by one mistake in particular. He tried to jam his third putt on 13 into the back of the cup, and the ball took a hard lip-out. “I’ve got to stop going that,â€� he said. “That’s not the speed that I hit putts at when I’m putting well.â€�    4. Woods spoke for many Tournament host Tiger Woods had an outside chance to finally win at Riviera, but after he got to 10-under he bogeyed four of his last 10 holes to take himself out of it. “Yeah, I got tired,â€� he said after a week full of interruptions and early alarms and freezing-cold hands. “I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I definitely felt it today. Wind, cold. I was at 10 and I slipped four shots coming in. That’s the way it goes.â€� The good news was he saw far more good shots come off his clubs than he did at Riviera last year, and he now heads to the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship for his first TOUR start in Mexico. 5. Riviera was brutal It was cold. Wet. And windy. How hard was it? Jordan Spieth shot 81, failing to break 80 for just the third time in his PGA TOUR career after a round that included a double-, triple- and quadruple-bogey. No one went bogey-free in the third round, and only two people (Vaughn Taylor, 67; Carlos Ortiz, 69) did so in the fourth. And Justin Thomas had a four-putt and two three-putts in a span of five holes. “It’s hard to tell you how extreme it is,â€� said Adam Scott (76). At the fact that Scott, Thomas and Holmes were playing 34 holes in a single day after another pre-dawn wake-up call and Sunday became a battle of endurance and will power.    FIVE INSIGHTS 1. Holmes has never been hotter with the putter He was first in Stokes Gained: Putting at +2.043 per round, which was statistically the best performance of his career. He ranked +1.727 in finishing T4 at the 2015 BMW Championship and +1.727 in winning the 2006 Waste Management Phoenix Open. Coming into the Genesis, Holmes was languishing at 202nd in SG: Putting, but worked hard and saw it pay off. Of his total Strokes Gained at the Genesis, 54 percent came on the greens. 2. The winner also crushed the par-3s Holmes was 6-under on the par-3s, including an ace, four birdies, and 11 pars. That was his best score to par on the par-3s in any single tournament in his career, and the best by a Genesis winner at Riviera. No par was bigger than his sand save from the bunker at the par-3 16th on Sunday, with playing partner Thomas looking at a likely birdie. 3. Thomas still statistically a closer Justin Thomas became the first player since Paul Casey at the 2018 Travelers Championship to take at least a four-shot lead into the final round and not win. Still, Thomas, who has four top-5 finishes in six starts this season, is still a better-than-average 6-for-9 at converting with at least a share of the 54-hole lead. He’s 5-for-9 at converting with at least a share of the 36-hole lead.  4. McIlroy (69, T4) stumbled at the start Without his A game, Rory McIlroy notched his third straight top-5 finish. You could fault his failure to birdie the par-5 17th and his bogey on 18 in the final round, but the bigger culprit was his slow start to the week, a slugging, 1-over 72. Of the top 24 finishers at the Genesis, only Dustin Johnson (opening 73, T9) and Xander Schauffele (opening 74, T15) started worse.  5. Woods (72, T15) neared a weird personal record Tiger Woods had three eagles, which was just one shy of his career best set at the 1996 Shriners Hospitals for Children Open (a five-round tournament) and 2010 Masters Tournament. The other good news was that this marked his seventh top-15 finish in 13 starts at the Genesis. The bad news was he made four late bogeys in the challenging conditions, and the Genesis remains the only tournament where he has double-digit starts and hasn’t won. WYNDHAM REWARDS The Wyndham Rewards Top 10 is in its first season and adds another layer of excitement to the FedExCup Regular Season. The top 10 players at the end of the FedExCup Regular Season will earn bonus payouts from the Wyndham Rewards Top 10. There was another flip-flop at the top after the Genesis Open, with Xander Schauffele and Matt Kuchar changing places yet again. In battling through extreme cold and gusting winds, Genesis champion J.B. Holmes was the week’s biggest mover, going from 61st to 9th. 

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SAN DIEGO - Marc Leishman wasn’t one to spend time on the range as he was growing up - and who could blame him. In those days you had to pick up your own range balls at Warrnambool Golf Club. Instead, he would use the course proper as his practice facility, challenging his mates to contests on each hole. Warrnambool is a coastal town in Victoria, Australia, a little over three hours drive from Melbourne. The course was rarely full, which allowed a group of youngsters to spend a bunch of time on each hole without slowing pace of play. "It might take us three hours to play nine holes - not holding people up - but we forever came up with things to do," Leishman recalls. "We put ourselves behind trees, or in divots, or tough bunker lies – really in all sorts of spots where we had to use our imagination. We had a lot of fun." Imagination. It's a word used less and less in modern golf. The art of golf is - at times - being bludgeoned by the science. In the past, the likes of Seve Ballesteros would wow the masses with his creativity from all over the course. In more modern times, Bubba Watson has shaped the ball in ridiculous ways. But now the game is skewed towards the athletic prowess and strength of a player and brute force can get you to places never seen before. We have players like Bryson DeChambeau following the science of the swing and of the body and calculating all sorts of variables around every shot to chase perfection. We have technology and stats measuring everything. Gadgets and gizmos a plenty, whozits and whatsits galore. Science has indeed taken the sport to incredible new heights. But science isn't everyone's best subject. Leishman has always been an artist. The joy in his golf comes from shaping the ball both ways or hitting it high or low on demand. He craves hard and fast courses and thrives in the wind. He loves being able to hit the same club across a wide yardage range and gets juiced up when the opportunity to paint a picture surfaces in his game. "That’s when I play my best golf - when I have to use my imagination. Augusta requires a lot of it, the British Open requires a lot of it and it’s what makes golf fun for me," Leishman says. I would call myself an old school pro. The game is an artistic game for me, and I love when you have to control it on the ground and through the air and you really have to think. It is a style that has seen him win five times on the PGA TOUR including last year at the Farmers Insurance Open where he defends this week at Torrey Pines. In the final round a year ago, Leishman couldn't buy a fairway. He was 70th in the field for Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee losing -1.235 to the field. But he invented ways to get himself to the greens regardless of the inaccuracy and gained +4.778 strokes putting as he made 151 feet, four inches worth or putts. Not long after Leishman was runner up at the Arnold Palmer Invitational Presented by Mastercard, an event he won in 2017. Then he opened THE PLAYERS Championship with a 5-under 67, his career best first round at TPC Sawgrass where his scoring average is a not so impressive 72.25. At seventh in the FedExCup, he was rolling along nicely. Of course, we all know what happened to the world next. But Leishman had no clue the COVID-19 pandemic would derail his form so significantly. Not many players - if any - spiraled like he did after the extended pandemic break. In his six regular season starts upon return, Leishman missed three cuts and posted a T40 as his best result. His early season form kept him in the duration of the three FedExCup Playoffs but he was a virtual passenger. Leishman missed the cut at THE NORTHERN TRUST. He then shot 80-78-79-73 (+30) in the no-cut BMW Championship (another tournament he's won before) to be dead last, nine shots worse than second last and 34 shots behind winner Jon Rahm. In the TOUR Championship he was 29th of 30 players. His start to the 2020-21 season wasn't much better as the now 37-year-old missed the cut at the U.S. Open followed by a T52 and T70 at the limited field CJ CUP @ SHADOW CREEK and ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP @ SHERWOOD. It wasn't pretty. So, what happened? It was a bunch of factors but at its core - Leishman got bogged down studying science and got frustrated with his art not making it to a gallery. "Having a big rest over the pandemic break was good for me to be with family but for my golf game it wasn’t so good for me," Leishman explains to PGATOUR.COM. “Normally on weeks off I don’t play at all, so I virtually have never played golf with no crowds. It’s either in a tournament or in a practice round at a tournament so that was very new to me. Even when I play golf back home in Warrnambool there are people watching me so returning without fans was weird. I really struggled with energy." The energy he refers to is the competitive instinct of the artist who loves to entertain and who thrives on an internal underdog factor. Leishman long went unheralded by the American public who confused him with other golfers and even when his profile rose, and he was grouped with big name stars, Leishman's nationality usually meant he'd be fighting for the majority of support. It was fuel for him. "When you’re struggling with crowds around it can still be fun because if there are 50 people watching and you hit a shot from the trees you can kind of entertain or show off your skills a little bit," Leishman says. "It gets you engaged even if you’re going to miss the cut – you think these people might remember this if I pull it off. But I was in the trees a lot last year and you can’t even show off when no one is there. "As an artistic player, when you start drawing dodgy pictures with your shots, which I was doing, you start to think about it too much and I started getting technical. I started thinking science and that's never good for me. I was looking in the wrong places for solutions." Now, it's not like Leishman hadn't had some tough weeks in his career before. But in normal circumstances, time with coach Denis McDade would quickly fix any swing issues. Problem was McDade is based in Australia and the pandemic made travel to the U.S. very difficult indeed. Sure Leishman could have looked for a local coach but he's a fiercely loyal type of guy. He's had the same coach and same caddie since he burst on to the PGA TOUR and was Rookie of the Year in 2009. McDade is loyal also. Despite plenty of roadblocks he made his way to the U.S. in late October last year and hooked up with Leishman in Los Angeles during the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP. After watching the opening two rounds intently, he had the answer. "It was huge for him to come over and a massive commitment from him," Leishman says. "He has a family back home, but he was over here for six weeks and he got home and had to spend two weeks mandatory quarantine in a hotel room where you don’t get given a room key. He missed his birthday and his wedding anniversary during quarantine, so I am really appreciative and want to thank him. "In the end it wasn't really my swing at all. It was the way I was getting into the ball - I was standing too far away from it," Leishman reveals. "I was being technical on the tee; I was doing drills in the tournaments before every tee shot which I had never done before, and it was getting me too far away from the ball and my weight too far on the toes. When my weight is on the toes my balance is bad and I miss it right and left and it’s just a disaster – I was in a hiding to nothing. "So, it was something really simple and that's where it’s really good that I’ve been with Denis for 18 years. He knows my tendencies and he saw it straight away. If I had gone to someone else or jumped ship with him not being able to come over, a new coach may or may not be able to see that." The results were near instant. In his next start at The Masters, Leishman was T13, hitting the ball better than most of the field but only falling behind on the greens. Two weeks ago at the Sony Open in Hawaii, he finished T4, his first top 10 since the pandemic break. Now he gets another crack at Torrey Pines where he has a win, two runner ups and two further top 10s in his portfolio. Look out. The artist is back.

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PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson simply peaked too early. Their best moments came in the days leading up to the first round of THE PLAYERS Championship. Their strong performances in the interview room didn’t carry over to the first tee, unfortunately. They traded barbs in their pre-tournament press conferences but didn’t trade birdies in the first round at TPC Sawgrass. On a day when low scores were plentiful at the Stadium Course, no one in the first round’s premiere pairing broke par. Mickelson shot 79, while Woods was the threesome’s low man after an even-par 72. Rickie Fowler shot 74. The trio of former PLAYERS champions was 9 over par on a day when the scoring average was 72.0. With his focus squarely on Sunday’s result, Woods said he wasn’t thinking about beating his playing partners. Everyone else was, though. Even if it was a Thursday, there were high hopes for the sort of mano-a-mano showdown that was a rarity during their primes. Both players had been playing well enough to make that seem feasible. Mickelson had won earlier this year and was coming off a fifth-place finish at last week’s Wells Fargo Championship. Woods is showing his best form in five years after fusion surgery. Woods saw the plethora of low scores before he teed off Thursday at TPC Sawgrass. Red numbers seemed easy to come by on a hot day that allowed the ball to fly far and made the Stadium Course play short. “We had to go out there and tear this place apart,� Woods said. He couldn’t, but plenty of players did. He will start Friday six shots behind the half-dozen players who shot 66: Webb Simpson, Dustin Johnson, Alex Noren, Chesson Hadley, Matt Kuchar and Patrick Cantlay. In light of the struggles from this star-studded threesome, it may have been Mickelson’s attire that made the biggest news. He played Thursday in a button-down shirt similar to the one he wore during his Masters practice round with Woods. “I think nobody does kind of slightly overweight middle-aged guy better than me, and this says exactly who I am,� Mickelson said. But fans were hoping Woods and Mickelson could turn back the clock. This was their first time playing together in four years. The last time they played at the Stadium Course, it was one of the most historic days in the tournament’s history. They were paired in 2001’s third round, when Woods produced the “Better Than Most� putt. Previous generations were treated to memorable showdowns between the top players. Arnie and Jack were forever linked after Oakmont. Nicklaus and Watson had the Duel In The Sun. The Hall of Fame careers of Woods and Mickelson overlapped for decades, but there weren’t many memorable meetings. They were often paired on opposite ends of the draw on the weekdays and Woods was simply too dominant on the weekends. “If you grew up in my generation, that was the closest thing I ever saw in a rivalry in golf, but we didn’t see that pairing often,� said Charles Howell III. Time has leveled the playing field between Woods and Mickelson, though. Age has introduced a warmer relationship between the two longtime competitors. There is a mutual admiration instead of an obsession with beating the other. There was the post-victory hug at the Presidents Cup and their pre-Masters practice round, two events that once seemed as likely as airborne swine. The prelude to THE PLAYERS Championship was a more jocular version of the pre-fight banter between two heavyweights. Mickelson recommended a high-stakes match between the them, sending golf fans’ imaginations into hyperdrive. “Now, I don’t know if he wants a piece of me,� Mickelson joked. Woods silenced Mickelson with a quick reference to the history books. But they stung like butterflies and floated like bees once they stepped into the ring at the Stadium Course on Thursday afternoon. There were momentary highlights, but they were quickly erased by Pete Dye’s penal course. Woods made eagle at the ninth hole to return to even par with the easier back nine ahead. He could only manage two birdies and two bogeys on that side, though. Mickelson was even par after birdies at 11 and 12, but he played Nos. 14-17 in 7 over par after rinsing shots at both 16 and 17. Fowler was even par when he joined Mickelson by hitting into the pond surrounding the island green. “I was worried about energy this week, and I just kind of ran out at the end,� Mickelson said. Woods, Mickelson and Fowler should have even easier conditions when they tee off at 8:27 a.m. Friday morning, but it’s likely too late for Mickelson, who needs a minor miracle just to make the cut. Woods will start the second round on the cut line and will need a low number to enter the weekend in contention. This was Mickelson’s third-highest score in 81 rounds at TPC Sawgrass. He shot a final-round 82 in 1999, then opened the 2000 PLAYERS with an 83. He shot a third-round 78 in last year’s PLAYERS. He only beat two players Thursday. The Woods-Mickelson matchup must wait for another week.

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