Chen holds 3-shot China Open lead despite bogey

The bulked-up fall portion (11 events) of the 2019-20 PGA TOUR season ends this week at Sea Island Resort in Georgia. The RSM Classic features two courses, along with 156 players, each one determined to go into the holiday break on a high note. Several pros, including tournament host Davis Love III, live in the area, so maybe their local knowledge will pay off this week. RELATED: Tee times |  Power Rankings | Daily fantasy preview THE FLYOVER Instead of focusing on one hole as we usually do, here’s a look at the renovated Plantation course overseen by Davis Love III. “We feel like this is a historic resort and it needs a historic-looking course,â€� Love told our Sean Martin for this story. LANDING ZONE At 368 yards, the eighth hole is the shortest par 4 on the Seaside Course. Not surprising, it’s also the easiest, playing to a stroke average of 3.842 last year. It’s too long for most players to drive the green, although Sam Burns’ tee shot in the first round last year finished on the far side of the green, a 380-yard bomb. Players must decide whether to lay up short or carry the bunkers guarding both sides of the fairway. Here’s a look at where all tee shots landed last year. WEATHER CHECK From PGA TOUR meteorologist Stewart Williams: “High pressure will continue to dominate the Southeast’s weather over the next few days with a gradual warming trend. Temperatures will return to the low-70s by Friday and mid-70s on Saturday. A fast-moving cold front will likely bring showers towards midnight Saturday night that will linger into early Sunday morning before pushing off. Mostly sunny skies and cooler temperatures will return Sunday into Monday with highs in the low to mid 60s.â€� For the latest weather news from St. Simons Island, Georgia, check out PGATOUR.COM’s Weather Hub. SOUND CHECK It’s all on you, it’s all on the player. Golf is never about one competitor versus another and it never will be. It’s against the player versus himself and versus the golf course.â€� BY THE NUMBERS 769 – Number of PGA TOUR starts (including this week) by tournament host Davis Love III. That’s fourth most all-time, behind Mark Brooks (803), Jay Haas (799) and Dave Eichelberger (784). 9 – Starts by Love at his RSM Classic. His best finish is a T4 in 2012. 559 – Number of PGA TOUR starts (including this week) by defending champ Charles Howell III. He enters this week with 1,916 rounds played on TOUR. 63 –Number of players who have ranked No. 1 in points in the history of the FedExCup. Brandon Todd is the most recent after winning last week’s Mayakoba Golf Classic to move into No. 1 in points. Scattershots Sea Island connections: Besides Davis Love III, here are some of the other TOUR pros who live in the area: Patton Kizzire, Zach Johnson, Matt Kuchar, Jonathan Byrd, Harris English, Brian Harman, J.T. Poston, Hudson Swafford, Josh Teater, Keith Mitchell and Michael Thompson. Perfect attendance: Six players have played in each of the first nine RSM Classics – Davis Love III, Charles Howell III, Chris Kirk, Chad Campbell, Zach Johnson and Brendon de Jonge. That number will drop to five after this week, as de Jonge is not in the field. Back-to-back: The last six players to win back-to-back starts on the PGA TOUR – Billy Horschel (2014), Adam Scott (2016), Jason Day (2017), Justin Thomas (2017), Bryson DeChambeau (2018) and now Brendon Todd. Of those six, Todd is the only one to do it in the fall portion of the TOUR’s schedule. Hot Harris: Harris English owns a TOUR-best four top-10s in 2019-20, most recently finishing fifth at the Mayakoba Golf Classic, and sits No. 13 in the FedExCup standings. Harris enters this week having posted all 20 of his rounds this season at par or better.

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ORLANDO – What happened to Graeme McDowell? This is a question that McDowell, 39, has gone to great lengths to try to answer, and is still trying to answer in real time. Mr. Everything in 2010, when he won the U.S. Open, the decisive point for Europe in the Ryder Cup, and two events on the European Tour, he has accrued just one top-10 finish in his last 47 PGA TOUR starts. His T10 at the 2017 Shriners Hospitals for Children seems like a long time ago, and a highlight unworthy of his talent. “I think people would look at me the last four or five years and say that I’ve got caught up in other things and lost my focus on what I’m doing,â€� McDowell told the PGA TOUR recently. “Is that true or false? Did I get married and have children? Yeah. Did that take my focus off what I was doing? Maybe.â€� And yet here is McDowell again, trying to dig himself out, as he put it after carding a 4-under 68 in the first round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard. He was T3 after the first round, his best start since the 2015 World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational (now WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational), when he shot 66 and went on to finish T17. McDowell is scheduled to tee off Friday at 1:19 p.m. ET. It’s been a busy week so far. D.A. Points and Francesco Molinari each aced the par-3 seventh hole. There were 94 balls hit in the water in round one, the most of any round at Bay Hill since 2003. Phil Mickelson tried to hit a right-handed shot through a mesh fence, and failed. Still, the longest accounting of this Arnold Palmer Invitational was McDowell’s two-plus-page transcript after the first round. The recipient of the 2014 ASAP Sports/Jim Murray Award for accommodating the media, he’s always been one of the game’s great talkers. “Interesting to see a lot of Europeans playing well here,â€� he said, presciently. He was talking about Spain’s Rafa Cabrera Bello, who fired an opening 65, but, in a way, also predicting the second-round surge of England’s Tommy Fleetwood (66, 9-under total), who shot into the lead. “It’s a real fairway-and-green golf course,â€� McDowell added. “The rough’s very penal this week, and the greens are very firm.â€� Every course has seemed penal for McDowell of late, and true to form, he has owned up to it, for he is not only verbose, he is candid. (Somewhere there’s a television career out there with his name on it.) Thursday brought more gems from G-Mac, who has lived at nearby Lake Nona since shortly after his runner-up at the 2005 API. He laughed about a complication of sleeping in your own bed during a tournament: trying to get the kids to go to sleep. “It’s literally just life,â€� he said of his slow fade over last five years or so. “Life. Life just got in the way. Mostly the family stuff, and I don’t think I ever sat back and rested on my laurels and thought I was — I just, my practice changed. The time that I was giving to the game changed and I was less effective in what I was doing. It snuck up on me. “It sort of happened before I realize it had happened,â€� he added. How many golfers are that self-reflective? How many athletes? How many people? Still, there are all sorts of reasons to be excited if you’re McDowell, who is playing out of the 125-150 category from last season’s FedExCup. He’s twice finished runner-up at Bay Hill, including 2012, when he shot a 9-under 63 in the second round and earned a final-round pairing with Tiger Woods. (McDowell finished second to Woods, five back.) And he’s playing better than his results indicate at 117th in the FedExCup and 259th in the world. Also, the U.S. Open will return to Pebble Beach, site of his 2010 victory. (He’s already in the field thanks to his 10-year exemption.) And The Open Championship will be held near his boyhood home at Royal Portrush, Northern Ireland. He’s not in that field, but could earn a spot as the API is now part of the Open Qualifying Series; the top three finishers in the top 10 not otherwise qualified will earn spots in the field. McDowell only found this out Tuesday. He doesn’t want to obsess, so he’s trying not to think about it. “It’s hard to do because I want it really badly,â€� he said. “I want to be back up there competing with these guys and I do feel like I have some good stuff in me. But I’ve had to ask myself some pretty hard questions the last couple years. Thankfully, I’ve came to the conclusion that if it was all gone, I would miss it. So, you know what, let’s try and enjoy it while it’s here. “It’s an opportunity,â€� he added. “It’s not an opportunity to beat my head against the wall, it’s an opportunity to try and dig myself out of a hole and look at that challenge as something to be enjoyed, and it’s going to be very rewarding when I do get out of it.â€�

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JACKSON, Miss. – Sahith Theegala had qualified for his first Open Championship appearance, The 150th Open at St. Andrews, as a PGA TOUR rookie. He earned a spot at the Home of Golf as an alternate via the Official World Golf Ranking (No. 62 at the time), a remarkable rise considering he was a year removed from zero status on either the PGA TOUR or Korn Ferry Tour. St. Andrews is largely defined by its robust bunkering; a hole can be endlessly strategized based on wind direction, firmness, club selection and other factors. Theegala is a chess enthusiast; he freely shares his chess.com username (it’s srtheegala) and gladly accepts challenges. So when he and caddie Carl Smith mapped out their strategy for St. Andrews, the comparison was inevitable. “I’ve joked all year with Carl, ‘It’s chess, not checkers,’” Theegala laughed in advance of this week’s Sanderson Farms Championship. “We were out at St. Andrews plotting the bunkers, ‘It’s chess, not checkers, Carl.’” Theegala has long applied the “chess, not checkers” mindset in his rise through the golf ranks. After suffering a wrist injury as a senior at Pepperdine in fall 2018, he returned for a fifth year. The following season, without an opportunity to compete at Q-School due to the COVID-19 pandemic-induced combined season, he went about earning enough non-member FedExCup Points to qualify for the 2021 Korn Ferry Tour Finals, in which he earned his first TOUR card. Theegala qualified for last month’s TOUR Championship as a first-year PGA TOUR member, his season kick-started by a T8 at the Sanderson Farms Championship, where he led through 54 holes at the Country Club of Jackson. He cooled down in a final-round 71 to finish three back of winner Sam Burns, but the golf world was put on notice. Playing out of the Korn Ferry Tour graduate category, Theegala needed that top-10 in Mississippi just to earn a spot in the following week’s Shriners Children’s Open. Now by virtue of his top-30 finish on the 2022 FedExCup, he’s fully exempt for the next two seasons on TOUR. Theegala returns to the Country Club of Jackson as a second-year TOUR member and with the second-best odds to win, behind only Burns. He recalls looking at his tournament odds early last season and seeing, “I was near last out of every field.” Now the public expects him to break through any week. Rather than shying away from the expectations, he’s relishing them. “Max Homa just talked about it at the Fortinet (Championship), being the odds-on favorite there … in previous years, he said he would use that as extra pressure. Now he’s taking it head-on and being like, ‘Dang, that’s cool that I’m the favorite of the tournament. Let’s go get this thing done,’” Theegala said. “That’s pretty cool to see. It’s cool to know (my odds) are up there. “Golf is such a crazy game; it’s just a hard game. There are very few times in golf where you’re truly happy. Trying to strive toward accomplishing stuff that maybe personally I didn’t think was possible a few years ago, now I do think is possible. The constant drive to get better; I do feel a little bit of that is almost an intangible, inherent love for the game … There’s something over getting the next hurdle that’s just so satisfying.” In his first year as a TOUR member, Theegala was close. After his near-miss at the Sanderson Farms Championship, he played his way into another 54-hole lead at the WM Phoenix Open, long known as one of the TOUR’s most stadium-like settings. Looking back, he describes it as “playing in front of 10 million people.” With several family and friends in attendance, he attempted to drive the green on the short par-4 17th but pulled it slightly left, the ball finding a greenside pond. He made bogey, followed by a closing par to finish one back of a Scottie Scheffler-Patrick Cantlay playoff. He was devastated but reflects on the experience as a season highlight nonetheless. “It was crazy how many people were there,” Theegala said. “That’s going to be a memory that I’m never going to forget. Still hurts. It’s going to hurt. People have said, ‘Oh, if you ever win … “No. It’s still going to hurt, no matter what. But it was such a special week. Really kept me going for the rest of the year.” He finished fifth at the Memorial presented by Workday and was runner-up at the Travelers Championship, making double bogey on the 72nd hole at TPC River Highlands to finish two back of Xander Schauffele. But the lanky, oft-smiling California native has kept fighting. He rebounded from an opening 74 at the following week’s John Deere Classic to finish T16, and he made the cut at The Open en route to a T34. He added two more top-15s to close his first TOUR season, and he arrives in Mississippi fresh off a T6 at the 2022-23 season-opening Fortinet Championship. Theegala didn’t watch much of last week’s Presidents Cup, aside from a bit of Sunday Singles. He understands the noise that he was a popular candidate for a captain’s pick, but he doesn’t believe he earned a spot on the team. That sentiment – believing he didn’t earn his spot – fuels him. He’ll have more chances to represent the U.S. Team. He’ll take the long view. “The energy was incredible,” Theegala said of the Presidents Cup. “I love how the guys are so into it. I’ve never played on any (U.S.) team .. I didn’t play on a junior golf (national) team or the Walker Cup, so I have a little chip on my shoulder. I wasn’t good enough to make those, so I might as well try to make one in the future. “I love to use anything as fuel to the fire, so I think the reason I didn’t watch the first couple days, using it as more fuel. I don’t think I earned my way onto the team at all, and I wasn’t close on points or anything like that, but it’s definitely something I’ll use as motivation moving forward.” Chess, not checkers.

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