Officialsportsbetting.com Golf Betting Collin Morikawa pulls away for five-shot lead at Hero World Challenge

Collin Morikawa pulls away for five-shot lead at Hero World Challenge

NASSAU, Bahamas — Collin Morikawa chipped in for eagle and raced away from a 20-man field Saturday in the Hero World Challenge with an 8-under 64, building a five-shot lead and leaving him one round away from reaching No. 1 in the world. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Collin Morikawa could reach No. 1 in world ranking with Hero win | Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka hope to party like it’s 2019 Morikawa would stay at the top of the ranking for only a week based on the two-year rolling formula. Even so, only 24 other players have reached No. 1 since the ranking began in 1986. The guy who has stayed No. 1 the longest — Tiger Woods — watched much of it unfold from the broadcast booth and he saw a command performance. Morikawa had the first bogey-free round of the week at Albany Golf Club, only once coming close to a bogey on the back nine as his pursuers couldn’t keep up. Brooks Koepka fell back with a double bogey on the par-3 eighth hole and had two birdies the rest of the way. On this day, that allowed him to post a 69 and move into the final group. “Just keep doing what I’m doing, play good and hope for the best,” Koepka said. Morikawa was at 18-under 198 as he tries to win his second straight start. He is coming off a Sunday rally in Dubai to win the DP World Tour Championship. Not long after Morikawa finished the opening hole in the final group, a dozen or so spectators lingered behind and headed to the back of Albany’s practice range to watch someone who is not part of the 20-man field: Woods. He spent another day hitting balls, this time with a driver, fueling speculation that 10 months after his car crash that badly damaged his right leg, he might tee it up in two weeks at the PNC Championship with 12-year-old son Charlie. Tournament organizers are holding a spot in the field for him. Woods wasn’t quite ready to commit to that, and a return to the PGA TOUR remained just as uncertain as when he spoke to the media earlier in the week. “I can hit it,” he said in the NBC booth during the tournament. “It just doesn’t go very far.” Leaning on another joke, he said he’s not hitting it so short that “I can hear it land.” But he said he has a lot of work to do on his health, and playing against the best in golf remained a long way off. What he saw on the course from Morikawa must have looked familiar, not so much the power but the precision and methodical way the 24-year-old Californian carved up Albany. Also familiar was how the rest of the contenders peeled away. Bryson DeChambeau started the third round with a one-shot lead and that was gone quickly. He hit a spectator at the back of the green, a good break for him when it caromed back and rolled off a slope onto the putting surface about 15 feet. And then he three-putted for bogey. He shot 73 and now is eight shots behind. Sam Burns, who is ranked No. 2 in the FedExCup, made a big run with an eagle on the par-5 11th followed by four straight birdies to get within two shots of Morikawa. But he took bogey on the par-3 17th and finished his round with a double bogey for a 68 that left him six behind. Daniel Berger recovered from a lost ball and double bogey on the par-5 third hole by making two eagles, only to drop two shots on the last three holes, including a tee shot in the water hazard on the 18th. He had a 69, also six behind. They were joined in a tie for third with Viktor Hovland and Patrick Reed, who each had 67, and Tony Finau, who bogeyed two of his last three holes for a 70. Rory McIlroy, who began the holiday event with a share of the lead, never had a chance to get into contention after taking a quadruple-bogey 9 on the 11th hole. He had a 75. The only other round over par belonged to Jordan Spieth, playing for the first time since becoming a father. His ball moved on the 18th green and he forgot to replace it, leading to a two-shot penalty and a 75.

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Major Specials 2025
Type: To Win A Major 2025 - Status: OPEN
Scottie Scheffler+160
Bryson DeChambeau+350
Xander Schauffele+350
Ludvig Aberg+400
Collin Morikawa+450
Jon Rahm+450
Justin Thomas+550
Brooks Koepka+700
Viktor Hovland+700
Hideki Matsuyama+800
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PGA Championship 2025
Type: Winner - Status: OPEN
Rory McIlroy+450
Scottie Scheffler+450
Bryson DeChambeau+1100
Justin Thomas+2000
Ludvig Aberg+2000
Xander Schauffele+2000
Collin Morikawa+2200
Jon Rahm+2200
Joaquin Niemann+3500
Brooks Koepka+4000
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US Open 2025
Type: Winner - Status: OPEN
Rory McIlroy+500
Scottie Scheffler+500
Bryson DeChambeau+1200
Xander Schauffele+1200
Jon Rahm+1400
Ludvig Aberg+1400
Collin Morikawa+1600
Brooks Koepka+1800
Justin Thomas+2000
Viktor Hovland+2000
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The Open 2025
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Rory McIlroy+500
Scottie Scheffler+550
Xander Schauffele+1100
Ludvig Aberg+1400
Collin Morikawa+1600
Jon Rahm+1600
Bryson DeChambeau+2000
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Ryder Cup 2025
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USA-150
Europe+140
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U.S. has bright future aheadU.S. has bright future ahead

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Is this the greatest U.S. golf team ever assembled? Answering that question requires comparing the present to the past. It’s also missing the point. The focus on this week’s outcome at Liberty National, in which the Americans dominated the Internationals so thoroughly that Sunday’s Singles were essentially rendered obsolete, should be spun toward the future. The question is not how good they are, but how much better they can be. Thanks to a nucleus of 20-something stars, a dynamic chemistry, well-timed and collective form, and a leadership group that finally found a winning and sustainable playbook, the U.S. has become, in Nick Price’s words, “a juggernaut.â€� It played out to a 19-11 win, the most lopsided in Presidents Cup history in 17 years. After three stints as the International Captain, Price doesn’t plan to return for a fourth at Royal Melbourne in 2019. That means he’s no longer the primary person tasked with figuring out how to beat the Americans. That will be left up to guys such as Ernie Els and Geoff Ogilvy, assistants this year who are being groomed for future captaincies. It also will be left up to their European Ryder Cup counterparts, who no doubt received the Americans’ message loud and clear this week: We’re here and we’re ready to conquer the world, starting with Paris and Melbourne the next two years. The Americans, in fact, were already letting their minds drift toward the future even before the completion of this week’s event. Thanks to the commanding 11-point lead built after Saturday’s two team sessions, they arrived at Liberty National on Sunday needing just one point from the 12 Singles matches. Phil Mickelson called it a “stress-free day for us – and that’s just something we’ve never had.â€� By the conclusion of the fourth match – Daniel Berger’s 2 and 1 win over Si Woo Kim – they had clinched. “We kind of knew the inevitable was going to happen today,â€� said Jordan Spieth, “You start to kind of look forward and wonder where this momentum could take us.â€� Far would likely be the operative word here. Consider that Spieth, Berger and Justin Thomas are just 24 years old, born within four months of each other in 1993. Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed are 27. Rickie Fowler is 29. Provided there are no health injuries and backsteps in their progress, there’s half your American team for the next decade or so. And of course, that doesn’t include the world’s top-ranked player, Dustin Johnson, who’s 33 and in the early stages of his prime. But it’s not just their age, it’s their attitude. As hard as they compete against each other, they pull for each other even more so. It’s why Spieth was among the first to congratulate Thomas on his PGA Championship win two months ago. It’s why Thomas and Fowler were among those waiting patiently until Spieth was done with his lengthy photo obligations following his Open Championship win. It’s why they vacation together. It’s camaraderie, millennial style. “These guys are famous for traveling together and having fun together,â€� said U.S. assistant Davis Love III, who led the Americans to the Ryder Cup victory last year – the first by the U.S. in eight years. “But the thing is they support each other so much. And that was a big message the last couple teams. Get together, support each other and don’t listen to the outside noise — because they talk about the Americans that they don’t care or that they don’t try. “You see these guys in the team room or working hard on the golf course, they’re trying sometimes too hard. And I think they finally figured out how to relax and play. It showed the first couple of days here that they just came out guns blazing. That feeling spilled over to their U.S. teammates – especially the older ones. “We have a dynamic here that is different than I’ve seen,â€� said the 47-year-old Mickelson, making his 23rd U.S. team appearance this week. “These young guys are not only great players, fiercely competitive, but they have a quality that’s taken me decades to acquire — and that is they are genuinely happy for each other’s success. “That type of support amongst each other, even though they are competing against each other, brings about a really special energy and dynamic to this team. I’ve never been a part of a team all these years that’s this talented and gone out and lit the course up like this. … It’s that support from each other that is getting the best out of them because there is no other way to explain this type of performance.â€� It helps, of course, that practically each American seemed to be at or near the top of his game coming into Liberty National. Johnson and Thomas had won FedExCup Playoffs events. Spieth had top 10s in all four events; Matt Kuchar had three. Fowler had a runner-up in Chicago; Kevin Kisner tied for third in Atlanta. Mickelson, Reed, Kevin Chappell and Charley Hoffman each had at least one top-10 in their last six starts. “The timing of their form,â€� noted Els,â€� has been exceptional. And then you look at their talent on the team, it’s pretty exceptional, too.â€� Eleven of the 12 Americans reached the TOUR Championship. If you weren’t aware of that fact – or the identity of the lone hold-out – then Kuchar made it widely known during Sunday’s post-victory team news conference. “Everybody was on great form,â€� Kuchar said. “We had 11 guys in the TOUR Championship; everybody except Phil Mickelson was at East Lake.â€� Before we go any further, it’s important to know that Kuchar was sitting within arm’s length of Mickelson. You should also know that Kuchar may have consumed some victory champagne or other celebratory beverages. “It was like, how many times does it happen that you get 11 out of 12,â€� Kuchar continued. “If it was only for Phil, we would have had 12 of 12, but Phil was not there. So we were one guy short of having an entire team there and if Phil was there, that would have been the whole team. Like how many times does a team ever have that many guys play that well to make the TOUR Championship?â€� It wasn’t just form, though. It was an incredibly display of big shots, whether holing out from the bunker or rolling in lengthy putts. The Internationals actually played well in the early part of most matches this week, but the Americans were able to turn so many of them down the stretch. U.S. assistant Tiger Woods, who knows a thing or two about the big moments, was impressed with his team’s work on the greens. “I think this was one of the best putting teams I’ve ever seen,â€� Woods said. “I know that they are young, they are talented, hit the ball a long way, but in the end, look at how many more putts we made. Probably from 15 to 18, it was pretty impressive to watch.â€� In the end, the Internationals had no chance. It was the perfect storm, a confluence of variables that worked in the Americans’ favor. Now the challenge is to make sure it’s sustainable. Youth is definitely on the Americans’ side. Chemistry, always a delicate thing, doesn’t seem to be a problem at the moment. But now they wear the target. The Internationals will spend the next two years working on a response. Before that, the Americans have a date in Paris next year; it’s been 25 years since they’ve won on European soil. The best golf team America’s ever assembled? Argue if you must. But you get the feeling their story is just beginning.

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‘Best putting round ever’ lifts Molinari to Bay Hill victory‘Best putting round ever’ lifts Molinari to Bay Hill victory

The British Open champion enjoyed his “best putting day ever” which he capped off by sinking a 45-foot birdie at the difficult par-four 18th at Bay Hill in Orlando. The usually low-key Italian raised his arm in the air to hail his final putt, the longest he has holed on the PGA Tour this year. Molinari posted a 12-under 276 total and, after a two-hour wait in the clubhouse, celebrated his third PGA Tour victory when none of the overnight frontrunners could match his total.

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