Emergency 9: Wyndham Championship, Round 3

LA QUINTA, Calif. — Andrew Landry regrouped to win The American Express after losing a six-stroke lead on the back nine Sunday. Landry broke a tie with Abraham Ancer with a 7-foot birdie putt on the par-3 17th hole and made a 6-footer on the par-4 18th for a 5-under 67 and a two-stroke victory. Related: Leaderboard | Amateur with one arm makes hole-in-one  “That was probably the shot of the tournament for me,” Landry said about the 17th. “Just to be able to go over there and, to that right hole location, and just hold one up and hit a good distance and have a 7-, 8-footer to look at. … Thankfully, it went in and kind of made 18 a little bit easier.” Landy won the pro-am event at PGA West two years ago after losing a playoff to Jon Rahm. “This is a golf course that has suited me very well in the past,” Landry said. “And just to look back on some of the things that happened a couple years ago and then now, just to be able to finally get it done. I didn’t want to have to go back into a playoff again and we’re running out of daylight, so it’s good to finally get the job done again.” The 32-year-old Texan has two PGA TOUR victories, also winning the 2018 Valero Texas Open. He jumped up 161 spots to 17th in the FedExCup standings.  “That’s why you just got to keep grinding it out,” Landry said. “We all search for these weeks, and the majority of players out here are going to have them, four, five, six times a year and top-10 players are going to have them a little bit more often. So, these are the weeks that we search for and we just continue to just play our ball and keep doing what we do, and hopefully they come sooner than later.” Trying to become the third Mexican winner in PGA TOUR history and first since 1978, Ancer matched the Stadium Course record with a 63. Playing two groups ahead of Landry, Ancer birdied the par-5 16th and the island-green 17th and parred the 18th. “All week, really, I hit the ball great off the tee and iron shots, and in the first three rounds, I feel like I didn’t score as low as I should have for how good I hit the ball,” Ancer said. “But stayed patient and today the putts started to fall in.” Playing two groups ahead of Landry, Ancer birdied No. 16 and 17 and parred the 18th, missing from 35 feet and saving par with a 4 1/2-footer. He realized he was tied for lead just before teeing off on 17. “I wasn’t paying much attention to the leaderboard,” Ancer said. “And then that’s when I noticed and I was like, `All right, well, we got to make two other birdies.’ I made the putt there on 17, which was big, and then just couldn’t make it happen on 18. But I played good, man. I’m proud of how I played.” After missing the cut in seven of his first eight starts this season, Landry appeared to be cruising to victory when he birdied the first three holes on the back nine to open the six-shot lead. But he bogeyed the next three holes, made a par on the 16th that felt like another bogey, and was tied when Ancer ran in a 25-footer on 17. Landry finished at 26-under 262. He opened with a 66 on the Stadium Course, shot 64 in the second round at La Quinta Country Club and had a 65 on Saturday on PGA West’s Jack Nicklaus Tournament Course for a share of the third-round lead with Scottie Scheffler — four strokes ahead of third-place Rickie Fowler. The anticipated duel between Landy and Scheffler fizzled on the first six holes. Scheffler bogeyed the par-4 first after his drive rolled back down a hill into a large divot. He also dropped strokes on the par-5 fifth and long par-3 sixth to fall four strokes behind Landry. On the water-guarded fifth, his aggressive play with a fairway wood from a downhill lie near a right-side bunker went well left and, after a long chip, he missed a 3-footer for par. He also failed to get up-down-for par on the 234-yard sixth hole after hooking his tee shot. Scheffler shot 70, briefly giving Landry a scare with an eagle on 16, to finish third at 23 under. The 23-year-old former University of Texas player is in his first season on the PGA TOUR after winning twice and topping the Korn Ferry Tour Finals and overall points lists last season. Fowler had a 71 in the final group with Landry and Scheffler to tie for 10th at 18 under. From nearby Murrietta, Fowler played the event for the first time in six years.

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S.H. Park wins first major championship

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Innovators often must endure criticism, and Sam Snead was no exception. Snead’s strategy off the tee would fit right in on today’s PGA TOUR, but it was anathema when he was a star in the middle of the 20th century. His contemporaries, Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan, were lionized for their accuracy. Snead was sometimes portrayed as a simple country bumpkin who swung for the fences. But he was on to something when he wrote, “I’d rather play a wedge second shot out of rough than a 5-iron from the fairway. … To me, playing terrain had to come second to reducing distance from tee to pin with the opening shot.” Snead reasoned that if the aim of the game is to get the ball in the hole as quickly as possible, then it’s advantageous to advance it as far as possible. Not everyone agreed. Grantland Rice, the renowned sportswriter, was among those who criticized Snead’s seemingly careless approach. “You’re going against the book,” Rice said, according to Snead. “Golf is a position game.” Some may argue that Snead’s propensity to pound drivers is the reason he never won a U.S. Open, but it also helped him set the PGA TOUR’s wins record (82), a mark he now shares with Tiger Woods. “I powdered them hard and into possible trouble because the percentage was with me,” Snead wrote. He’s been vindicated by the hard data, specifically ShotLink powered by CDW. ShotLink’s ability to track every shot allows players to replace intuition with objective measurement. Just as analytics assaulted many of baseball’s long-held beliefs, ShotLink has led to changes in golf’s orthodoxy. “You’re just trying to gain that little bit of an advantage,” said Joel Dahmen. “Out here we’re looking for microscopic advantages, we’re talking tenths of a shot.” ShotLink powered by CDW allows players to achieve those small, but incremental, gains by helping them make better decisions. By showing the scoring averages from different portions of the course, ShotLink allows an optimal course-management strategy to be devised. And players can receive answers to questions like, “Is it better to be 150 yards from the hole, but in the rough, or 180 yards away and in the fairway?” ShotLink can prove whether it’s better to aim at the flag with a wedge or 15 feet to the left. Some players like Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods intuitively knew the best way to navigate a golf course. Now the data allows more players to master the mysteries of proper course management. The data can be especially helpful to new pros, giving them knowledge that it used to take multiple seasons to accrue. It could be one contributing factor to the five wins we’ve seen since July from players under the age of 23. “With ShotLink, with all the data the club companies can give you to help you map out the course, that tells you where you’re making birdies and which is worse, the left rough or the right rough. All that stuff helps,” said Collin Morikawa, who won the Barracuda Championship in his sixth start as a pro. An array of analysts are now employed by TOUR players. Their spreadsheets determine the veracity of the game’s conventional wisdom and help players effectively balance risk and reward. They’ve become valuable members of players’ teams, alongside their caddie, coach, psychologist and trainer. Driving and approach play are two of the areas where data has had the biggest impact on decision-making. While no analyst worth his salt would advocate a one-size-fits-all approach, some themes have emerged. ShotLink has largely confirmed Snead’s theory, that the penalty one receives from finding the rough slightly more often is offset by the gain of being closer to the hole. And an even bigger advantage is accrued when the longer tee shot finds the fairway. But when hitting approach shots, players often take on too much risk, especially with short irons. Traditionalists may hate the “bomb and gouge” style of play, even if Snead was advocating for it in the middle of the 20th century, but it’s backed up by data. Scott Fawcett, a course-management consultant to several pros and collegiate programs, says players should hit driver as long as the landing area fits a couple criteria, most importantly that there’s 65 yards between penalty areas. The criticism of “aggressive” play from the tee is often based on a false dichotomy that says the safe play was guaranteed to find the fairway while the longer club was destined for the rough. That, of course, isn’t the case. Even when a longer shot may leave the tricky half-wedge shot that TOUR players purportedly hate, it’s still advantageous in most situations to hit the ball closer to the green. The data shows that it takes TOUR players almost an identical number of strokes to hole out from 90 yards in the fairway (2.76) as it does from 40 yards in the rough (2.77). From 40 yards out and in the fairway, a TOUR player takes 2.59 strokes to hole out. “Unless there’s water guarding the pin, I try to get it as close to the green as possible on my second shot (on par-5s),” FedExCup leader Webb Simpson wrote in Golf Digest. “I used to lay up to 90 or 100 yards, but I studied my stats and I’m just as good or better from 60 yards. So now I go for it.” Charles Howell III points to the 13th hole at Bay Hill as an example of how the stats have changed his strategy. He often laid back on the 370-yard hole because he didn’t want to be left with a touchy wedge shot to a green fronted by water. Laying back meant hitting between two fairway bunkers, though. Now Howell hits driver off the tee, even though the tee shot often runs through the downhill fairway and into the rough. For Dahmen, the data led to a different conclusion. It showed that he should be less aggressive on reachable par-5s. He likes his long clubs, but he was making too many bogeys in an attempt to make eagle. Now he’s trying to leave himself an easy up-and-down or two-putt instead of aiming at the flag and risking being short-sided. “I’m try to get it in the right position, which isn’t necessarily on the green,” Dahmen said. “That’s probably the biggest one for me. My par-5 scoring has improved a ton and it’s because I’m not even trying to hit it on the green sometimes.” While the math favors more aggressive play off the tee, it often asks players to temper their expectations into the greens. Nelson once said he was trying to hole any approach with a 7-iron or shorter, but the data has shown that TOUR players, though they’re the best in the world, may not possess such pinpoint accuracy. In reality, TOUR pros average three strokes to get the ball in the hole from 170 yards and in the fairway. If a player feels invincible with a short-iron in his hand, he may be taking on more trouble than he should. “I think about 50-60% of your swings are effectively the same, but there are so many small, random variables – a couple millimeters difference in contact, a couple miles per hour of wind – that impact where your ball ends up,” Fawcett says. If a player averages 30 feet from the hole from 150 yards, then he or she should imagine the target as the center of a circle with a 30-foot radius. Fawcett likes to say that even though players like to imagine they’re firing a sniper rifle, they actually should imagine it’s more like a shotgun pattern. In simple terms, Fawcett uses Strokes Gained numbers to find the circle that covers an area with the lowest expected scoring average. This often means hitting closer to the center of the green than pros are accustomed to. Using quantitative methods to select targets also allows players to have more confidence in their target selection. “When you hit a shot, you observe only one outcome, but you need to plan for the range of outcomes that could happen, taking into account the likelihood of each,” Broadie wrote. “Football coaches develop game plans to take advantage of the opposing team’s weaknesses. Baseball managers have a strategy toolkit that includes lineups, pitching changes and defensive alignment. “Coaches, managers and players in many sports engage in constant strategy sessions to try to maximize their chances of winning. Although we don’t always think of it, in golf a good game plan also increases our chances of (shooting) a better score.”

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