‘Everyone is going to be watching what we’re doing’

ORLANDO, Fla. - Rickie Fowler and Viktor Hovland have been sharing the same longitude and latitude this week, each competing at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard. However, as recent journeys go, they have been on different trains bound for different places. Hovland, 23, is the red-hot wunderkind not far removed from Oklahoma State. He is riding one of those sizzling golf tears where nearly every bounce seems to go right, and he finds himself in contention once again as the API moves into the weekend at Bay Hill Club and Lodge. (At 7-under 137, Hovland trails leader Corey Conners by two shots.) Hovland has been a rocket ship in the Official World Golf Ranking. He was ranked 100th just more than a year ago, and now he is 13th. He smiles a lot, and for good reason. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Day's tee shot gets stuck in tree, takes one-shot penalty Certainly Fowler, now 32 and a five-time winner on the PGA TOUR, can relate to Hovland's success. Fowler is one of a long line of Cowboys standouts paving a path to the PGA TOUR for Oklahoma State players such as Hovland and Matthew Wolff. Fowler has been struggling. Searching. Tinkering. He and swing coach John Tillery have been making changes. Fowler knows exactly where he wants to be - contending in majors (four top-5 finishes in 2014), making U.S. cup teams, winning big titles (such as THE PLAYERS Championship six years ago) … because he has been there. He is working as doggedly at home as he ever has, long hours, sacrificing, waiting and hoping to see results. And still waiting. Hovland and Fowler were in the same group along with Aussie Jason Day the last two days at Arnie's Place. Hovland made seven birdies and shot 4-under 68. Hovland is riding a stretch of six top-6 or better finishes in his last seven starts. Fowler needed a chip-in for birdie at his final hole on Thursday just to shoot 76. Friday's goal to sneak back inside the cutline never was going to be easy. But he'd do what Arnold Palmer would do. His head was down Friday, and he got after it. When Fowler rinsed a tee shot at the dogleg par-4 third hole (his 12th) on Friday, he ballooned to 5 over for the tournament. He appeared destined for another disheartening week in a frustrating stretch of them. Coming in, Fowler had missed three cuts in his last six starts. But he is a fighter, and birdies coming home at Nos. 4 (28 feet), 5 (42 feet) and 6 (2 feet) at least gave him a chance. Fowler, who sports shirts and hats and shoes honoring Palmer when he plays here, had missed the cut only once in nine starts at the API; he made 118 feet of putts in a round of 70. At 2-over 146, he headed to lunch not knowing if he'd be working this weekend. He longed for two more rounds at Bay Hill to find some traction, some momentum. Something positive. "Things are definitely moving the right way," said Fowler, once No. 4 in the world, now ranked 65th. "Just had a couple swings that cost me. But I’m happy with it. It’s getting closer and closer, so we'll see if we get a tee time tomorrow. If we do, we’ll go play like hell this weekend. If not, we’ll go get ready for our tee time next Thursday (at THE PLAYERS)." Peter Malnati had a chance to knock out all the players at plus-2 late Friday, but made double-bogey at 18 and missed the cut himself. Fowler was in on the number. A needed break. More than a year removed from his last top 10 (2020 American Express), Fowler doesn't hide the fact that golf these days is more work than fun. He made five consecutive West Coast starts, something he hadn't done since he was a rookie. When he is home, he stays dedicated to his craft. The days he takes off are only to give his 5 foot 9, 150-pound body a rest. "It’s definitely been a grind," Fowler said. "I think more so it’s just a mental challenge, because playing and competing against the best players in the world for a decent amount of time now, and being up there at one point in the top 10 for quite some time, and being one of the top guys in the world, it’s just hard. You know what you’re capable of, and where you should be - or what you expect out of yourself. "So that’s been more of the struggle, not beating myself up too much, and kind of taking a step back, let everything happen, be patient. But, yeah, it’s been frustrating at times, been a grind. But we’re still grinding it out." Funny how life works sometimes. As he was grinding just to make a cut, Fowler didn't need to look very far to see the level of play to which he wants to return. Hovland isn't "walking" around Bay Hill this week; he is floating across the grounds at Arnie's Place, his game honed and sharp. Sure, he could hit a few more fairways (8 of 14 Friday), but most everything is working. It doesn't matter if you are 23 or 32; Hovland and Fowler know that golf is cyclical, and hot golf can be fleeting. So when you have it going, you make the most of it. Good golf exists on razor-thin margins. Fowler was greenside in a bunker in two shots at the par-5 12th and walked away with bogey; Hovland came up short on the par- 3 seventh and holed his bunker shot from 10 yards. Birdie. "Yeah, it’s been very fun," Hovland said. "Obviously playing very good and I don’t feel like I have that many holes in my game anymore, which is cool, because I missed plenty of greens out there today (seven) and I still shot 68, even made a bunker shot and got some really cool up-and-downs. Walking from the fairway over to the rough wherever I was hitting from, after missing the green, I would have been anxious the whole way … But now it’s like, ‘All right, I’ll be all right. Even if I make a bogey here I can birdie the next.' So it’s just a very relaxed kind of attitude. It’s a lot easier when you’re playing well. You just kind of let it all happen." Therein lies the difference. One guy is just kind of letting it happen right now. The other is trying to make something happen. Fowler has viewed it from both sides. At Bay Hill on Friday, you needed to watch only one grouping to see the contrast. Rickie Fowler is working hard, and said he is starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. No, he isn't there yet. That's the magical journey of golf.

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When the latest iteration of The Match begins under the lights at Pelican Golf Club on Saturday (TNT, 6 p.m.) it will feature four of the most prolific winners of the PGA TOUR’s modern era. Of the five youngest players to reach 10 career TOUR wins since World War II, four of them will be playing: Tiger Woods (age 23), Jordan Spieth (23), Rory McIlroy (25) and Justin Thomas (26). Jack Nicklaus (24) is the fifth name on that list. The four who will tee it up at Pelican have combined for 24 major championship wins and nearly a quarter-billion dollars in official PGA TOUR earnings. They’ve won a combined seven of the 16 FedExCup trophies ever contested. All four have reached the top of the Official World Golf Ranking. Their on-course accomplishments are well known, but a deeper dive into their statistics can illuminate an underlying trend that many fans may not be aware of. Something you might not know about: Jordan Spieth Spieth’s name will permeate the age-related section of golf’s record books for generations to come. When he won the 2013 John Deere Classic, he was the first teenager to win a PGA TOUR event since 1931. By age 21 he was a two-time major champion, the youngest player to do that in the men’s game since Gene Sarazen. Among players in the modern era, only Spieth and Nicklaus have accumulated three professional major wins before age 24. For fans watching Spieth during those early seasons – especially in 2015 – it felt like he made every putt he looked at from 20 feet. Your eyes weren’t deceiving you: that season, Spieth made 27.2% of his putts from 15 to 25 feet away. The overall make percentage from that range on TOUR that season was just 16.0%. In the seasons since, no player with enough rounds to qualify has sniffed a 27% make-rate or better from that distance. But consider this: In 2015, Spieth actually gained more strokes with his approach play (40.78) than he did on the greens (37.67). In Spieth’s brilliant 2015 season, he was the only player on TOUR to make 25% or more of his putts from 15 to 25 feet and average half-a-stroke gained per round or more with his approach shots. There’s only been one player to replicate the feat over an entire PGA TOUR season since. Something you might not know about: Justin Thomas Perhaps nobody in the game can go super-low like JT. At the 2017 Sony Open in Hawaii, he peppered the PGA TOUR record books with numbers that have stood up for more than five years. At Waialae Country Club that week, he opened with 59, recorded the lowest opening 36-hole total score in TOUR history (123), and finished with the lowest 72-hole total ever shot in an official TOUR event (253). That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. Thomas has shot 63 or lower a staggering 20 times in his PGA TOUR career. Since the beginning of 2015, that’s six more such rounds than any other player – McIlroy is second with 14. Thomas has five rounds of 61 or lower in his TOUR career, and 38 rounds of 64 or lower. In both cases it’s most of any player over the last decade. It’s fitting, then, that a player who can go crazy-low holds a major comeback record: At the 2022 PGA Championship, Thomas won despite being seven shots back to begin the day. That’s the largest final round deficit overcome to win a major since Paul Lawrie was ten back at the 1999 Open Championship. Something you might not know about: Rory McIlroy Rory McIlroy is often heralded as the best driver in the world. Statistically, it’s justified: Since the beginning of 2014, McIlroy has averaged 0.96 Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee per round, the best of any player with 100 or more rounds played on the PGA TOUR In that span. Although his hypnotic excellence with the driver can sometimes overshadow the other wonderful things he does, McIlroy is obviously no one-trick pony. Take this, for example: Since the inception of Strokes Gained tracking on the PGA TOUR, McIlroy has put together nine different rounds in which has gained at least a full stroke in each of the four key disciplines: Off-the-Tee, Approach the Green, Around the Green, and Putting. No other player has more than six such rounds. In 2022, both he and Thomas did it on two occasions; they were two of just four players with multiple such rounds this year. Something you might not know about: Tiger Woods You would think that with Woods so limited it would be difficult to unearth and celebrate statistics about him not readily shared in the past. The reality is that as time passes his seemingly limitless list of accomplishments grows even more ridiculous. When the immensely talented players of today accomplish lofty tasks, the question isn’t whether Tiger did it before them, the question is usually how many times he did it before them. When McIlroy won the 2012 PGA Championship by eight shots, he joined Woods as the only players in the last 100 years to win multiple majors by eight strokes or more. Woods has done it three times (1997 Masters, 2000 U.S. Open, 2000 Open Championship). When McIlroy successfully defended his title at THE CJ CUP in South Carolina in the fall, it marked his second back-to-back of 2022 on the PGA TOUR (RBC Canadian Open). McIlroy was the first player to do that twice in a calendar year since Woods in 2007 – the sixth different year Woods had done it. Arguably the greatest stretch of golf ever played was by Woods when he won four consecutive majors, the Tiger Slam, at the turn of the century. Expanding this window from the 1999 Memorial Tournament presented by Workday through the 2001 Memorial Tournament, Woods won a ridiculous 20 times in 40 official PGA TOUR starts. But what if I told you that years later Woods would have another similar run of greatness? While the Tiger Slam era is rightfully heralded as the halcyon peak of Tiger’s play, it’s not the only time he had a run of 20 wins in 40 PGA TOUR starts. From the 2005 WGC-American Express Championships through the 2008 U.S. Open, Woods made 40 official PGA TOUR starts. Again, he won 20 of them. When comparing the two runs of dominance, the younger Woods still takes the crown, but the numbers within that later run are nothing to scoff at, either. Woods had a combined margin of victory of 69 strokes in the earlier stretch, and 56 strokes in the later one. Five majors won in eight starts for young Tiger, three in eight starts for the early 30’s Woods. The percentage of rounds led or co-led is close, too: 34.9% to 31.0%. Think of it this way: Over the last 40 years, five players besides Woods have won 20 or more times on the PGA TOUR over the course of their entire careers. Woods twice won 20 times in 40 starts, which is something unlikely to happen ever again just once, let alone twice.

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ATLANTA (AP) — Patrick Cantlay delivered the goods again, this time with a 6-iron instead of a putter. “Patty Ice” was just as clutch with a $15 million shot that allowed him to hold off Jon Rahm and win the FedExCup and the TOUR Championship on Sunday. RELATED: What’s in Cantlay’s bag? | Final leaderboard In a tense duel with the world’s No. 1 player, Cantlay had a one-shot lead going to the par-5 18th hole at the TOUR Championship when he hit 6-iron from 218 yards to just inside 12 feet that secured the biggest victory of his career. “Felt like a huge win, and it was,” Cantlay said. Rahm’s shot was equally special, landing next to the hole on its second bounce but rolling to the light rough beyond the green. With Cantlay in close, the Spaniard had to hole the chip to have any chance of a playoff. He narrowly missed, and Cantlay safely two-putted for birdie and 1-under 69. The victory was worth $15 million for Cantlay, a 29-year-old Californian whose rise in golf was slowed by a back injury that kept him out for three years and nearly ended his career. Now he has stamped himself among the elite in golf, boosted by the FedExCup Playoffs. Cantlay showed remarkable grit in surviving a six-hole playoff to beat Bryson DeChambeau in the BMW Championship last week to take the No. 1 seed and a two-shot lead to start the TOUR Championship. He never flinched over four days at East Lake. Rahm, who started the tournament four shots behind and went into the final day two back, never caught Cantlay. He never let him breathe easy, either. Cantlay took a two-shot lead with an approach to 6 feet for birdie on the 17th hole, and then nearly lost it all. He drove to the right on the 17th, clipping a tree and dropping down into deep rough, and then hit a flyer over the green and the gallery. His pitch back to the green came up short and into more deep rough, and he had to make a 6-footer to save bogey and stay ahead. With Rahm well down the 18th fairway, Cantlay hit his best drive of the day, rolling out 361 yards that set up a 6-iron he felt he needed to hit close. Rahm was bogey-free over the last 28 holes, but he only cashed in on two birdies. He closed with a 68 and tied with Kevin Na for the 72-hole score of the tournament at 14-under 266. They will split points toward the world ranking. Cantlay started at 10-under par and finished at 21 under. Rahm earned $5 million for finishing second in the FedExCup, while Na (67) picked up $4 million. Justin Thomas (70) birdied the last hole to finish fourth, which was worth $4 million. This was more than about money for Cantlay. He won for the fourth time this season — one of those at the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday, when Rahm had to withdraw after building a six-shot lead after 54 holes because of a positive COVID-19 test results — and no one else won more than twice.

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