Leaderboard: Moving day at the Masters

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – The 14th green at Pebble Beach is hard enough to hit with a wedge, let alone a 3-wood. Out-of-bounds stakes aren’t far from the putting surface, either. Gary Woodland wasn’t sure he should take the risk while holding the lead on the final holes of the U.S. Open. Woodland, the former college basketball player turned professional golfer, has physical gifts that few players possess, though. His caddie, Brennan Little, urged him to use them at this crucial moment. The uphill hole annually ranks as one of the hardest par-5s on the PGA TOUR. It’s the rare three-shotter where par is acceptable. Most players never have to consider reaching it in two. Woodland’s 3-wood carried the gaping bunker in front of the green and settled in the rough, just left of the flag. The birdie gave him a two-shot margin and the confidence to close out his first major championship. “It would have been pretty easy to lay up there. … (My caddie) is the one that told me play aggressive,â€� Woodland said. “Him telling me to do that gave me confidence, and it ended up in a perfect spot. That birdie there kind of separated me a little bit from Brooks and gave me a little cushion.â€� That shot was impressive, but it was a shorter stroke three holes later that illustrated Woodland’s progress from promising prospect to major champion. After his tee shot drifted to the wrong side of the hourglass green on Pebble Beach’s 17th hole, he nearly holed his chip shot from off the putting surface. That par save allowed him to play the picturesque finishing hole comfortably. But he added one more magnificent stroke to his triumph with a 30-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole of the championship. A final-round 69 gave Woodland a winning score of 13-under 271. He held off the TOUR’s most intimidating man in majors, Brooks Koepka, who pulled within one shot on the back nine, but could never overtake Woodland. Koepka fell three shots short of winning his third consecutive U.S. Open. He’s finished in the top 2 in five of the past six majors. Woodland didn’t dream of sinking big putts on the 18th green when he was growing up in Topeka, Kansas, though. He wanted to hit game-winning jumpers. However, he knew his basketball career was on borrowed time after the first game of his college career. He was a freshman guard for Washburn University when the Ichabods visited Lawrence Fieldhouse to face the Kansas Jayhawks. His assignment was to guard future NBA player Kirk Hinrich in the season-opening exhibition. “I was guarding Kirk Hinrich and like, OK, I need to find something else because this ain’t gonna work,â€� Woodland said. He transferred to Kansas the following year to play college golf. Woodland always thought he’d be a professional athlete. Golf was going to be his vocation now. His athleticism helped him get to the PGA TOUR in 2009, less than two years after he turned pro. Woodland’s physical prowess has received plenty of press ever since he arrived on TOUR. The college basketball player epitomized the bigger, stronger athletes who were migrating to the course. The expectations were raised even higher when he won just two years later. His ascension slowed because of an unpolished, one-dimensional game. His win at last year’s Waste Management Phoenix Open was just his third in nearly a decade on TOUR, and first in five years. “From a golf standpoint, I was probably a little behind, and that gets frustrating at some point, because my whole life I’ve been able to compete and win at everything I’ve done, and I haven’t been able to do that as much as I’d like to in golf,â€� said Woodland, 35. “It’s taken a while, but I think we’re trending in the right direction.â€� When he arrived at Pebble Beach, he was the highest-ranked player in the FedExCup without a victory. His first major title moved him to fifth in the standings. This is the first time in his career that he’s won in back-to-back seasons. He credited the work with Pete Cowen, who became his short-game instructor 18 months ago and then started coaching all facets of his game after Butch Harmon retired from instructing on TOUR earlier this year. Woodland was stellar around the greens at Pebble Beach, which is not an easy task on the steeply-pitched, poa annua putting surfaces. He didn’t three-putt all week. He made just four bogeys over 72 holes, tying a U.S. Open record. He was second in Strokes Gained: Putting this week, as well. His +8.3 strokes gained marked the second-best putting performance of his career. “He’s experimented, and he’s put the time and effort in to get better,â€� said his friend Matt Kuchar. “He’s really refined his skills. Not only does he have potential, but he gets a lot out of it now. He’s figured out how to play golf, how to keep it in play, how to work it both ways and his short game has vastly improved. It used to be a liability and now he’s gaining strokes around the greens.â€� Woodland is 54th in Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green this season, an improvement of more than 100 spots in that statistic since last season. Earlier in the week, he and Cowen were working on hitting pitch shots off tight lies. That helped him execute that difficult pitch on the second-to-last hole. “I competed all my life at every sport and every level,â€� Woodland said. “It was just learning how to play golf. It was learning to complete my game, to get that short game, to get that putting, to drive the golf ball straighter. And that was the big deal.â€� The ability to perform under pressure is one of those intangibles that statistics can’t accurately measure, though. On Sunday, Woodland didn’t look like a man who’d never converted a 54-hole lead into victory. He’d taken at least of the share of the lead into the final round on seven occasions. He was winless in all seven. He started Sunday with a one-stroke lead over Justin Rose. Major champions like Koepka, Louis Oosthuizen and Rory McIlroy were still within reach. Woodland didn’t blink when Koepka made birdie on four of the first five holes Sunday. He made birdies on Nos. 2 and 3 to keep his lead. Playing with Tiger Woods in the final round of last year’s PGA Championship taught him about handling the final-round pressure. Woodland and Woods were both in contention, and Bellerive was overflowing with fans eager to see Woods win his first major in a decade. The chaos distracted Woodland early in the round. It was too late by the time he gathered himself. Woods and Koepka were already locked in a showdown. That experience helped him at Pebble Beach, especially as Koepka put pressue on him. “I think from a mental standpoint I was as good as I’ve ever been,â€� Woodland said Sunday. “I never let myself get ahead of myself. I never thought about what would happen if I won, what comes with it. I wanted to execute every shot. I wanted to stay in the moment. I wanted to stay within myself.â€� Woodland, who didn’t have a top-10 in his first 27 majors, now has three in his last four. That shows a more complete game, one that’s able to withstand the toughest tests. Pebble Beach, which played just a hair over 7,000 yards, forced him to rely on more than just his driving distance. The small greens demand precise iron play. He finished second in greens in regulation this week, hitting 52 of 72. “People probably growing up said the U.S. Open wouldn’t suit me, because I’m a long hitter, I’m a bomber,â€� Woodland said. “Coming to Pebble Beach, on top of that, it’s a shorter golf course. And I went out and proved, I think to everybody else, what I always believed, that I’m pretty good.â€�

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NORTH BERWICK, Scotland (AP) — Cameron Tringale has played 331 times on the PGA TOUR without winning. His career-best round of 9-under 61 on Thursday might help him change. Tringale ran off six straight birdies to start the back nine at The Renaissance Club on Thursday and had a three-shot lead in the Genesis Scottish Open, the first event co-sanctioned by the PGA TOUR and DP World Tour. Former U.S. Open champion Gary Woodland saw work with putting coach Phil Kenyon pay off in his round of 64, the only one close to Tringale. “I haven’t had a professional win on my own, and obviously Scotland is where golf started, so this place is special,” Tringale said. And it was relatively benign, at least for Tringale. That wasn’t the case Thursday afternoon, when the average score was more than three shots higher. Flags were crackling in 30 mph gusts that felt even stronger along the shores of the North Sea, conditions best described by the clubs that were used. Some players barely reached the fairway on the par-5 16th, if they did. Patrick Cantlay had 231 yards for his second shot on the 483-yard closing hole. He hit 3-wood, and even that wasn’t enough. Cantlay did well to close with three straight pars, which were at a premium. He had a hard-earned 70. U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick opened with 71, while PGA champion Justin Thomas held on as long as he could. Thomas bogeyed three of his last five holes for a 73. The low score from the afternoon was Kurt Kitayama at 66, and only five other players who faced the afternoon wind managed to break par. Tringale had the lowest score of his PGA TOUR career and matched the course record set three years ago by Bernd Wiesberger when The Renaissance played to a par 71. Jordan Spieth set an early pace by running off five straight birdies, only to drop three shots over his last 10 holes for a 68. He called it a tale of two nines based on course knowledge. “The nine I had never seen before went really well, and the nine I played yesterday went poorly,” Spieth said, who is playing a week before The Open Championship for the first time since 2015, the last time the Open was at St. Andrews. It made sense this year with the PGA TOUR co-sanctioning the tournament for the first time, which led to 14 of the top 15 in the world at The Renaissance, a course that looks like one and is plenty fast without having true links soil. Tringale, who has reached the TOUR Championship only once in his 12 previous years on the PGA TOUR, is having one of his better years. He missed a playoff at Torrey Pines by one shot and was a distant runner-up to Hideki Matsuyama in THE ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP last fall. The conditions along the North Sea could not have been more ideal for him, with only a mild breeze and a full blue sky in the morning. Tringale took advantage with one key club in his bag. “Golf is more fun when the putts are going in, and they were for me today,” he said. He made a pair of birdie putts from the 40-foot range, and only four of his nine birdies were inside 6 feet. Equally important were a few midrange par putts he made at the start. It was a struggle for Masters champion Scottie Scheffler, who made double bogey from the 18th fairway by going from rough to rough, and lost more ground on the front nine for a 73. The Scottish charge was led by Ewen Ferguson (67) and Russell Knox (68), who heeded some strong advice from his wife, a former tennis pro. Knox has been struggling with his putter when he was persuaded to try a long putter. “My wife said, ‘You’ve been playing professional golf for 15 years and you’re horrible at putting. Try something different,’” Knox said. “The best putt of my life was a 3-footer for par on the first hole because if that didn’t go in, we were in for a long day.”

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LA QUINTA, California, EE.UU. (con información de AP) — Adam Long, miembro del PGA TOUR Latinoamérica en 2014, embocó un putt de cuatro metros en el hoyo final este domingo para ganar el Desert Classic y conseguir el primer título de su carrera en el PGA TOUR. El suyo fue el segundo triunfo de un graduado del PGA TOUR Latinoamérica en el PGA TOUR, siguiendo el título del Sanderson Farms Championship logrado por Cody Gribble en 2017. Completando apenas su sexto torneo en el TOUR, Long cerró con una ronda de 7-bajo par 65 en el Stadium Course de PGA West para vencer por un golpe a Phil Mickelson y Adam Hadwin, con quienes compartió la última salida en la jornada final.  “El putt de Phill me dio una buena idea,â€� dijo Long. “Fue uno de esos putts en los que uno se para sobre la pelota y sabe qué es exactamente lo que vas a hacer. Es algo que uno no puede controlar, pero cuando tienes esa sensación es algo bastante bueno. Me siento bastante incrédulo en este momento. Realmente no caigo en cuenta de lo que pasóâ€�. Long se colocó en posición de embocar el putt de la victoria gracias a un estupendo hierro-6 que pegó desde 175 yardas con la pelota debajo de sus pies en un loma a la derecha del fairway. Graduado de la Universidad de Duke y con 31 años de edad, Long se hizo profesional en 2010 y comenzó su carrera jugando en los mini tours de su país. En 2012 ganó la tarjeta del Web.com Tour y tras perderla regresó a los mini tours. En 2014 jugó 12 torneos del PGA TOUR Latinoamérica y 11 del Mackenzie Tour PGA TOUR Canada que lo dejaron en buena forma para regresar al Web.com Tour por medio del Q-School. En el Web se mantuvo desde 2015 hasta 2018, cuando aseguró su tarjeta del PGA TOUR al terminar la temporada regular en el 13º puesto entre los top-25 de la lista de ganancias. “De alguna forma ha sido un poco de sube y baja, pero he tenido un crecimiento sostenido a través de mi carreraâ€�, dijo Long. “He jugado en la mayoría de los tours que hay en el mundo y he ido progresando poco a poco. Puede parecer que salí de la nada, pero mi juego ha ido en la dirección correcta por los últimos dos añosâ€�. Mickelson, líder del Desert Classic tras cada una de las primeras tres rondas, tuvo muchas dificultades con el putter para su ronda de 69. Su putt de 12 metros en busca de birdie en el hoyo 18 se desvió un poco a la izquierda al final. “Tuve un día terrible con el putter, uno de los peores que pueda recordar en un buen ratoâ€�, dijo Mickelson. “Así fue desde el primer hoyo, con no cortito de poco más de un metro en subida e hice tres putts en ese green. Fallé muchos cortos en los primeros nueve y algunas oportunidades de birdie, pero la sensación era fatal con el putter. Pegué muchos tiros buenos, pero no logré poner la pelota en el hoyoâ€�. Hadwin hizo 67, dejando ir una ventaja de tres golpes en los últimos nueve hoyos. “Así es el golfâ€�, dijo el canadiense. “Emboqué muchos putts toda la semana y honestamente estuve batallando un poco con el swing, no lo tuve como los primeros tres díasâ€�. Para Hadwin este fue su cuarto top 6 consecutivo en este evento. En 2017 había sido segundo tras una tercera ronda de 59 en La Quinta Country Club y el año pasado había empatado en tercer lugar.  Long terminó con 26-bajo par 262, embocando valiosos chips en un par de ocasiones para mantenerse en contienda en los últimos nueve hoyos. “Esas que metí de afuera fueron enorme y otros putts en los primeros nueves también me ayudaron a mantenerme ahíâ€�, dijo Long. La semana la abrió con un 63 en el Nicklaus Tournament Course de PGA West. El viernes hizo 71 en el Stadium Course y el sábado otro 63 en La Quinta para meterse al último grupo con Mickelson y Hadwin.  “Fue una gran emoción jugar con Phil,” agregó Long. “Lo he admirado toda mi vida y no pudo haber sido mejor para conmigo en la cancha. Fue grandioso jugar con él, muy divertidoâ€�.

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