Phil Mickelson holds a 3-stroke lead over Paul Casey, but darkness stopped the final round just before the finish line at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
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ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – Cameron Champ has quickly become known for more than his tee shots.  The 23-year-old rookie started the season by appearing on the cover of a golf magazine that was peddling the promise of longer drives. Then he started earning attention for his scores.  No one appeared on leaderboards more often than Champ this fall. He sat inside the top 10 after 13 of the last 16 rounds. He was 64 under par over that stretch.  He will start the New Year ranked sixth in the FedExCup. He is tied with Gary Woodland for the most top-10s this season (3).  At the start of the season, Champ would’ve considered it a success if he made all the cuts. He did much more than that. He won the Sanderson Farms Championship, finished T10 at the Mayakoba Golf Classic and closed the fall with a sixth-place finish at The RSM Classic.  His worst finish in five fall starts was a T28 at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open, where he was in sixth place entering the final round.  He was most proud of the consistency he showed this fall.  Fifteen of his last 17 rounds were in the 60s. Eleven of them were 68 or lower, including a second-round 62 at Mayakoba. He leads the TOUR in birdies (117) and is second in birdie average (5.9 per round).  He had a chance to win The RSM Classic on Sunday despite struggling with his ball-striking.  “My putter really saved me this week. It’s been a good balance. Some weeks, my ball-striking has been great and I really haven’t putted well. And vice versa,� he said.  Champ excelled with both the longest and shortest clubs in his bag. He leads the TOUR in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee (+1.48 per round) and could contend for the greatest single-season performance in that metric. But he also ranked 28th in Strokes Gained: Putting (+0.83 per round) this fall.  It’s a very small sample, but no player has ever combined such skill on the tee and off the greens. Even if Champ’s putting regresses as the season progresses, he could become the first player to average more than 1 stroke gained per round off the tee and 0.3 per round on the greens.  The advantage that his distance alone gives him should not be understated, though.  Only twice in the FedExCup era has the leader in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee failed to qualify for the TOUR Championship. Only once has the leader in that statistic failed to win.  The leader in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee has an average FedExCup ranking of 14 and averages 1.7 wins per season.  Bubba Watson is the current record-holder for single-season performance in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee. He averaged 1.49 strokes gained per round in 2012, the year he won his first Masters.  There have been only eight seasons in which a player has averaged more than 1 stroke gained per round off the tee. Four players – Dustin Johnson (2016, ’17), Rory McIlroy (2012, ’14, ’16), Watson (’12, ’15) and Sergio Garcia (2005) – have achieved that feat.  Players who surpassed 1 stroke gained per round off the tee averaged 2.7 wins per season and a ranking of 4.3 in the FedExCup.  Last season, eight of the top 10 in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee qualified for the TOUR Championship, as did 13 of the top 20 in that metric.  Let that sink in for a second. Nearly half of the players who qualified for the season finale were in the top 20 of Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee when they arrived at East Lake.  Champ leads the PGA TOUR in driving distance (328.2 yards) while hitting 62 percent of his fairways. His driving accuracy almost equals the TOUR average this season (63 percent).  Mark Broadie, the inventor of the Strokes Gained statistics, calls Champ’s combination of distance and accuracy “remarkable.�  “The Strokes Gained that he loses from reduced accuracy is way more than compensated by his extra distance,� Broadie said.  Broadie has calculated that it takes approximately 3.4 strokes gained per round to win a PGA TOUR event. Champ covers nearly half of that with his tee shots alone. This fall, he gained nearly 2.4 strokes per round with his driving and putting.  “There are a lot of ways to get another 1 stroke per round to reach 3.4 per round,� Broadie said. “A hot putter, sinking one more putt per round, an approach shot or 2 to 4 feet instead of 14 feet, etc.�  Champ may not be able to keep up this unprecedented pace, but perhaps his putter should be mentioned alongside that other club that he is known for.
SAN ANTONIO — Camilo Villegas chipped in twice to highlight a nine-birdie round that earned him an 8-under 64 and the first-round lead at the Valero Texas Open on Thursday. RELATED: Leaderboard | Cut prediction: Valero Texas Open Sung Kang, a 33-year-old South Korean, is two shots back with Cameron Tringale after each had a 66 at TPC San Antonio’s Oaks Course. Jordan Spieth, whose struggles the past three years appear to be subsiding after four top-10 finishes the past two months, is three back (67) with Seung-Yul Noh and Hideki Matsuyama. Phil Mickelson dropped to 15 shots back when he had a 10 on the 18th hole — he took two penalty shots and another three strokes trying to get away from a greenside stream — and ended with a 79. Villegas won the TOUR Championship in 2008 and the Wyndham Championship in 2014, but has endured injury and then the death of his 22-month-old daughter last year. His two top-10 finishes this year include a tie for eighth at the Honda Classic. “Sometimes it goes your way, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Villegas said. “The last few years I’ve been up and down with many things. We keep showing up and the results start showing up.” He bogeyed his opening hole Thursday and birdied six of seven holes in the middle of his round. That streak included putts of 23 and 20 feet and a chip-in from the fringe at his 13th hole. He finished up when he holed out from about 45 yards away to the side of the green. “Some days the hole is a little bit big,” Villegas said. “On (the last hole), I got really lucky. I hit a chip that was probably going off the green, and it hits the pin and goes in.” Kang, the 2019 Byron Nelson champ, got his round rolling with an eagle on his 11th hole. He hit the green in two on the par 5 from 292 yards and made a 30-foot eagle. “I played great today, but I didn’t start off very good,” Kang said. “I struggled a little bit with a new driver from the start, but I found a way to hit it on the back nine so started driving a lot better.” Kang birdied three of his last four, including his finishing hole with a 22-foot birdie. Spieth birdied three of his opening five holes. Looking for his first win since the 2017 Open Championship, he had steadily dropped in the world rankings until he hit No. 92 in January after missing the cut in five of eight starts. “Overall with the score, I certainly would have signed up for 5 under starting out,” Spieth said. “I felt like I played some really nice golf on our front nine. I didn’t quite hit it as good as I have been, but certainly the short game came through. I mean, 5 under around this track is a good score. I’d take four more of them.” Five of Spieth’s seven birdies came before he made the turn. For the day, three of his birdie putts came from longer than 15 feet, including a 21-footer at his second hole. “Overall, just chipped and putted really well, which was the difference-maker today,” he said. He used a putter from the fringe while 16 feet away for birdie at his second-to-last hole. He made up for hitting into the bunker on the right off the tee, but he couldn’t recover on his 18th. He pushed another tee shot right and hit a provisional. But he found his tee shot near trees, punched it out near the green, yet failed to get up and down and settled for his second bogey. “It just got a little bit off there today off the tee on contact,” Spieth said. “The rest of the swing, I mean, I feel like I’m swinging the same and out in front of it and putting a good move on it.” Spieth has used the Texas Open to bolster his game in the past. In 2015, he finished second after four straight birdies late. Two weeks later, he won his first major at the Masters and in June won the U.S. Open. In February, Spieth had a share of the lead after a third-round 61 at Phoenix and he led by two shots going into the final day at Pebble Beach. Last month at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard in Florida, he was two shots out of the lead heading into the final day and finished tied for fourth. Scottie Scheffler, a Dallas native and former Texas Longhorns standout like Spieth, shared opening-round 68s with Tom Hoge and Sebastian Munoz. Scheffler was runner-up last week in Austin at the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play. He made up for a bogey on his 17th with an 11-foot birdie putt at his last. “I made a few silly mistakes here and there, kind of two sloppy bogeys, but other than that, I felt like I played really solid,” Scheffler said. “I was pretty frustrated bogeying a par 5 there towards the end of the round, so having a nice bounce back will give me some momentum and make me rest a little easier.” In addition to Mickelson’s final-hole struggles, he had a three-putt inside nine feet and on the next hole missed from less than four feet. Abraham Ancer was tied with Spieth at 4 under early in his second nine, but a triple-bogey and bogey finish put an even-par 72 on his card.
