Logjam at the top in unpredictable U.S. Open

Click here to read the full article…

PALM HARBOR, Fla. – What a difference a few days can make. On Monday, Corey Conners made an unsuccessful attempt to qualify for the Valspar Championship. He was leading the tournament when he walked off the course Thursday afternoon. Conners’ 71 on Monday at Southern Hills Plantation in nearby Brooksville, Florida, was six shots too high to earn a spot in this week’s PGA TOUR stop, but the rookie learned later that day that he got in the Valspar field after another player withdrew. Conners made five birdies and just one bogey on a difficult day at Innisbrook Resort’s Copperhead Course. Cool, breezy conditions played to the strengths of the Canadian who attended college at Ohio’s Kent State, where he was teammates with PGA TOUR winner Mackenzie Hughes. “I don’t overpower it, but everything is really solid,� Conners said. “I definitely like the challenge and like golf courses that put a premium on the fairway and hitting the green.� He missed just four fairways Thursday, but his short game saved him several times as he hit just 11 greens. “It was a lot of tap-in pars and made some birdies,� said Conners, who needed just 24 putts Thursday, ranks 133rd in the FedExCup. He has made the cut in nine of 10 starts this season, but hasn’t finished better than T29. He was a two-time U.S. Amateur semifinalist (2013, ’14), losing to Gunn Yang in the 2014 final. OBSERVATIONS Rory McIlroy’s struggles continued Thursday at the Valspar Championship. He three-putted the last hole for 74, his fifth consecutive over-par round. It’s the first time since April 2010 that McIlroy has had more than four consecutive over-par rounds on TOUR. He’s 12-over par in his past five rounds. He didn’t hole a birdie putt Thursday. His lone birdie was a holed bunker shot on his 16th hole. Some big names struggled down the stretch Thursday. Patrick Reed, who lost a playoff to Jordan Spieth here in 2015, reached 4 under with four holes remaining, but played Nos. 15-18 in 4 over par. Sergio Garcia was 3 under par with six holes remaining, but played his final six holes in 2 over to shoot 70. Adam Scott, who played alongside Garcia, also reached 3 under on his back nine before signing for a 70. Scott took his first lesson from instructor George Gankas, an Instagram sensation with more than 92,000 followers. Chris Couch, who’s making his first PGA TOUR start since 2012, shot 71. The 44-year-old birdied his first hole, then made 16 consecutive pars before bogeying the 18th. He has four events to earn $311,662 to retain exempt status for the remainder of the season. Steve Stricker, who picked up his first PGA TOUR Champions victory last week at the Cologuard Classic, opened the Valspar Championship with a 1-under 70.

Click here to read the full article…

When Billy Hurley III played in the 2005 Walker Cup, his teammates included Matt Every, Brian Harman and J.B. Holmes, all players he now competes against regularly on the PGA TOUR. But his path to the TOUR decidedly different than theirs. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 2004 and had a five-year service commitment before he could even think about making his living playing golf. That Navy career took Hurley to Pearl Harbor as well as to the Persian Gulf, where he served aboard the USS Chung-Hoon, which is a 10,000-ton, guided missile destroyer that was charged with protecting Iraqi oil platforms. And often, Hurley was the man driving the ship, winning several handling awards along the way and even navigating the Suez Canal. Hurley, who competes this week in THE PLAYERS Championship, focused on a career at the helm early on in part because he thought his eyesight would preclude him from flying. Even when the Navy decided to allow pilots who had LASIK surgery midway through his stint at the Academy, Hurley stayed the course – literally. “We have ships at the Naval Academy that we use for training just there in the Severn River and Chesapeake Bay,â€� Hurley says. “And you know, the first time doing that I knew I was pretty good at it and just really enjoyed it. “It was just a lot of fun.â€� After graduation, Hurley was selected to be a surface warfare office – and learning to drive the ship was the first order of business. He says it normally takes nine months to a year, depending on sea time, to prove competency, which is followed by an oral examination by the captain, XO and other senior officers. “That usually consists of a lot of standard kind of questions and then some situational kind of questions and then some emergency procedures to kind of make sure that you know what you would do … in an equipment failure,â€� he explains. “There’s very regimented steps.â€� “It’s already laid out. It’s not guesswork. It’s if this happens, you do one, two, three, four. If that fixes it, great. If it doesn’t, then you do five, six, seven, eight. So you kind of have to have all that memorized and know that really like the back of your hand.â€� The destroyer, which in Hurley’s case was 509-and-a-half feet long, has two rudders and two huge screw propellers. The rudders can’t operate independently except in an extreme emergency. The screws are a different story, though. “So that’s obviously just like driving a speed boat on the lake, you turn the wheel to go left, you go left,â€� Hurley says. “But the unique thing about having two propellers is that you can operate those in different ways to, to kick the ship or back the ship up in a different angle. “So we call it twisting the ship where you could make one of the propellers go backwards and one go forward and the ship will kind of nearly just twist in place if you do it right.â€� Hurley, who picked up his first TOUR victory at the 2016 Quicken Loans National about an hour from Annapolis where the Naval Academy is located, says you can even make the 10,000-ton behemoth go straight sideways by twisting the screws and doing the opposite with the rudders. “It’s really cool,â€� he says. “It’s really cool.â€� The trip through the Suez Canal, according to Hurley, was more of a management situation “where you’re just kind of making sure you’re in between the buoys and stay in the middle.â€� Once, though, he was the man giving the orders as the destroyer got underway from Pearl Harbor without using any tugboats. “We twisted and twisted and kind of just came off the pier and then, and then drove out of the slip,â€� Hurley recalls. “So that was, that was one of the cooler things. “I think I made the captain a little nervous when I told him I wanted to try. Sir, I think I can do this without tugs. He’s like, y-e-a-h, I know you can. (And I was like) well, no, I can, like, we can do this without tugs. So we had the tugs obviously there … but we didn’t end up using any of their help. So that was really fun.â€� So does driving a car seem easy now that he’s maneuvered massive destroyers through the Red Sea and the South China sea? “Honestly, it’s very, very, very different,â€� Hurley says. “The thing about a ship is when you turn the wheel, it doesn’t just go. There’s a little lag time. So unlike driving a car where you can do nearly what you want immediately, you have to be constantly thinking ahead. “Then you have wind and you have current and you have all these other things that you’re paying attention to as well, that can help you if you do it right and can make it really, really difficult if you do it wrong.â€� Not that Hurley made too many mistakes.

Click here to read the full article…