Olympics 2021 live updates: Caeleb Dressel caps historic week, Xander Schauffele wins gold

PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico — Harris English feels he got away from the basics that carried him to a promising start to his PGA TOUR career. He hopes he’s headed in that direction again. English holed a chip-and-run from off the 18th green Saturday for birdie and a 7-under 64, giving him the 36-hole lead at the Mayakoba Golf Classic as he tries to end six years without winning. English was at 13-under 129, one shot ahead of Vaughn Taylor, who had a 66 in the afternoon. Brendon Todd, coming off a victory two weeks ago in Bermuda Championship, had a 68 and was two back. “Just mainly working on the same stuff every day and kind of going back to the drawing board and figuring out what I was doing really well my first couple years on tour and just stick to that, not trying to reinvent the wheel,â€� English said. Whatever he’s doing, English is on a roll. He had to go back to the Korn Ferry Tour Finals after last season to regain his card. Since then, he has finished in the top 10 in three of his four tournaments. Next up is a long day. Because rain washed out all of Thursday, players will go as long as they can Sunday before darkness, with the 72-hole event concluding Monday. Even with the new policy of top 65 and ties making the cut, 82 players advanced to the final two rounds. The course, which received more than 9 inches of rain from Monday through Thursday, dried remarkably well and the greens had plenty of pace. English motored along, rarely getting into too much trouble. He birdied his last two holes to set the pace. English won at Mayakoba in 2013 when it was the final PGA TOUR event of the year. That was his last win, 170 tournaments ago. “I had a lot of success here and I love this place, love the greens,â€� English said. “Feel like if I can get it on the dance floor and hit 14, 15, 16 greens a round, I can give myself a chance. With this wind, anything can happen, but if I stay the course and keep hitting like I am, I’m in a good spot.â€� So is Todd, who overcame a mental block — he called in the yips — of a big miss to the right that nearly drove him from the game. Todd got it sorted out and picked up loads of confidence with his victory in the inaugural Bermuda event. His only frustration Saturday was with putting. “I hit it to 25 feet, 6 feet, 12 feet, 4 feet, and then missed a 12-footer for par on 5,â€� he said. “Striped it at the flag on 7, and on 8 I hit a close one in there about 10 feet and burned the edge. I just didn’t get the putts to fall in the second nine.â€� Danny Lee, who started the tournament 10 under through 13 holes for a 62, shot 70 and was three shots back. “Just missed a couple putts out there, made bogey on a couple par 5s,â€� he said. “Just golf happened.â€� Jason Day, playing Mayakoba for the first time in 10 years as he tries to get ready for the Presidents Cup, shot 77 and missed the cut.

Click here to read the full article…

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – A casual round on a par-3 course may have changed the course of Davis Thompson’s career. Thompson had impressed at the University of Georgia, having reached No. 1 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, won the SEC’s Player of the Year Award in 2021 and ranked second in that year’s class of PGA TOUR University presented by Velocity Global grads. As an amateur, he separated himself with his strong ballstriking. The margins are much smaller in professional golf, however, and his putting struggles were proving too costly. After missing the cut in the Korn Ferry Tour’s Nashville stop last year – his fourth missed cut in five starts – Thompson played a local par-3 course with a friend and started tinkering with his putting grip. Admittedly a creature of habit, the Korn Ferry Tour rookie was reluctant to depart from a traditional grip. But, as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures. Thompson decided to try the cross-handed, or left-hand-low, style of putting. “I was in a bad place mentally with my putting. … I needed to make a change,” he said recently at Sea Island Golf Club, the venue of this week’s RSM Classic and a course Thompson knows well. His father, Todd, is the RSM’s tournament director and Davis Thompson makes his home in St. Simons Island. He has already played the RSM three times, but this will mark his debut as a PGA TOUR member. He arrives home at 54th in the FedExCup thanks to two top-15 finishes, and credits his mid-season putting switch with making him a TOUR member at just 23 years old. He relied on two drills to get accustomed to the new grip, and they bore almost immediate fruit. He finished fifth in his second event with the new grip – before the final round, he watched putting highlights of Jordan Spieth, the gold standard for the left-hand-low grip – and won his next start. A month later, he’d earned enough points to officially clinch his first TOUR card. The drill: Thompson would hit putts from 3, 6 and 9 feet, requiring himself to make all five 3-footers he attempted, four of five from 5 feet and three of five from 9 feet. He had to start the drill over if he failed to hit all three benchmarks. He’d perform that drill from a variety of angles to the same hole to work on putts with different breaks. Thompson also would hit nine putts of 30 to 40 feet with a goal of averaging two strokes per hole. He said the cross-handed grip has made it easier for him to start his putts on their intended line and keeps his left shoulder from rising too early in the through-stroke. “It kept my left shoulder down—my shoulders are more level,” he said. “One of my flaws when I was putting traditionally was that my left shoulder was up and out of it pretty quickly.” A change to the tempo of his stroke accompanied the grip change. Thompson used to have a “pop” stroke, a la 2012 FedExCup champion Brandt Snedeker, but he found it difficult to control his speed on faster greens. Now his tempo is more even throughout the stroke. He practices while using a metronome app on his phone to dial in his tempo. He also counts in his head, a habit that has the added benefit of clearing his mind before he strikes his putts. “It gives my brain something to trigger the stroke and something besides the result to think of,” Thompson said. “I’m more focused on my counting instead of the line or speed or anything like that. “It’s one, look at the hole. Two, look back at the hole. Three, start my backstroke and four, make impact with the ball. It’s really helped create more positive energy on the golf ball. I used to take it back quick and decelerate coming through (impact) because I was trying not to kill it on fast greens. Creating more positive energy, you don’t see as much break because you’re hitting it solidly and the ball is rolling well.” Positive energy in his putting moved Davis Thompson’s career in a positive direction, straight to the PGA TOUR.

Click here to read the full article…

Daniel Berger used to think he didn’t really love golf… he just happened to be really good at it. But the two-time PGA TOUR winner has upgraded his love of the game over the last 18 months after a persistent injury took him away from the little white-dimpled ball he took for granted. Berger falls into the classic category of “You don’t know how much you love something till it’s gone.� Coming off a sixth-place finish at the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock, where he was part of the 54-hole lead, Berger was hitting a shot at the Travelers Championship when he felt some discomfort in the index finger on his right hand. It lingered. Berger battled through the pain and suited up for six more events that season and even forged top-15 finishes in the PGA Championship and THE NORTHERN TRUST. But the discomfort was stopping him doing his usual preparations and forced him to pull out of the BMW Championship before it began, ending his FedExCup run. The pain was now giving him issues down to the wrist. Inflammation meant only one thing could be done. Rest. RELATED:  What you need to know for The American Express | Power Rankings “I just couldn’t practice. I’d get to a golf tournament and hit just 50 golf balls the whole week and I just didn’t feel like I could do the preparation to where I would feel ready to go,� Berger explained. “At home I couldn’t go hit 500 balls if I wanted to. I never was able to do the things that in the past I was able to do.� Initially, a rest didn’t sound so bad to a young man who had been around elite athletes his whole life and had been working his tail off to become one himself since before he can remember. Berger’s father Jay played top-level tennis, winning three ATP singles titles and getting as high as seventh in the world. He played in the Davis Cup for the United States and then moved to coaching, working with the U.S. Davis Cup and Olympic tennis teams and also was a director of tennis for the USTA. Amongst this environment, young Daniel Berger thrived. “I knew since I was a young boy I would be a professional athlete. I just didn’t know what sport yet,� Berger said. His father, and Berger himself, are believers in the 10,000-hour rule. That being you need to get to 10,000 hours of dedicated practice in something to master it. So Berger’s life has been about putting in the work, and then doing more. So the idea of a break was something of a novelty. Maybe he could enjoy some down time and a more “normal� life for a while. The 2015 PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year was excited about getting in the water on his boat and doing other recreational activities that wouldn’t hamper his injury. And he did have fun … until he started to miss his previous way of life. “In the beginning I thought it was amazing. I got to do other things,� Berger said. “But the reality is my whole life all I’ve ever known is hit balls, go to a golf tournament, compete … and suddenly you are unable to do those things you are so passionate about and it sucks. “I have always been a firm believer of the harder you work the better you perform and prior to that I had never had a time in my career where I wasn’t able to do the things I felt like I needed to do. That was the most frustrating part. You know what you need to accomplish but physically you are unable to do that and it just eats you up.� The frustration and annoyance got the better of the 26-year-old. And he came back to competition in 2019 despite things not being 100%. A runner-up finish at the Puerto Rico Open in late February gave him a bit of false confidence that he could battle through things a little. But the entire season he couldn’t quite trust things and his practice time remained well down on his usual standards. He fell to 131st in the FedExCup without a top-10 after Puerto Rico and missed the FedExCup Playoffs. Now though, Berger says he is 100%. The last few months he has returned his practice to the hours he is accustomed to. And in his five starts this season Berger has three top-25 finishes to be currently 79th in the FedExCup. The results might not yet show significant improvement, but Berger knows his ball-striking is returning toward its best. At the Sony Open last week, he was 10th in the field in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee and 11th in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green. And he had his first positive mark of the season in Strokes Gained: Approach the Green. “I have put a lot of work in that I wasn’t able to do before. And that has already been the big difference in the five events I have played this season. I just need to continue to put the work in,� he said prior to The American Express this week in California. “It’s been a blessing to come back and do what I love. I used to always say I never really liked golf; I was just good at it. But when you take some time off, I realized I really like golf a lot. My main goal now is to put myself in contention to win. It is tough out here, so you’ve got to continue to get better. I feel like this offseason I did a lot of good things and I am hitting the ball way better than I have in a long time.� Berger is trying to get those feelings from the 2015, 2016 and 2017 seasons where he was Rookie of the Year and won back-to-back FedEx St. Jude Classics. He’s even reverted to the old TaylorMade irons he used coming through the ranks and says it helps him “just feel more like me.� As one of the famed Class of 2011, Berger has also drawn motivation from what Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth have already achieved in the game, knowing he’s always been able to compete on their level. It makes the idea of winning a FedExCup and major championships even more attainable. And watching the recent Presidents Cup on television – two years after he secured the clinching point for the U.S. Team at Liberty National – also put a fire in his belly. “I watched every single shot … and I never watch golf. But I love team sports and I love rooting for anything that’s American,� Berger said. “It is disappointing not to be there but obviously I didn’t deserve to be. To see those guys go out there and play the way they did was impressive and it is certainly motivating. “There are a lot of young guys making a name for themselves and I think you will see 10 or 15 guys playing on the teams for the next 10 or 15 years just like you saw with the Phil’s and Tiger’s. I want to be part of that.� Now that he’s back fit and healthy, there’s a good chance he will be.

Click here to read the full article…