Perry wins U.S. Senior Open by 2 strokes

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In his third PGA TOUR win, 24-year-old Jon Rahm is the new face of the Wyndham Rewards Top 10 this week. Rahm, partnered with Texan Ryan Palmer, claimed the Zurich Classic of New Orleans in impressive fashion. It lifted the Spanish star from 23rd to sixth in the FedExCup standings, putting him within striking distance of Matt Kuchar at the top as the season starts to heat up. With Rahm’s jump there was some minor shuffling inside the Wyndham Rewards Top 10. The top five – led by Kuchar – remain the same, but Brooks Koepka, Gary Woodland, Rickie Fowler and Charles Howell III all drop a spot. Former FedExCup champion Justin Thomas is the man who drops out. The top 10 in the standings after the Wyndham Championship — the final event of the PGA TOUR’s regular season — will receive a portion of the $10 million bonus in the new Wyndham Rewards Top 10 competition. First place after the Wyndham Championship will receive $2 million, followed by $1.5 million for second, all the way to $500,000 for 10th place, the final spot eligible for a bonus. Palmer moved from 50th to 19th, but the biggest jump was from Matt Every who claimed his first top five result since winning in 2015. Every climbed 35 spots from 137th to 102nd. LOOKING AHEAD Going into this week’s Wells Fargo Championship, five of the top 10 players in the Wyndham Rewards Top 10 are in the field. Rory McIlroy, Paul Casey, Gary Woodland, Rickie Fowler and Charles Howell III will all be looking to consolidate their place amongst the seasons best. None of them can catch Kuchar’s lead this week but they all have a shot at moving to second place. Click here for full coverage of the Wyndham Rewards Top 10

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ATLANTA — For the second day in a row, no one had a better score than Jon Rahm at the TOUR Championship. That’s just what he needed to make up ground on Patrick Cantlay going into a weekend chase for the FedExCup. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Jordan Spieth reveals that couple is expecting first child Rahm birdied his last three holes Friday for a 5-under 65. Cantlay birdied his last two holes for a bogey-free 66 to keep one shot ahead. It’s not quite a two-man race for the FedExCup with 36 holes still to play at East Lake, though it was shaping up as a possibility. Bryson DeChambeau was the next closest player, and his 67 lost ground Friday. He was six shots behind. “We definitely feed off each other,” Rahm said. “And that’s probably why you see the difference in the scoreboard right now.” Cantlay looked as though he was protecting a lead, often playing to the fat of the green. That was more a product of showing respect to an East Lake course that punishes even slight misses on the wrong side of the hole. He hit 16 of 18 greens, and only twice did he have par putts from about the 5-foot range. “I’m playing really well, and I think I’m playing the golf course the right way,” Cantlay said. Cantlay started the TOUR Championship at 10-under par because he was the No. 1 seed in the FedExCup. Rahm began four shots back. Asked if the idea was to chip away at the lead, Rahm replied, “What other strategy is there?” “As soon as we teed off, that didn’t matter,” he said of the four-shot deficit. “There’s a lot of golf to be played, even now.” The reason for Cantlay’s pre-tournament advantage was because of last week at Caves Valley. Cantlay and Rahm played in the final threesome, along with DeChambeau, going into the weekend at the BMW Championship. Cantlay finished 66-66 and won in a playoff. Rahm closed with 70-70 and tied for ninth, dropping to the No. 4 seed. That now seems long ago. The TOUR Championship, to a degree, feels normal now. Cantlay was at 17 under. He and Rahm will be in the final group again. DeChambeau had more work to do, as did Justin Thomas, who made two bogeys and failed to birdie the par-5 18th in his round of 67. He was seven behind. “A place like this, there’s not really a lead that’s safe with how tough it it can play,” Thomas said. “But at the end of the day, I can’t worry about what the other guys are doing. I just have to go out and try to make some birdies and stop making mistakes.” Harris English made his share of mistakes with five bogeys in his round of 69, leaving him in the large group at 9 under. So did Jordan Spieth. He was going for his fourth straight birdie to get right in the mix, facing a 10-foot putt on the 13th hole. He three-putted, lost momentum and shot a 67. Spieth, Rory McIlroy (66) and Louis Oosthuizen (67) were at 8 under. Gone are the low scores from the opening FedExCup Playoff events, at rain-soaked Liberty Natitonal and Caves Valley, where players at each course had a putt at 59. The best anyone has managed at East Lake, still slightly soft from rain and a light breeze, had been a 65. So it’s tougher for players to make up a lot of ground unless the leaders come back, and there has been little indication Cantlay and Rahm are going to do that. Cantlay had plenty of looks at birdie, and didn’t hear many calls of “Patty Ice” because not many of those putts were going in. He got up-and-down from a bunker on the par-5 sixth. His wedge into the 13th spun back to an inch of the cup. Rahm holed a 35-foot putt from off the green at the 13th, gave it back with a bad drive to the right on the next hole, and then closed the gap to one shot with a 10-foot birdie on the 16th. The final two holes felt like a duel, even for a lazy Friday afternoon. Rahm poured in a 25-foot birdie putt on the 17th, and Cantlay matched his birdie from 15 feet, the first time he had made a putt longer than 5 feet all day. On the closing hole, Rahm blasted out of the front bunker to tap-in range. Cantlay chipped down the slope and with the grain — one of the few times he was out of position — and watched it trail off 8 feet from the hole. He made that to regain the lead. “When you have somebody like him who played a round with very few mistakes — you could argue that it could have been a lot lower — it only motivates me to keep doing a little bit better,” Rahm said. “Even though I want to focus on myself, you know he’s not going to let up and he keeps putting it in the fairway and on the green and in the fairway and on the green. “It can raise your playing level a little bit,” he said, “as well as me raising his level when I’m making birdies.”

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