Stats Insider: A Military Tribute at The Greenbrier

Taylor Pendrith is going for his first PGA Tour victory and he picked up a few late birdies to help. Penrith has a three-shot lead in the Butterfield Bermuda Championship.

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DETROIT – Bryson DeChambeau birdies three of the first four holes to seize the lead, and when it gets tight on the back nine he birdies three in a row to finish. His final-round, 7-under 65 is more than good enough to salt away the Rocket Mortgage Classic for his sixth PGA TOUR title. He moves from 12th to 4th in the FedExCup and serves notices that his new style, otherworldly power combined with astonishing touch, might just be changing the game. Welcome to the Monday Finish. THREE KEYS TO SUCCESS 1. He was a master of both touch and power. DeChambeau said he had heard the Donald Ross layout was a bomber’s paradise, and finding that to be the case, he took full advantage, nearly driving the green at the short par-4 first and 13th holes. He led the field in driving distance – he was outdriving even the TOUR’s longest hitters by as many as 30 yards – and in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee (6.672). But in a first for the ShotLink era, the winner also led in Strokes Gained: Putting (7.831). That’s a fearsome combination. 2. He didn’t crumble on 14. The par-5 14th was like a par 4 for DeChambeau, but he hacked his second shot out from the right trees, through the fairway and into the water hazard. Things were not going well, with Matthew Wolff finally finding his game and making a run in the group behind him. Still, DeChambeau didn’t panic. He took a drop, gave himself a par putt (he missed), and resolved to not let the bogey ruin his day. “I held my head high and I was able to almost make par,” he said, “but I just kept moving forward.” 3. He had perfect timing. As DeChambeau eyed his birdie putt from just over 30 feet at the 16th hole, it was time to make something happen. Wolff had bounced back from his own failure to birdie 14 – after being just behind the green in two – with a birdie at the 15th. DeChambeau’s comfortable lead was now down to a shot, but not to worry. He rolled in the 30-footer at 16 for birdie to restore a two-stroke lead, then gave Wolff no chance by making more birdies on 17 (an easy two-putt after hitting the green) and 18 (huge drive, stuck the approach to inside four feet). DeChambeau’s start (three birdies in first four holes) and finish (three straight) were impeccable. OBSERVATIONS McNealy has Motor City roots Stanford product Maverick McNealy isn’t just a product of Silicon Valley, where his dad Scott founded Sun Microsystems. Before that, Scott McNealy lived in Detroit, and Maverick and his three brothers, Dakota, Colt and Scout, are all named after cars. “My dad grew up here in Detroit and my grandpa worked for American Motors,” said McNealy, who shot a final-round 66 to finish 15 under and T8. “… It’s fun thinking back the last time I was here was when my dad caddied for me at the U.S. Amateur at Oakland Hills a couple years ago. “Our family all drives American cars,” he added. “I’ve got my mom’s old Ford Explorer and we have two Explorers and two F‑150s in the family right now between my brothers and I. It’s special.” One brother, he added, is just finishing up his computer science degree at Stanford while working for Autonomic, which McNealy described as Ford’s cloud computing capability. “A lot of Motor City connections with our family,” McNealy said. His final round would’ve been even better were it not for a missed four-foot birdie putt on 18. Still, he was pleased with the performance. “Making East Lake is my goal this year,” he said. Hubbard marches to own drummer Colorado native Mark Hubbard, who now lives in Houston, shot 72 to finish T12. In the third round he played alongside DeChambeau, presenting viewers with a drastic contrast in styles. “Me and my caddie were joking about it on the first tee,” said Hubbard, a devout skier. “I don’t know if there’s two more polar opposite people or players on the PGA TOUR.” DeChambeau’s epic tee shots bring down rain; Hubbard’s low ones run forever. DeChambeau is the Mad Scientist; Hubbard admitted he hadn’t heard about “specs” on a golf club until he was a freshman at San Jose State. Basically, he said, “I just kind of see it and hit it.” His only equipment quirk is his 33-inch putter; he bends so much at the waist to putt that his torso verges on horizontal. “I just see the lines better down there,” he said. His pairing with DeChambeau reached its comic apex at the par-5 14th hole, after DeChambeau “hit his usual drive about 100 past me,” said Hubbard, who was well back in the right rough. When CBS on-course reporter Trevor Immelman asked what club DeChambeau had used, and was told 8-iron, Hubbard chirped that he himself had only needed a 9-iron. “So I one upped him,” he said, “but mine was a layup to 85 yards.” Hubbard (69) was beating DeChambeau (67) until a four-shot swing in the last three holes. QUOTEBOARD “It’s nice to actually play on the weekend.” – Rickie Fowler, who moved up the board with a final-round 67 (14 under, T12) after earlier making his first cut since the Return to Golf. “It’s been a long week, mentally draining week.” – Cameron Champ, a late addition to the field after being medically cleared. He flew in Thursday and shot a final-round 66 (T12). “The level of play on TOUR these first four weeks has been incredible.” – Kevin Kisner (66, solo third, his best result since winning the 2019 WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play) WYNDHAM REWARDS The Wyndham Rewards Top 10 is a season-long competition that offers a $10 million bonus for the 10 golfers who end the regular season at the Wyndham Championship inside the top 10 in FedExCup points. The player atop the standings will earn $2 million, with varying payoffs for the others through $500,000 for the 10th place finisher. Bryson DeChambeau enters the Top 10 at No. 4 after winning the Rocket Mortgage Classic, while Lanto Griffin shoots a final-round 69 for a T21 in Detroit to inch up one spot. Webb Simpson (70, T8), meanwhile, maintains the top spot in the standings. Here’s how the standings look heading into this week’s Workday Charity Open. SOCIAL SNAPSHOT

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U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick is known for his dedication to detail. He enters intricate stats about every shot he strikes into a spreadsheet, so it should come as no surprise that it took 30 custom prototypes to find a putter that fit him perfectly. This is the story of how Fitzpatrick found his custom Bettinardi putter, one that’s based on a flatstick that hasn’t been available for a decade. This custom putter helped him to a win in this year’s U.S. Open and to his TOUR Championship debut. He is 15th in the FedExCup entering the season-ending TOUR Championship, and thus will start the week seven back of leader Scottie Scheffler. Fitzpatrick began using a Yes! Golf Tracy II when he was 16 years old. That putter was known for its unique C-Groove configuration. The C-Grooves, half-circle grooves facing downward, were said to produce a truer roll on the greens. U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen famously used a Yes! putter to win two U.S. Opens, and Fitzpatrick used his Tracy II to win another national championship in the United States, the 2013 U.S. Amateur. He continued to use the putter long after he turned professional and had no intentions of switching out the flatstick that brought him such success until he started running into a serious problem around 2016. He needed a reliable source for backup putters, but that became difficult after Yes! filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and was purchased by Adams Golf the next year. Without the option to purchase from Yes! Golf directly, Fitzpatrick began scouring eBay and exhausting his options to find a replacement. Around that time is when Sam Bettinardi, the current Vice President of Bettinardi Golf, stepped in with a lifeline. Bettinardi Golf is a putter manufacturer located in Tinley Park, Illinois – near Northwestern University, where Fitzpatrick played for a semester before turning pro — and the company has machining capabilities that would allow it to custom-make a putter to fit what Fitzpatrick was looking for. Bettinardi just needed a way to get in contact with Fitzpatrick to tell him about it. A mutual friend provided the crucial connection. “I approached his friend … (and) said, ‘Hey, I know you’ve played some golf with Fitzpatrick. … We would be the perfect company for him. We can make him all the putters he wants. We can dial it in,’’ Sam Bettinardi recently told GolfWRX. “And he goes, ‘You know what? That’s a good idea, Sam. The problem is Matt’s never going to switch. He’s been using the same putter since he was 16. But I’m happy to make an introduction to his father.’” And with that conversation, Sam had one foot in the door. When he finally got ahold of Fitzpatrick, it was clear Fitzpatrick didn’t want a new putter. He wanted a replica of his Yes! Golf original. “I started talking to Matt,” Bettinardi said, “and the premise of the conversation was, ‘If you can duplicate my (Yes! Golf Tracy II), I will use your putter. … I want it to be the exact same as what I have now. But I want to be able to go to somebody if I need tweaks, or I need backups, or I want to change anything. I want to go to a reliable company, … but you have to duplicate it.” What Sam Bettinardi didn’t know at the time was just how precise Fitzpatrick’s hands and eyes were. Fitzpatrick knew exactly what he wanted, and he wasn’t going to budge until he got it. “We took that Yes! Tracy II and made him six putters that were very similar,” Bettinardi said. “And that was in 2017. He goes, ‘You know what, you guys are close, but the feel is not there. Change this, change that.’ We made him six more, and he goes, ‘Hey, this is close, but the offset isn’t right. I need it to be this specific offset, and this specific weight.” Fitzpatrick’s challenge was proving more difficult than Sam Bettinardi and team originally thought. “Out of all the players I’ve dealt with and worked with – I’ve been working for Bettinardi Golf for 10 years — … Matt has to be up there in the top three most discriminating players. I’m not going not say picky. I’m going to say discriminating because he’s arguably a top-five putter in the world. He knows exactly what he wants. And if the offset was a slight tick off, or it was one gram different, he could tell.” Thirty prototype putters later, Fitzpatrick found an acceptable replacement. “It was a very, very tough project for us, but after about 30 putters, he finally found one where he was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to put it in play,’” Sam Bettinardi explained. “I believe he put it in play in 2018 for a short period of time. He then took it out and put it back into play again in 2021 for most of the season.” Fitzpatrick used his custom Bettinardi putter to win the biggest title of his career, the U.S. Open, earlier this year. Ironically enough, it was on the same course in Brookline where he used a Yes! Golf putter to win the 2013 U.S. Amateur nine years earlier. What is it that he loves about the C-Grooves? He explained Tuesday, saying, “If I just picked up a regular blade putter out any milling, it feels very fast off that putter. Mine feels a little bit softer. “Not only that, though, for me when I’ve hit putts with just a regular-faced putter I feel like it slides on the face a lot,” he added. “Like if I maybe don’t quite strike it perfectly, I feel like it slides off in a direction. With the C-groove that I have, I feel like it helps start it online much better.” Although it was a long and complicated process, Bettinardi Golf learned a bit along the way, including the secret behind the C-Grooves’ success, allowing the company to improve upon the earlier technology. “The (Yes! Golf) C-Groove has grooves that are milled at an angle, and after studying them, we learned they got the ball into a forward roll, or a true roll faster,” Sam Bettinardi told GolfWRX. “We took that and perfected it, and took it into our Roll Control face, which is what you see in our Inovai and Studio Stock line now. So we bettered that C-Groove for feel purposes, and got the grooves a little bit sharper with our precision machining techniques. … The best part for us was that the company was out of business and the patent on the C-Groove expired.” Now, Fitzpatrick continues to use the custom Bettinardi putter that’s made exactly for his preferences, which happen to be the exact same as they were when he was 16 years old using a Yes! Golf Tracy II putter. His former self would surely be proud of his recent accomplishments in 2022, but also of his custom flatstick.

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