Takeaways from Round 1 of PGA Championship

Chinese rising star Haotong Li enjoyed playing in the company of major champions Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson on Thursday but a two-over 73 in his debut appearance at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship left a bitter taste. The 22-year-old Li made two birdies against four bogeys at the Club Golf de Chapultepec, paying dearly for missing seven fairways and 10 greens in regulation as he ended the opening round in tied 49th position. “Actually, I played all right, just had a couple of bad tee shots but it’s just the distance is so hard to judge. For some reason, it went way further than when I played in the practice round. So I just need to get the perfect distance, judge the distance better. That’s all,â€� said Li, who claimed his second European Tour victory in Dubai last month. Starting his day from the 10th tee, the slender Li dropped a bogey on 12 with a three putt made up for it when he holed a 40-foot birdie at the par five 15th hole. Three more bogeys on three, four and eight pushed him down the leaderboard before he salvaged his day with a closing birdie from three feet on nine “The wind was kind of different … different in the practice round. It was quite tough out there, honestly,â€� he said. “Today I just played too safely, everything is iron tee shot. Tomorrow I need to go more with the driver.â€� Playing partners Watson and Mickelson both came home with 69s, four shots better than Li who believes his game can only benefit by watching the established PGA TOUR stars up close and personal. “Yeah, it was really fun. It was awesome to play with them and it’s good experience,â€� said Li.

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ATLANTA — Scottie Scheffler returned to East Lake on Sunday morning looking every bit like the No. 1 player, pulling away with four birdies in six holes to complete the third round with a 4-under 66 that gave him a six-shot lead in the TOUR Championship. Scheffler was delivering a steady diet of pars that put him in a tight battle with Xander Schauffele until a second stoppage due to lightning in the area Saturday. At the time, he was one shot ahead. And then he was gone. Scheffler holed birdie putts from about 5 feet on the 13th and 15th holes. He stuffed his approach to 2 feet on the 17th and then made a superb escape from the left rough over the water that left him a long pitch he nearly holed on the par-5 18th. He tapped in to reach 23-under par. That left him one round away from the $18 million prize for winning the FedExCup. Rory McIlroy birdied his last two holes for a 63 and will be in the final group with Scheffler. He was at 17 under along with Schauffele, who also had good looks for birdie and didn’t make any of them Sunday morning. Defending champion Patrick Cantlay (66) and Sungjae Im (66) were seven shots behind. Scheffler is the No. 1 seed in the FedExCup and was rewarded with a two-shot lead at 10-under par before the tournament started. He is 13 under for his raw score, which is tied for McIlroy for the best this week. McIlroy, however, was the No. 7 seed and began six shots behind. Schauffele missed an 8-foot birdie putt on the 13th hole when they resumed the round. He sent his next tee shot so far to the right that he had to hit a provisional in case it was out-of-bounds. He found it, but wound up missing a 10-foot par putt to fall three behind. And then on the par-3 15th, Scheffler hit his tee shot to 5 feet to a front left pin over the water. Schauffele also hit a good one to 10 feet and missed again. Scheffler already has won four times this year, including the Masters, to reach No. 1 in the world and is considered a shoo-in for PGA TOUR player of the year. He won just over $14 million in the regular season — already a record, and not surprising given the steady rise in prize money. He won a $4 million bonus from the “Comcast Business Tour Top 10” for leading the FedExCup in the regular season, along with a $1 million bonus for winning the Aon Risk-Reward Challenge. A victory Sunday afternoon would equate to a $37 million year for the 26-year-old Texas grad.

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PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Dustin Johnson, the world’s top-ranked player, has made 10 starts at THE PLAYERS Championship. His best finish is a tie for 12th two years ago. It’s the only PGA TOUR event he’s played 10 times or more without a top-10 finish. “I don’t know – I struggle with everything,â€� Johnson said Wednesday in trying to explain a track record at TPC Sawgrass he calls “frustrating.â€� Justin Rose is the world’s second-ranked player. He’s made 15 PLAYERS starts with just one top-10 finish, a tie for fourth in 2014. Like Johnson, Rose’s results here are a career-low — it’s his most starts in a single TOUR event with so few top 10s. “I’m slightly bemused by why I haven’t done better,â€� Rose said. “… Doesn’t really make a lot of sense.â€� Indeed, it doesn’t – and yet those two aren’t alone. Some of the game’s most notable and successful players have come to TPC Sawgrass and made the kind of noise usually reserved for art galleries and libraries. Bubba Watson has 11 PLAYERS starts without a top 10; no other tournament has shut him out that many times. World No. 3 Brooks Koepka doesn’t have a top-10 in four starts. Combined, those two players have five major victories and 17 overall TOUR wins; each is also a native Floridian, but any “localâ€� knowledge obviously hasn’t translated here. Not that any of that should matter, insisted Koepka. “Course history isn’t what you guys make it up to be, I don’t think,â€� he said. Course history and past results, however, usually provide a starting point for contenders. Yet even the game’s two biggest names have consistently failed to stay in the mix at THE PLAYERS. Tiger Woods is the only player to win this event in both March and May but has just three top 10s in his other 16 starts at THE PLAYERS. In Tiger’s legendary career, he’s never made as many starts at a single event with so few top 10s. Phil Mickelson won THE PLAYERS in 2007 when it first moved to May but hasn’t had a top 10 since then. In 25 career starts, he has just three top 10s. The only other tournament in his career that comes close to matching that level of futility is the BMW Championship, in which he has two top 10s in 21 starts. Of course, that tournament rotates its host course each year. So what does all this tell us? Pretty much what we’ve known all along – that TPC Sawgrass favors no one and diffuses the horses-for-courses theory so prevalent at some other TOUR events. “It’s when Charles Howell goes to the Sony Open, he’s pretty much a stock standard top-10 guy or a win. I don’t know if there’s anyone out there that plays that well at this golf course – and that’s what’s so interesting about it,â€� said Jason Day, whose rollercoaster results at TPC Sawgrass include a win in 2016, two other top 10s and three missed cuts. One big reason why TPC Sawgrass doesn’t favor a particular style? It has avoided becoming a bomber’s paradise. At 7,189 yards, it’s not particularly long, and accuracy is at a premium – especially after THE PLAYERS moved to May with its firmer, faster conditions. Day, for instance, won two years ago basically hitting 2-iron off the tee instead of being able to bomb it. Most of the game’s best players are big hitters but not being able to overpower the Stadium Course has reduced their advantage. “All the notables in the game now are a reflection of what is going on in the game; they’re the bombers, they hit it forever,â€� said David Duval, the 1999 PLAYERS winner who is now a Golf Channel analyst. “That’s not a necessity here. It opens up the field that much more because of that. … there’s no soft spots among the 144 teeing it up. “The reality is that length is always an advantage. It doesn’t matter the golf course you play. But I think also at the same time as I talked about for a number of years about this golf course, a lot of the modern players and in a way seemingly like to bully a golf course into submission with length. This golf course doesn’t not allow that. You have to play the golf course as it was built and designed and you can get around that way.â€� Pete Dye’s course put a premium on precision, where shotmakers such as Fred Funk and Tim Clark can succeed, where the shorter hitters are on somewhat equal turf. “If this was a modern-style golf course where every carry was 300 [yards] and things widened out, it would be frustrating for 40 percent of the field,â€� Rose said. “I don’t think any one of the PGA TOUR players that are here this week is frustrated by this golf course. I think everybody gets here thinking, ‘I’ve got a good chance to win.’ “The best players in the world think they’ve got a better chance to win, which they do, but I think that it’s slightly condensed. I think the top players in the world these days are the guys who are hitting it generally a lot further than most, so you might run into six, seven, eight, nine venues a year where you’re playing against guys who just maybe can’t beat you based on their skill set versus yours. “This golf course allows everybody that chance to win, which is I think appropriate for THE PLAYERS Championship.â€� Adam Scott at TPC Sawgrass in just his third PLAYERS start in 2004 and has three top 10s and three other four other top 20s since then. That makes him one of the few players who can point to at least a modicum of consistency at this event. “I think probably there are certain courses that people love and, I wouldn’t say hate, but just they don’t agree with you,â€� Scott said. “Whether it’s visually or a particular hole or something – I mean, a lot of guys struggle putting at Riviera and I putt well there, which is weird. And this might be a course like that as well, where it’s just difficult to see the right shot, difficult to read the greens. “If you get on a bad run here, this course really can dent your confidence because the severity of penalty is very extreme, and that was part of the design from Pete Dye. You’re on the green, or three inches to the left, you’re in the water. It’s a big difference in a game of inches.â€� Johnson, fresh off his 20th career TOUR win at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship, has never played THE PLAYERS in March. But he thinks the schedule switch might play to his strength, with a more receptive course that doesn’t penalize his lengthy shots that run out into trouble. “Playing it how we did, where it was just straight Bermuda – it was always really firm and fast,â€� he said. “It kind of brought the whole into play, but that’s just how it was and how it played and the short Bermuda rough was really difficult to judge. Now the course plays completely different. It’s softer, it’s longer, the rough’s a little bit deeper but it’s still playable. … “It definitely sets up better for me like this.â€� That’s good news for DJ but perhaps bad news for the rest of the field. Don’t worry, though – if we’ve seen anything about TPC Sawgrass, the course will find a way to equalize the field.

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