Tiger: This is my best shot to win another major

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – The TOUR’s hot-shot rookie and one of its longest-tenured players will play in the final group at The RSM Classic on Saturday. They’ll be joined by one other man. Jason Gore, insurance salesman. Back problems and bad golf led the former TOUR winner to look for another job. It also helped him regain his love for the game. Kirkland-Gore Insurance was founded about 18 months ago. Entertaining clients is his main responsibility, but he did earn his insurance license last week. “I was playing well at home, but who knows when you get out here and play in this kind of weather, especially with this competition,â€� Gore said. He is competing on a sponsor exemption this week.  In the past 25 years, only eight players have won a PGA TOUR event while playing on a sponsor exemption. Gore is one of them. He will play in Saturday’s final group alongside Cameron Champ, the early front-runner for this season’s Rookie of the Year award, and Charles Howell III, the 39-year-old veteran of more than 500 TOUR events. Howell has a three-shot lead over Champ and Gore after back-to-back 64s. Howell is looking for his first win in more than a decade and just the third in nearly two decades as a pro. Champ is looking for his second win in five starts. Gore and Champ both shot 63 on Friday to move into second place. Champ is in position to take the FedExCup lead. At least for a day, Gore was reminded of better days. He’s still known best for his magical run in 2005, when he was the endearing underdog who played in the U.S. Open’s final group. He won four of his next eight starts, including his lone PGA TOUR title, and shot a 59. He’s won just once on the Web.com Tour since. This week, he’s back in the final group after getting one of the last spots in the field. He learned Sunday night that he’d been given a tee time at Sea Island. His car was packed for an unofficial event at Pebble Beach. He was on a red-eye flight to the East Coast hours later. “I’m just glad my boss would let me off to play,â€� he said. He only has the partial PGA TOUR status that is afforded to past champions, though. He’s played just 12 events over the past two years. He’s made one cut. “I haven’t played a weekend in so long, I don’t know what to do,â€� Gore said. “I have nothing to lose.â€� On Friday, he didn’t look like a man with a day job, albeit one that affords a lot of time on the golf course. He birdied his final four holes to shoot 30 on the back nine of Sea Island’s Seaside Course. He leads the field in Strokes Gained: Putting after gaining more than 5 shots on the greens Friday. He made all seven of his attempts between 5 and 15 feet, including three putts of 10-15 feet. He also made a 27-foot birdie putt on 17. Gore’s year got off to a promising start. Now he’s looking for a strong finish. He finished second in his third tournament of 2018, the Web.com Tour’s Club Colombia Championship. He hasn’t made a cut in his last eight starts, though. “My back felt terrible,â€� said Gore, who has arthritis in his spine. He had radio-frequency ablation six weeks ago to “burn all the nerves in there.â€� “Being out here, it kind of beats you up after all these years,â€� he said. Stepping away was just what he needed to get back on the leaderboard.

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Spieth, Kuchar, Koepka share early Open lead

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The PGA TOUR visits Charlotte, North Carolina, this week for the Wells Fargo Championship. We were on the range and putting green at Quail Hollow on the lookout for any equipment changes as the field prepares for one of the season’s toughest tee-to-green tests. There was no shortage of tinkering to be seen. Rickie Fowler continues to search In his first start since the Masters, we spotted Fowler on the range testing a number of shafts in his Cobra RadSpeed driver, including the popular Fujikura Ventus Red. Although it might seem odd to be testing two of the same shafts, it appears that they may be tipped differently — meaning that they were trimmed in the tip area to fine-tune the flex. Fowler had a lot going on at the range Tuesday. One of the more interesting things was an iron shafted with a Fujikura MCI Practice shaft, which is designed to help improve tempo by amplifying the feel of loading and unloading the gold shaft. Canadian Corey Conners is into some new irons A few weeks ago, a new Ping iron called the i59 debuted in the bag of Viktor Hovland. It looks like young Norwegian star is setting a trend with fellow Ping staffers. Corey Conners, who up until this week had been using a set of Pings iBlade irons, had a fresh set of prototype i59’s that look to be going into play. The image below is a close-up of the new iron. Satoshi Kodaira has some cool clubs in the bag The winner of the 2018 RBC Heritage has quite the eclectic set of clubs including some custom-stamped Titleist Vokey wedges with his name in cursive, as well as a game-improvement Ping G425 Crossover utility. But the two big standouts are his PRGR forged irons and a left-handed 8-iron, which he uses to warm up. Golf fans may remember the Japanese company for its sponsorship of Corey Pavin in the late ’90s. Fleetwood is getting a grip on his putting There are a lot of ways to grip a putter, and it feels like England’s Tommy Fleetwood has tried most of them in the search for the putting form that made him one of Europe’s top Ryder Cup players and a top-10 player in the world. He is still well inside the top 30 in the OWGR, and also sits 119th in the FedEx Cup. If the putter gets rolling this week, those numbers are going to change quickly. Jason Day is testing a new putter Longtime TaylorMade Spider devotee Jason looks to be taking a page out of Bryson DeChambeau’s playbook. He’s testing a SIK Flo C-Series putter with a graphite LA Golf putter shaft, the same make of putter and shaft as the reigning U.S. Open champion.

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