Tiger Woods pleased as Charlie shines in runner-up finish at PNC

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Hideki Matsuyama was surprised when a rain delay disrupted his hot play on Quail Hollow’s back nine. But he welcomed this interruption, even if it threatened his momentum. “I was grateful for the rain delay because I was getting tired,â€� Matsuyama said. “I was able to lay down in the locker room and get some rest.â€� August’s heat and humidity wasn’t the cause of his fatigue. No, it was his play. “I think what was making me tired was I wasn’t hitting my driver like I wanted to,â€� Matsuyama said. “I was hitting fairways but I wasn’t getting the crisp contact that I was hoping for with my driver.â€� These are the words of someone who just shot a bogey-free 64, the low round of the week, to share the lead at the PGA Championship. Matsuyama, though, is known for his high standards, and even Friday’s round couldn’t meet them. He had no problem choosing Friday’s best shot. It was an 8-iron to 7 feet on the par-3 17th hole that set up his fifth birdie in six holes. As for his worst? “There were too many. I can’t count them all,â€� he said. “Somehow, my worst shots were finding the fairway.â€� Matsuyama is one of the PGA TOUR’s best ball-strikers, but he’s seemingly never satisfied with how he’s hitting the ball. His one-handed follow-throughs and disgusted demeanor that precede his ball landing close to the hole have become the subject of Internet satire. At 8-under 136, Matsuyama shares the PGA Championship’s 36-hole lead with Kevin Kisner. They were two strokes ahead of Jason Day (70-66) when the second round was suspended by darkness after the afternoon’s rain delay. Matsuyama, 25, is trying to become the first player from Japan to win a major. He’s already won three times this season, including Sunday’s victory at the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational, and is the FedExCup leader. His final-round 61 was his second-best putting round of the season, according to strokes gained: putting. He switch to a new putter, a TaylorMade TP Mullen, at last week’s World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational. Matsuyama also won this season’s WGC-HSBC Champions (by seven) and the Waste Management Phoenix Open. His strong ball-striking sets up best for the major championships, where conditions are toughest. He’s finished in the top 15 of the year’s first three majors, including a career-best T2 at the U.S. Open. Matsuyama needed just 23 putts Friday, tying his personal record for fewest putts in a round. His +4.5 strokes gained: putting also is the top single-round mark of his career (Note: Strokes Gained statistics not official until round’s end). “Twenty-three putts just means I missed a lot of greens,â€� Matsuyama said. He missed six greens, to be exact, and five fairways Friday. But his iron shots that did find the green were close to the hole. He only had to make two putts longer than 8 feet Friday, a 22-footer for par on No. 9 and an 11-footer for birdie on the 12th hole. Matsuyama has been one of the TOUR’s best ball-strikers since turning pro in 2013. It his putting that determines his fate. A hot putter helped him post four wins and two-runners-up in a six-tournament span that ended with the SBS Tournament of Champions in January. His performance on the greens cooled after that, but has picked up again recently. “I wish I knew (why),â€� he said. “The greens here at Quail Hollow, as you know, are really fast. And there’s a lot of putts that honestly, I’m not trying to make. I’m just trying to get it up near the hole, and a lot of them are going in.â€�

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HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the pool where he trained a year ago in March, Tommy Hughson had to get creative. He had aspirations of swimming in college, and he had to stay in shape. So, during the week, the high school senior would run and ride bikes to work on his cardiovascular fitness. Then, on Saturdays, Hughson, who has competed at junior nationals since he was in ninth grade, would swim in the river near a friend’s house. One day they saw an alligator about 200 yards in the distance, and they did the only logical thing. “We swam the other way,” Hughson says matter-of-factly. Meanwhile, Julia Kubec and her mother were spending some of their free time in the early stages of the nationwide shutdown last April and May sewing personalized home-made masks and handing them out to medical workers at various facilities on Hilton Head Island. “I’m not the best sewer, but we made them by hand,” Kubec says. If it’s true, as playwright Oscar Wilde once said, that no good deed goes unpunished, though, Kubec’s gesture turned out to be one of them. In October, she tested positive for COVID-19, along with several other members of the Seahawk soccer team at Hilton Head Island High. It was the weekend before Kubec was set to return to in-person classes. “At first I was like really concerned, but I was pretty asymptomatic, so I wasn’t super worried about it,” recalls Kubec, who did lose her sense of taste and smell. “But in my house, like, my family would not even acknowledge me whatsoever. They would leave food like outside my door.” Later this spring, Kubec and Hughson will graduate from high school this spring with GPAs in excess of 5.0, heading to Duke and the University of Chicago, respectively. They are among 11 seniors from Beaufort and Jasper counties who were named Heritage Classic Foundation Scholars earlier this year. All were deeply affected by COVID-19. One of the recipient’s father was in the hospital for 11 days battling acute respiratory distress syndrome, viral pneumonia and sepsis. He survived thanks to a transfusion of convalescent plasma. Another family needed food bank donations after several members tested positive and had to stop working. One recipient worked at a local pharmacy and delivered medications while separated from his mom and sister, who couldn’t get back home from Nevada due to travel restrictions. Ten of those impressive students received four-year awards that ranged from $16,000-20,000 while the 11th was a one-year grant of $3,000. A total of 353 students have been named RBC Scholars and earned grants totaling $4.63 million since the beginning of the program in 1993. The Heritage Classic Foundation Scholars program is funded by members of the Tartan Club, who make a minimum family contribution of $1,000 year, and ticket sales. “It means a lot,” Hughson says. “It really means a lot. And it puts me again in debt to this Island. I’ve grown up here and I’ve gotten so much from this Island. I have so many great memories and yet again, I’m being helped along in my life by something amazing.” Kubec’s reaction was similar. “I feel like it kind of is a way for me, like, all the sacrifices and hard work that I’ve accomplished over the past few years finally feel like they’re being recognized kind of, because there’s just been so much that I’ve had to give up throughout high school in order for like my academics and athletics,” she says. “So. with this, it just finally feels like worth it.” Academic success, leadership and community service – three hallmarks of the RBC Scholar program — go hand in hand for Kubec and Hughson. Kubec was vice president of her freshman and sophomore class and president as a junior. She’s helped organize homecoming activities and food drives and donations for local animal shelters. The last year has been different, though, and milestones like graduation ceremonies and the prom are up in the air. “It’s just been crazy and I’m not like the biggest fan of like surprises, but everything with COVID just feels like new surprises showing up every week,” Kubec says. “It’s been really interesting, like kind of disappointing in some ways, because a lot of the things that we may have been like looking forward to this year, haven’t been able to go on. … “So that’s definitely been upsetting, but I feel like everyone, especially our school has been really good at like adapting to it. And they still like have tried at least to provide us with some of those things, which is positive.” Kubec, who will attend Duke in the fall and likely study economics, has also taken mission trips with her church to work at youth recreation camps in the Honduras and build houses in the Dominican Republic. She calls the experience “life changing. “Just seeing how different, life is in one of those countries and even just like the culture and the way that people interact,” Kupec says. “The communities are so close and everyone is just so like appreciative of everything. Especially when we worked with the children, just seeing how even despite like the language barriers and everything, we were just able to like form these close relationships with them. It was very heartwarming.” Hughson, who will swim for the University of Chicago next year, is president of the Model United Nations and French National Honor Society at Hilton Head Island High. If not for COVID-19, Hughson would be preparing to travel to a conference where students like him roleplay as delegates to the UN. This year it’s on-line. “You pretend to be a country or a representative from that country and you debate and argue and try to solve world issues such as maybe a hunger crisis in a country or a conflict over in another region,” Hughson explains. “So, you have to do it through diplomacy, and you have to make decisions and write the laws and bills. It’s really interesting.” Small wonder, then, that Hughson hopes to work in the State Department. As much as he’s interested in current events, though, the Seahawk swim team captain also loves looking into the past. Hughson has been interested in archeology since he was in preschool – “I’ve always liked old ruins, digging in the dirt and finding old stuff,” he says. His interest is so keen that the local archeological society has given him the opportunity to work on a native American shell ring that turned out to be 3,500 years old. Hughson started small, moving dirt, then screening through it to find artifacts. As he gained experience, he was able to operate some of the machinery like the magnetometer and spectrometer. He calls the opportunity “pretty cool.” “Growing up with the island, you only really know about the beaches and the tourists and all the big hotels,” Hughson says. “So, I didn’t really know we had such a rich history.”

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