FORT WORTH — Sam Burns waited a while to win his fourth PGA TOUR title.
He shot 5-under 65 on Sunday, another warm and wind-whipped day at the Charles Schwab Challenge. Burns finished the final round at 9 under par. He thought he needed to be 10 under. He watched the 16 players ahead of him fight the rustling breezes and quickening greens at Colonial Country Club.
None of them lasted.
Nearly two hours after his round had ended, Burns defeated Scottie Scheffler in a playoff on the first extra hole, No. 18 at Colonial CC. Burns holed a 38-foot putt from the fringe behind the green that veered right and fell on its last revolution. Scheffler had a putt of 37 feet and missed. It seemed like it was over before it started.
“I’m pretty exhausted,” the new champion said in the equally new tartan jacket given to the winners at Colonial. “Mentally I was prepared to go as long as it took. I don’t know if I could have done it physically. But mentally I was ready. When coach calls your name, you’ve got to be ready to play, and I think we did a really good job of being ready.”
Burns, 25, started the final round in a tie for 17th place. He said he never looked at a leaderboard. He was seven shots behind Scheffler when he hit his first shot.
“Who would have ever thought that you’d have a chance seven back?” Burns said.
He went out in 5-under 30. He made one birdie and one bogey on the back nine. He posted one of 12 scores in the 60s.
He had lunch with his family and kept an eye on the leaderboard. Scheffler, who held a two-shot lead after three rounds, plodded through an uneven afternoon of no birdies but clutch putts to save par. Scott Stallings and Brendon Todd started the round right behind him. They too struggled. Nearly everyone did.
Harold Varner III threatened. Then he played the back nine. Varner shot a 45 to go from a grasp of the lead to a tie for 27th after an 8-over 78.
“I did not envy them,” said Burns, who finished at 3:47 p.m. local time.
Five players completed the par-5 11th hole at 10-under or better. None of them could stay there. Davis Riley was 11 under at the tee at No. 12; he finished at 8 under. Scheffler shot 72. Todd shot 71. Stallings shot 73. The few players who did manage Colonial at par or better started the round too far from the lead.
“I think both days on the weekend the back nine played exceptionally hard,” Todd said.
“I gave myself a lot of looks,” said Scheffler. “I just didn’t have it today.”
Colonial played to an average of 72.3 sturdy strokes Sunday — more than two shots over par. Gusts of 30 mph raked the grounds. The players learned to time them, making their swings in the lulls. On the 18th tee, Scheffler stepped into his shot at the precise moment one of them rose. “A tornado,” Scheffler quipped to his caddie.
“It’s just a really hard golf course and a lot of wind,” Burns said.
When Scheffler reached No. 16, he and Burns were the only players left at 9 under. Burns excused himself from lunch and went to the gym, where he stretched for 15 minutes. He laced his golf shoes, rolled a few putts and prepared for the possibility that he would play more golf.
An hour later, Burns was holding the trophy.
He and his caddie had talked earlier in the week about how to confront Colonial, a course that opened in 1936. Many players, including those who’ve won the tournament, argue that Colonial requires few drivers. Better to take shorter clubs and aim for the widest parts of the fairways, they say.
“The data does not back that up,” Burns said. “You need to push it around this golf course.”
Burns did just that. He led the field in driving distance, averaging 297 yards off the tee. But he also was pushing it with his putter. He ranked second in Strokes Gained: Putting (4.1) in the final round. The combination of sheer distance and touch on the greens made the difference.
Burns earned 500 FedExCup points, vaulting his total to 2,101. Only Scheffler, at 3,142, has more.
“I feel like I need to win a handful more times to catch Scottie,” Burns said.
He’d like to have the chance. He and Scheffler, identical in age, are close friends, Burns said. They shared a close embrace after playoff.
“It’s going to be a fun story that we get to have for the rest of our careers,” Burns said.
THIRD ROUND
FORT WORTH — The wind blew hard on the day for moving. Little moving could be done.
Scottie Scheffler started the third round with a share of the lead at the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club. He birdied the last hole on a gusty Saturday to take it alone by two. His 30-footer there was one of three birdies in his entire round on a course with a reputation for yielding plenty of them. Colonial (par 70) averaged 70.6 strokes for the field. Only Scheffler and 19 other players broke par.
Brendon Todd crafted a masterful front nine at Colonial Country Club, with an eagle and three birdies. He made straight pars on the back, committed no bogeys, shot a 5-under 65 and rose 13 spots to a tie for second place, two behind Scheffler. Todd, who made the only significant move of the tournament, hit just eight greens in regulation. He missed four greens with wedges in his hand.
Scott Stallings, who began the afternoon in a tie for first with Scheffler and Beau Hossler, looked out of the picture after a bogey on No. 10, his third in four holes. But he rallied with three birdies over the last seven. Stallings lost just one place with an even-par round. He tied Todd at 9 under.
The story about Saturday at the Schwab begins and ends with the conditions players know to expect when the PGA TOUR comes to Texas for its annual springtime swing.
The wind battered good shots. It made bad shots worse. Scheffler hit the same shot into the par-4 12th and the par-3 13th. Both succeeded. Minutes later, he faced an identical yardage with a similar angle on the par-4 14th. Then the wind paused. Scheffler watched his ball sail like a runaway kite. It came to rest almost 70 feet past the hole.
“That’s just stuff that kind of happens out there,” Scheffler said.
Even Todd had trouble explaining his score — the best of the round by two strokes. He even played later in the day, when the winds were rising. He said Colonial was his favorite course on TOUR, owing to the fact that Todd, one of the shorter drivers among his peers, can compete on a 6,929-yard — actual distance on Saturday — golf course.
Todd ranks 55th in driving distance among the 69 players who made the cut. But his precision this week from the tee has been exceptional. A three-time winner on TOUR, Todd ranks first through 54 holes in driving accuracy among the 69 players who made the cut. He also tops the list in Strokes Gained: Putting, earning five shots on the field. He took a mere 22 putts in the third round.
“It just seems like when we get calm conditions out here, guys go crazy,” said Todd, whose best finish in six starts at the Schwab is a tie for fifth in 2014. “But it’s almost the opposite for me. A little bit of wind allows me to use the wind to shape shots into the pins and stay patient. That’s the key.”
But the key isn’t always predictable. His 9-iron at the downwind par-3 16th, for example, carried 168 yards — 20 yards longer than his typical 9-iron yardage. Playing alongside Tood, Mito Pereira swung the same club. His ball traveled 185 yards and flew the green.
“The wind was whipping,” Todd said, “and it was good to get out there and keep the ball in play and make some birdies.”
Stallings, who shot 67-64 this week after qualifying Monday for the U.S. Open, also fought the elements all afternoon. He was two shots over par at the turn. He bogeyed the par-4 10th. Nine under to start the day, Stallings was five strokes behind Scheffler when his afternoon began to improve. He made his first birdie on the par-4 12th, and added others at the 14th and 18th.
“Everyone had to deal with it,” Stallings said of the wind, “and I didn’t do a very good job early. But it was nice to see a few go in late, closer to where I wanted to be going into tomorrow.”
He and the others know they’ll need to do a very good job of managing a different sort of distraction Sunday. Scheffler, the Dallas resident and reigning Masters champion with four PGA TOUR wins this season, will have brigades of noisy support from family, friends, neighbors and others from the Dallas-Fort Worth area who claim Scheffler as one of theirs. With Jordan Spieth six shots behind, Scheffler will be the expected and obvious sentimental favorite.
The wind will blow again. With its many turns and wind-shielding trees, Colonial likely will present the same defenses it mounted Saturday.
“You’ve just got to be committed to what you’re doing,” Scheffler said.
“Hopefully if I hit enough good shots, I’ll be able to get a few good breaks and some bad ones, as well, and just kind of ride things out.”
SECOND ROUND
FORT WORTH — This has been a good week in North Texas for Scott Stallings, first qualifying for the U.S. Open that will be played less than an hour from where he was born and now sharing the lead at Colonial with top-ranked Scottie Scheffler and Beau Hossler.
Stallings shot a 6-under 64 without a bogey on a relatively calm Friday at Hogan’s Alley. That put the Massachusetts-born and 206th-ranked player in the world at 9-under 131 along with with Dallas-area resident Scheffler and former University of Texas player Hossler, who both had bogey-free 65s.
Scheffler, in one of the last groups of the day after Stallings and Hossler played in the morning wave, tied them with a 14-foot birdie putt at the par-4 17th and saved par at No. 18 after his final drive went left into the rough.
“I think I needed to put up a good score with the wind being real low and the greens being not crazy firm,” said Scheffler, without a bogey so far this week. “Yeah, I love that stat. It’s a lot of fun. … I kept the stress off myself for the most part.”
It was calm pretty much throughout the day Friday. But hot and breezy conditions are expected for the weekend rounds at the Charles Schwab Challenge, with gusts around 30 mph and temperatures in the mid- to upper-90s in the forecast.
Scheffler and Hossler were among the Colonial-record eight players to share the 18-hole lead at 66. Stallings began the second round as one of the seven others within a stroke of that.
Patrick Reed matched his opening 66 with another and was alone in fourth place at 8-under 132. Pat Perez (66) and Chris Kirk (67), the 2015 Colonial champion who hasn’t won on the PGA TOUR since, were 7 under.
After missing the cut at last week’s PGA Championship like Scheffler did, the 37-year-old Stallings came to the Dallas area to play in a 36-hole qualifier Monday for the U.S. Open next month in Brookline, Massachusetts. He shot 8 under and placed 11th to get into his third U.S. Open and 12th major overall.
“That was a huge goal, probably the biggest goal I had of the year, is to play the Open up there,” Stallings said Friday. “Probably the only time in my career I’ll have an opportunity to play a major championship in New England where at least half my family lives, my sister lives just down the road.”
Stallings had eight birdies and five bogeys in his first round at Colonial. There were no bogeys on Friday, and no birdies until four in the middle of the round — at Nos. 8, 9, 11 and 12. The three-time PGA TOUR winner added another at No. 14, then finished by rolling in a 28-foot birdie putt.
Having the momentum of qualifying for the U.S. Open “carry over into the week was nice to see, and take advantage of a day that we definitely haven’t seen very often here,” said Stallings, who was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, but now lives in Tennessee, where he went to school at Tennessee Tech.
Jordan Spieth, another local favorite and No. 9 in the world, shot 66. He birdied his first two holes and had a 35-foot birdie putt when finishing on the ninth hole. Spieth was tied for 12th at 5 under.
The 2016 Colonial winner, Spieth was the runner-up at Hogan’s Alley for the third time last year, when he led after each of the first three rounds before falling in a final-group showdown with Jason Kokrak the last day. Korak is even par through two rounds this year.
Fifth-ranked Justin Thomas missed the cut at 3 over a week after winning the PGA Championship for the second time. His 72 on Friday included going 6 over over a four-hole stretch midway through the round — bogeys at No. 7, 8 and 10, and triple-bogey 7 at No. 9 without going in the water.
It is the second year in a row the PGA winner played the following week at Colonial missed the cut. Last year it was Phil Mickelson.
Hossler, in his 136th PGA TOUR event and still looking for his first victory, had a more steady second round after the exciting finish Thursday, when he had two eagle 2s his last four holes, though both hole-outs came immediately after bogeys.
“Certainly, yesterday was more of an up-and-down round. Today felt frankly, never really stress-free, but as stress-free as it’s going to get,” Hossler said. “It felt like I was in play. I never was that out of position.”
Nick Taylor, ranked 244th in the world, took the solo lead for the second day in a row. The Canadian dropped into a share of the first-round lead with a bogey on his final hole, and Friday shot 6-over 41 on his final nine holes after five birdies in his first nine holes to make his turn at 9 under.
FIRST ROUND
FORT WORTH — Scottie Scheffler did something last weekend that he rarely does, watching a golf tournament at home after missing a cut. The world’s No. 1 player is back on the course, and tied atop a crowded leaderboard at Colonial.
Scheffler was among eight players who shot 4-under 66 on Thursday in the Charles Schwab Challenge. But he was the only one in that group without a bogey, rebounding from his missed cut at the PGA Championship.
Cam Davis, Beau Hossler, Chris Kirk, Patrick Reed, Webb Simpson, University of Washington product Nick Taylor and Harold Varner III also shot 66s. Seven others were a shot back.
“The course is playing harder than it does in a typical year here. Yeah, I felt like I did a really good job of managing myself around the golf course,” Scheffler said. “Anytime you make no bogeys, it’s going to be a good round.”
Those who teed off in the morning wave — including Scheffler, Reed, Simpson and Varner — started with virtually no wind and cooler conditions. The wind picking up later in their rounds and gusted to 20 mph throughout the afternoon.
Defending Colonial champion Jason Kokrak and Jordan Spieth, the 2016 winner who last year became a third-time runner-up, shot 69.
Many players wore ribbons pinned to their caps to show support for the community of Uvalde, Texas — about 350 miles south of the course — after 19 students and two teachers were killed in a shooting at an elementary school Tuesday.
Reed birdied all four par 3s at Colonial, including a 64-foot blast from the greenside bunker into the cup at the 237-yard fourth hole. His only bogey came on his last hole, after missing the fairway on the 400-yard dogleg right ninth hole.
In his previous 11 starts the past four months, Reed missed four cuts and finished no better than 26th. He has slipped to 38th in the World Golf Ranking — he was ninth when at Colonial last year.
“It feels good to get a number out of it,” Reed said about his 66. “Honestly, I feel like there’s been too many days that I’ve done a lot of things really well, just the number hasn’t really reflected it. But the great thing about a season is it’s a season. You have a lot of time left.”
Varner had four bogeys, countering those with six birdies and an eagle at the 634-yard 11th hole, when he had a 330-yard drive and a 305-yard approach to the green for a 5-foot putt. That came after a chip-in birdie from 55 feet at No. 10, and a 10-foot birdie putt at No. 12, but he bogeyed two of the next three holes.
Bolstered by his eagle make from 95 yards out on the par-4 12th, Taylor was at 5 under and was still a stroke ahead in the lead until his bogey at No. 18. The world’s 244th-ranked player hit his last drive of the day way right, and his second shot ended up on a cart path.
Simpson followed his only bogeys, on both front-side par 3s, immediately with birdies. That included a closing 6 1/2-foot birdie putt at No. 9 after his tee shot at No. 8 put him in a deep greenside bunker with only his head and shoulders visible when blasting out of it.
“Other than those two holes, it was really solid,” Simpson said. “Had a few good up-and-downs, but this is the type of Colonial that I love where the rough is up and the wind is blowing.”
Hossler took his share of the lead with an eagle 2 from 135 yards out finishing at the ninth hole. He also had another eagle at from 65 yards at the par-4 sixth. Both of his eagles came after bogeys on his previous hole.
Scheffler played Thursday with PGA Championship winner Justin Thomas, the world’s No. 5 player who had a 71.
Thomas won the PGA in a three-hole aggregate playoff over Will Zalatoris, who had an opening 72 at Colonial. Zalatoris lives in the Dallas area like Scheffler and Spieth.
Mito Pereira shot even-par 70 at Colonial, four days after he lost the PGA lead and missed the playoff with Thomas and Zalatoris because of a double bogey on the 72nd hole at Southern Hills.
Scheffler didn’t officially commit to playing Colonial until after his premature departure from the PGA. He watched the rest of the PGA Championship on TV after the roughly 300-mile trip home from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“I typically don’t ever watch golf, but it was nice. I relaxed all day Saturday, and Sunday went out and practiced, just put the tournament up on my phone and kind of watched,” Scheffler said. “Will was really close and J.T. is a good buddy of mine, as well, and my old caddie was caddying for Mito. … I had a lot of different guys I wanted to watch, and it was fun.”
Related Articles
Share
