This PGA Championship Has Six Chasers, All Capable of Winning but in Need of Sunday Magic
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Something good or bad is going to happen at Oak Hill in Sunday’s final round of the PGA Championship and when it does, one of the top seven on the leaderboard will likely walk away with the Wanamaker Trophy.
The odds of winning jump considerably higher when you get past the top seven, so if you believe in what the betting public believes, the contenders are all bunched together with five shots separating leader Brooks Koepka at 6 under and seventh-place Rory McIlroy at 1 under.
Koepka leads after back-to-back 66s but his one-shot lead is tenuous on a golf course that has bogeys and double bogeys around every corner.
Which is what you want to hear if you are a chaser.
The contenders start with Norway's Viktor Hovland and Canadian Corey Conners both at 5 under and one shot back of Koepka. Both shot even par in Saturday’s third round and both had their struggles while staying in the hunt.
For Hovland, it was two consecutive bogeys on the front nine and three birdies in the middle of the round offset a bogey at the last.
That bogey dropped him out of the lead with Koepka, but kept him in the final group on Sunday.
“Any chance you have to play in the final group in a Sunday on a major, that's pretty special, but the mindset is just going to be, I play my own game," Hovland said. "Obviously I want to win, but I am just going to play what I think is the right play on every single shot and if I get beat, I get beat, but the plan is to not to give it away.”
Conners played 15 holes flawlessly on Saturday but when he found a fairway bunker off the tee on the 16th, flawless became spoiled. His second shot stuck under the lip of the bunker and after a drop from an embedded ball, the Canadian eventually made a double bogey 6 and fell out of a co-lead that he owned at the beginning of round.
“I didn't make great contact there,” Conners said of the bunker shot. “I saw everybody looking up in the air. I did that as well. I thought it maybe skipped up. But you know, didn't see anything land and was pretty certain it was embedded there. The ball was below my feet and didn't quite adjust for that. Wish I could have that one back.”
Oddly, of the top seven on the leaderboard, Conners and Hovland are the only two players that have not won a major.
Of the 13 majors that Hovland has played, he has two top 10s with his best finish a T4 at the 2022 British Open.
For Conners, in his 17 major appearances he has missed the cut nine times and in the remaining eight has three top 10s, all in the Masters, and just three rounds under par in those eight final rounds.
Bryson DeChambeau’s only win in a major comes at the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, a course that looks and plays like Oak Hill.
His even-par 70 on Saturday derived from solid driving off the tee, but at times wayward iron shots cost him a chance to go lower, as was also the case in his second-round 71.
Take away consecutive double-bogey 6s on the par-4 6th hole and DeChambeau's game is close to where he believes he needs it to be to make up the three-shot deficit.
“The past couple days I've been pretty close, A-minus, B-plus game,” DeChambeau said. “Just haven't seen it through the past couple days. I haven't been able to get that left wrist down the way I want it to.”
DeChambeau admits that his game needs to be firing on all cylinders and being lucky is part of the equation of winning a major title.
Both Justin Rose and Scottie Scheffler are four shots back and will clearly need some help to catch Koepka.
Neither has put together anything close to Koepka’s consecutive 66s, with Rose's best rounds consecutive 69s, but Scheffler’s 67 and 68 in the first two rounds showed potential.
Four shots back are a lot when the leader has won four major titles and almost captured a fifth just a month ago at the Masters.
And while Koepka fumbled the green jacket on Sunday, it seems improbable he mishandles the Wanamaker in this final round.
Which means both Rose and Scheffler will have to produce something they have not this week: a very low round.
“I didn't shoot myself out of it on a day where the conditions
were tough and I didn't have my best stuff,” 2022 Masters champion Scheffler said. “I hung in there pretty good and didn't post the number I wanted to, but I'm still only four back going into tomorrow and if I go out and have a great round, I think I'll have a decent chance.”
For McIlroy, it’s been nine years since he won a major championship, the 2014 PGA at Valhalla.
Sitting five shots back may not seem like a lot, but for a player that is openly is questioning his game and mental attitude, those handful of shots may seem insurmountable.
“It hasn't been great; I can play a lot better.” McIlroy said after a 1-under 69. “Even today, I was just aiming it down one side of the hole and hitting driver and sort of just accepting that it probably will go in the rough, and if it I do hit it in the rough, it's funny, I was a little more accepting of the ball going in the rough today, and I actually hit more fairways because of it.
"Again, it just goes to show if you have a little more of a carefree attitude, it seems to work out a little bit better.”
For most of the week, McIlroy has sounded and played with little emotion and commitment to winning. Instead, his responses at times have been dismissive of his game and questioning his ability.
“I just wasn't feeling great, to be fair,” McIlroy said of his demeanor. “I think I still don't feel like my game is in great shape. I've held it together well. I've held some good putts. I've scored well. I probably hit it a little better off the tee today than I did the first couple of days, but I think this tournament and especially in these conditions and on this golf course, the non-physical parts of the game I think are way more important this week than the physical parts of the game, and I think I've done those well, and that's the
reason that I'm in a decent position.”
Those are the contenders, all have a chance, but all will likely need some help from Koepka, who is not inclined to give it away after what happened at Augusta National last month.