Will Collin Morikawa hold on? Can Rory McIlroy come back? What’s been the biggest surprise? The final round of the PGA Championship will answer these questions and more.
— Valhalla Golf Club has done it again. For all the griping about low scores and lack of strategy, the venue that has hosted some of the most thrilling PGA Championships has set the stage for yet another electric Sunday.
Not only are two players tied for the 54-hole lead, but 13 others are just five shots back and six are within three strokes. Of those 15 players inside the top-10, 10 are looking for their first ever major victory, while the rest are hoping to add to their total.
Just like it did in 2000 when Tiger Woods beat Bob May in a playoff or like we witnessed in 2014 when Rory McIlroy came storming back to win his fourth major, Sunday’s final round looks to have plenty of ingredients to provide yet another classic.
Here are five questions ahead of the final 18 holes:
Paolo Uggetti: Unsurprisingly, Louisville native Justin Thomas has explained the phenomenon of Valhalla well this week. Between the soft greens due to rain and the way the golf course forces the best players in the world to play it a single way (drive it well, putt it great) in order to succeed, Valhalla inevitably causes a leaderboard bottleneck.
“It just doesn’t matter what golf course you put us on, on planet Earth,” Thomas said. “If the greens are soft we’re going to tear it up. It just doesn’t have anything to defend itself.”
And tear it up they have. 15 players are double-digits under par heading into Sunday — more than twice as many as there ever have been at a major championship. Two players have shot major-low rounds already this week in Shane Lowry and Xander Schauffele thanks to hot putting performances, and it feels like the winner Sunday will be determined by who can catch fire on the greens.
“It’s hard to separate yourself,” Hovland said. “You’re going to have to make a bunch of birdies and roll a bunch of putts in.”
“It’s going to come down to a lot more than [putting] but it kind of feels that way with the greens being receptive and the fairways being receptive,” Schauffele said. “Hopefully it being a little bit — even drier, the ball might roll a little bit more. So yeah, it might come down to something like that.”
Mark Schlabach: There’s no question the soft conditions have helped the best golfers in the world. The 69.55 scoring average in the third round was the lowest average score to par (-1.45) in PGA Championship history.
There are six players within two shots of the lead entering the final round. Anyone in that group — and probably a few guys behind them — is capable of putting together a great round to capture the Wanamaker Trophy on Sunday. Schauffele carded a 9-under 62 on Thursday. Seven golfers posted 65s on Friday. Lowry put up another 62 on Saturday.
Hovland said there are some easy holes on the course and a few difficult ones where you have to hit into the middle of the greens and hope for a par.
“I think just the greens being soft and having Zoysia around the greens, like it’s hard to separate yourself,” Hovland said. “If you miss in certain spots, guys seem to be able to spin it out of the bunker and spin it out of the fairway, so you can kind of get away with some bad shots.
“But if you catch fire, you can shoot a low score, which a couple of guys have done, but it’s hard to do that every single day, so that’s why I think you see the bunched scores.”
Uggetti: It has to be Viktor Hovland. Just last week, Hovland was talking about how far away from good golf he felt. After splitting from his swing coach Joe Mayo, Hovland has been lost in the wilderness of swing tweaks and adjustments. The 2023 Tour Championship winner had no choice but to go back to Mayo this past week ahead of the PGA Championship and it seems to have worked.
“I’m surprised in the sense that — just how far away I felt last week,” Hovland said Saturday. “But I’m not surprised in the way that I’m here because, like, I never doubted my abilities. It was just kind of my machinery was not working very well. But now we’re moving in the right direction.”
Hovland admitted that his swing immediately felt better once returning to work with Mayo, adding that Mayo simply gave him one swing feel to work on over and over and it has paid dividends.
