Michael Thorbjornsen keeps rolling along, and the second-year pro from Stanford has put himself in position to reach the Tour Championship.
By going 66-66 to open the BMW Championship at Bellerive, Thorbjornsen headed into the weekend in the projected 30th and last spot to make it to East Lake next week. The kid, who won his first title in Detroit this month, can certainly run hot and cold. In his last five starts, he’s gone Cut/T-7/T-40/Win/T-47. He’s mostly been impressive, though, with eight top-25s in 21 appearances. The Tour Championship bubble projections look like this right now: Thorbjornsen, Tom Kim, Sungjae Im, Adam Scott and Ryan Fox are the last five in; the last five out, from 31st, are Patrick Cantlay, Kurt Kitayama, Rickie Fowler, Bud Cauley and J.T. Poston.
As hard as it is to believe, Charlie Woods is about to start his senior year of high school.
The Palm Beach Post reported that Tiger Woods’ 17-year-old son will start classes this coming week at the private Benjamin School. It’s also golf season for the boys there, and Woods is part of a stellar team that won the Class 1A Florida High School Athletic Association title. Charlie, who shot 68 in the second round at state, was the Post’s Small School Co-Player of the Year last season with his Buccaneers teammate Andrew Tsar. This was not a standout summer for Woods, who ranks 311th in the Rolex AJGA Rankings. His best stroke-play finish was a T-28 in the Team TaylorMade Invitational, while Woods rallied to get into a 14-for-2 playoff in the U.S. Junior Am, only to miss advancing. Barring a dramatic change, Charlie will be playing golf at Florida State at this time next year.
Callaway's Full Toe SP wedge is built around a simple observation: open-face wedge shots aren't centered strikes.
Contact drifts high and toward the toe, and on a conventional wedge profile, that's right about where the grooves stop.
So Callaway extended them with the help of Spin Gen 2.0 grooves that run heel to toe across the face, with the pitch spacing tightened by 17 degrees, which the company says amounts to 44 percent more groove area than a conventionally shaped wedge.
The elongated toe also created room to move mass. Callaway's Spin Pocket construction (the largest pocket the company has built, 18 percent bigger than Opus SP+) pulls material out of the bottom of the head and relocates it up the face, producing the highest wedge center of gravity (CG) in Callaway's history. Square the face and the CG sits above the strike, holding launch down and spin up. Open it, and contact climbs closer to the center of mass while the head's offset adds launch back.
Scottie Scheffler showed up at last week's FedEx St. Jude Championship with a TaylorMade Qi4D driver, never said a word about it and picked up 13 yards.
Is the distance bump an aberration, or a warning for the competition? To quantify the differences between Qi4D and Qi10 (Scheffler's previous driver), we put both drivers on the swing robot and found that distance increased and dispersion improved as speed ramped up with Qi4D.
More than any other driver we’ve tested on the robot in the last 7 years, Qi4D rewards players who can move it—just like Scottie. Check out the full video breakdown.
Did a Sergio Garcia Masters outburst cost LIV its PIF funding?
That's what a new Financial Times report says. Garcia broke his driver and damaged a tee box during the final round at Augusta National earlier this year. The 2017 Masters champ issued an apology two days later, but according to FT, he did a different type of damage to LIV through the "embarrassment" caused to Saudi PIF governor and former LIV chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan.
In four days, Scottie Scheffler went from first to nearly the worst.
The World No. 1 dominated in Memphis on Sunday and Thursday at the BMW Championship he only beat three people while battling some sort of unknown illness. He opened with four bogeys in the first seven holes and was last on the leaderboard. From there he made three birdies and a bogey to shoot two-over 72, which is tied for 44th place. Only Sepp Straka, Bud Cauley and Nicolai Hojgaard shot higher scores.
Barb Moxness, at 73, is the oldest player in the field at the U.S. Senior Women’s Open.
With JoAnne Carner no longer competing, eyes turned to Moxness to see if she could shoot a number near her age. On Thursday at Barton Hills in Michigan she made three bogeys and two birdies to shoot 73, making it the third time in her last five rounds at this championship that she’s shot her age or better. An amazing feat for the woman who was a rookie on the LPGA in 1978. “I keep saying to myself every year are you going to retire now, then things happen and I don’t,” she said. “It’s harder as I get older. It’s harder to stay in shape, it’s harder to stay stronger. I don’t think mentally I’m quite as focused as I used to be. But I can still get out there and do it.” Golf … such an amazing game!
Owen Wilson's golf comedy series is set to return.
Apple TV announced the second season of "Stick" will premiere Nov. 4. And it looks like Emmy Award nominee Rhea Seehorn ("Pluribus" and "Better Call Saul") is joining an already stellar cast.
I had the pleasure of profiling Wilson and writing about how his role as Pryce Cahill, a former tour pro whose career was cut short, got him into golf. And with more than two months until "Stick" season 2 starts, golf fans have plenty of time to get caught up on season 1—or, to at least read Golf Digest's story.
The response from golf’s other stakeholders has not been kind to LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil’s speech.
Though O’Neil didn’t really outline any specific details regarding LIV’s future on Wednesday at the Indianapolis event, powerbrokers in the industry were amused by his repeated use of “complete, not compete,” specifically in the aftermath of LIV attempting to raid several DP World Tour events and national opens to its 2.0 schedule. And while this was mostly before O’Neil’s time, those stakeholders don’t forget LIV poaching players, financing an antitrust assault and distorting the market with unsustainable purses. To the rest of golf LIV's call for peace feels less like diplomacy than the desperation of a five-year blitzkrieg that has finally run out of ammunition.
