Welcome back to the Monday Finish, where it’s always golf season no matter what the USGA says. To the golf news!
We’ve got a one-handed putter. A cross-handed chipper. A Lambo. A guy leaving LIV. A bunch of guys joining the PGA Tour. We’ve got two season finales behind us (shoutout Stewart Cink) and two more coming up this week. We’ve got content, controversy and content controversy. Here are 10 golf stories in the swirl this week.
The story: Okay, that’s a dramatic headline. But Adam Schenk won his first PGA Tour event, the always-chaotic Butterfield Bermuda Open, in particularly notable fashion.
The win was massive for Schenk’s career; he rose to the occasion in variable, brutally windy conditions and survived all the glorious quirky challenge of Port Royal en route to a one-stroke victory. Schenk felt pride in his victory but also relief — instead of planning Q-School he can plot out his next two years as an exempt member of the PGA Tour. That’s all awesome.
But from a big-picture golf-world perspective the craziest thing about Schenk’s victory is that he sort of just made up his putting strategy as he went along, finding something new in his hotel room each night. He putted one-handed when it wasn’t super windy. He finished off his winning five-footer with his left hand resting on the edge of the shaft below his grip. I found the whole thing oddly inspiring and self-aware; asked about his putt on the 72nd hole he gave credit to his hotel room (“it’s a little bit left to right as I putt towards the window”) and shared his process:
“I was just in my hotel room practicing with one hand. I’m like, ‘One hand’s not going to work because it’s got the wind emblem on the Weather Channel app. It’s already windy here and it’s going to be really windy.’
“So I kind of let my left hand rest on top. The only thing you can do is line up to it, take it back smooth and just release it and hit it off the center of the putter. If it goes in, it goes in, great. It was so windy on the last hole, I did the same process … if you’re going to miss it, miss it quick but don’t sit there and think about it forever.”
What it means: We’re not just in the mallet-putter era but the broomstick-putter era, the any-grip-that-works era, the one-handed putter era. The questions of “are you willing to look silly” and “are you going to make more putts” seem to have increasingly intertwined answers.
The story: Rory McIlroy lost in a playoff at the DP World Tour Championship this weekend but his runner-up finish was more than enough to earn him the big prize: a seventh Race to Dubai title and his fourth in a row. That puts him at seven for his career, one ahead of Seve Ballesteros and one behind Colin Montgomerie.
What it means: McIlroy won everything he wanted to this year. Okay, that’s not quite literally true. He would have wanted an Open Championship win at Royal Portrush more than just about anything. But McIlroy has made it clear what matters at this point in his career and that’s winning majors, winning at iconic venues, winning meaningful tournaments and winning Ryder Cups — particularly on foreign soil. He’s also talked about wanting to chase down Montgomerie in his quest to become the greatest European golfer in modern history.
So this year’s haul — a Siggie at Pebble Beach, the Players Championship, the Grand Slam-completing Masters, a home-game Irish Open, an away-game Ryder Cup and this Race to Dubai — checked a hell of a lot of boxes.
“As you’re still playing, it’s probably detrimental to do it too much. But yeah, there’s times when I catch myself thinking about my place in the game and where I’m going to end up,” he said post-round. “Again, as a 36-year-old, hopefully with a lot of years left in the tank, I don’t think about it too much. But yeah, you can appreciate that up until this point, it’s been a pretty good run.”
The story: Matt Fitzpatrick wasn’t exactly slumming it in your weekly men’s group, but early this year he’d fallen well below his lofty standards. He split with his longtime caddie, he fell outside the top 100 in DataGolf’s rankings and he was a question mark to make the European Ryder Cup team. But when summer hit, Fitzpatrick did too: beginning the final week of June he’s reeled off eight finishes of eighth or better in 12 starts, capped off with Sunday’s playoff victory.
What it means: It means that hard work has continued to pay off for Fitzpatrick, who has left no stone unturned in his ongoing quest for low numbers. It was fitting that he got up-and-down for the win in a playoff with his characteristic cross-handed chipping the same week that Schenk broke through; golf is about a lot of things but mostly it’s about working until you find what really works.
“It was the lowest I’ve ever been out on the golf course, and obviously when that happens you feel like things have to change,” Fitzpatrick said. “It’s easy to say now that the only way to go is up from there, but easier said than done.
“To end the year and win this tournament is very special, and I really want to make sure that I thoroughly enjoy it.”
The story: Linn Grant won the Annika, particularly cool given she and host Sorenstam are both Swedish. It was her second win on the LPGA Tour and first of what she called a “rollercoaster” year.
What it means: It means Grant found at least a one-week answer to the vexing riddle of life as a professional golfer. Asked how she bounced back from multiple strings of missed cuts this season, she cited a quest for herself and her own process that I found fascinating:
“I don’t know, to be fair,” she said. “Golf and this lifestyle is always a rollercoaster of trying to figure out how to get better. Sometimes it’s just about taking a step back and maybe look at yourself and be like, ‘Am I happy? Am I making the decisions that make me happy?’
“Sometimes that is what makes golf easier. You have to be kind of strong and confident in those decisions to be able to say, maybe I’m not playing this week because I’m not feeling it, because it doesn’t make me happy, or changing just your plans or how you do things more for yourself to be true to yourself.
“For me this year I think that has been really big. Like I’ve had to change a lot of things in my routines, things that I thought were just things that were good to do because other people were doing them instead of thinking like, ‘What do I actually believe in? What do I think makes me a better person and a better player?'”
The story: Brooke Matthews made her first career ace really count. Her 9-iron from 143 on No. 12 at Pelican Golf Club came with a two-year lease on a Lamborghini Urus and a $20,000 donation to charity. It also vaulted her inside the top 60 in the Race to the CME Globe, making this the first time she’ll qualify for the season-ending championship.
What it means: Sometimes golf is about inner satisfaction and sometimes golf is about shiny expensive cars and sometimes it’s about both.
“It was wild. All week I was like, ‘I want to win the Lamborghini,'” Matthews said. “I still can’t believe it. I blacked out. I can’t wait to watch it on film because I still can’t really remember it.”
Here you go, Brooke:
