It hasn’t been a typical season for Patrick Cantlay. But if you ask him about it, and you ask him about his goals in the immediate future, be it the FedEx Cup Playoffs or ensuring he is a member of the US team for the third time in next month’s Ryder Cup, he responds with his typical nonplussed stoicism.
There is a reason he earned that “Patty Ice” moniker. He plays golf as dispassionately as a janitor mopping a floor. He has the game’s best poker face.
“I think I’ve been like that my whole life, and that’s kind of who I am, so I just embrace it,” Cantlay said with the slightest “what, me worry?” grin.
Cantlay arrived at the FedEx St Jude Championship ranked a respectable 23rd in the points standings, but he has slipped to 24th in the World Ranking. His three top-10 finishes in 16 starts all were in the top five, actually, but his three missed cuts came in the year’s final three majors. Those brief visits in golf’s biggest events have cost him in the US Ryder Cup points standings, where he is 14th with two weeks to go in the qualifying process.
This is the time to show some form. But Cantlay reasoned that there never is a bad time for that. He has a point.
“That’s the process, to get the results and all those things will take care of themselves,” he said after a heartening three-under 67 on Friday at TPC Southwind.
“I’d just rather work on things than worry,” he said. “If I thought it would help, then I’d look more stressed, but that doesn’t help.”
Which is why he spent a little extra time with swing coach Jamie Mulligan on the practice range Friday afternoon. That appeared to pay off on Saturday with a third-round 66 that wasn’t going to get him that much closer to the leaders but, yes, it was something he wanted to see. Especially on the greens, where Cantlay hovered around the top 10 strokes gained for the afternoon; he entered the week 83rd for the year.
An eight-time PGA Tour winner, Cantlay last won at the 2022 BMW Championship. Two years ago here, he lost a playoff to Lucas Glover, one of his 10 career runner-up finishes. At seven-under 203, he’ll begin Sunday’s final round just outside the top 10 on the leaderboard.
“It would be nice to build some momentum,” he said in his only admission to thinking about what comes next, though in the next breath he reverted to type. “You know, you take it one day, one tournament at a time.”
Boring, he was told.
In response, all he did was grin a little. Cool customer.
