PONTE VEDRA BEACH — The best thing Rory McIlroy can say about his Saturday 73 at the Players Championship, leaving him four shots off JJ Spaun’s lead at eight under, is that he didn’t lose the tournament. That’s not insignificant—Will Zalatoris and Min Woo Lee were two of the Saturday Sawgrass victims, posting a pair of 78s to go from near the lead to out of touch. As the wind blew, the carnage escalated on the back nine, and just on the island green—Zalatoris went from 11 under to two under in five holes, lowlighted by a quadruple bogey on 14. With that abyss beckoning, McIlroy stayed resolute, and capped off a day of poor putting with a birdie on 18 that had him smiling in the post-round presser.
“I feel like I played better than I scored,” he said. “All the bogeys I made were really soft … not out of it by any means. The wind is supposed to still be blowing tomorrow.”
It might make him a glutton for punishment, but he’s rooting for a windy Sunday and what he called “testy conditions,” operating under the theory that when trailing by four shots, you have to roll the dice and hope the elements hurt the guys above more than they hurt you.
The “soft bogeys” he referred were mostly a matter of missed putts and poor chips. He was 56th of 72 golfers in strokes gained/putting Saturday, and before the 18th he couldn’t buy a putt inside 10 feet, missing efforts on 5, 13, 16, and 17. At other points, he left relatively simple chips uncharacteristically far from the hole, and it was easy to see afterward why he thought he could have shot in the 60s.
“They slowed the greens down today for obvious reasons,” he said, “and I feel like I didn’t adjust very well to that. Then some of the chip shots around the greens, when you start to get downwind, I got a little tentative with some of those as well.”
When it came to ball-striking, he was pleased with how controlled his flight in the wind, and the stats bear it out—he was 12th in strokes gained/approach, and that’s within the context of the early wave facing easier conditions. The key was a low flight, making sure the ball stayed below to the trees to avoid the really big winds.
“It was just a tough day,” he said. “I feel like it was a tough day to make birdies, but if you managed yourself well, you could just make a ton of pars.”
Thanks a late bogey by Akshay Bhatia, he’ll play in the second-to-last group with Alex Smalley and Corey Conners, just ahead of the final threesome of leader JJ Spaun, Bud Cauley, and Lucas Glover. Due to the threat of rain and storms, tee times for Sunday were moved ahead, and leaders will tee off at 10:01 a.m.
McIlroy appeared more buoyant than he has all week following the windy battle, and you get the sense he feels at home in the wind and believes he’ll putt better in the final round. There are four players to leap frog to capture his second Players Championship, but it’s impossible not to notice that only Glover has a major among that quartet, and two of them have never won on the PGA Tour while Spaun has just a single title to his name. If enthusiasm for the wind counts, and if pedigree counts, he’s well situated to grab his second title of the year and head into major season with a serious head of steam.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
