SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Patrick Cantlay is a classic music buff, who’ll often pick a favorite song before a round to listen to and likes to get it stuck in his head when he’s on the course.
His coach, Jamie Mulligan, jokes that he probably hasn’t heard a full song written after 1979.
“Maybe a stretch but he’s mostly right,” Cantlay conceded. “I’ve had Zeppelin songs stuck in my head and I keep playing them over. I’ll even get a poppy Simon & Garfunkel song, I’ll get stuck in my head and just go with it. My musical taste is mainly summed up as like Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, with Zeppelin being my favorite.”
On Friday at the WM Phoenix Open, he said there wasn’t a particular song on repeat but that didn’t stop him from making sweet music at TPC Scottsdale. Cantlay, 29, shot a bogey-free 5-under 66 to continue a torrid run of stellar golf. The reigning FedEx Cup champion is 125 under in his last 28 Tour rounds, with 26 of them in the 60s.
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“I’m playing really well right now, my body feels good and I’m hitting it where I’m looking and making some putts,” Cantlay said. “It’s fun to be out here.”
Cantlay improved to 9-under at the midway point of the tournament and three strokes behind leader Sahith Theegala in his tournament debut. Which begged the question: how come Cantlay has waited this long to experience “The Greatest Show on Grass?”
“I think I just play a lot on the West Coast and so this was the odd one out,” he explained. “This one, this year’s sandwiched in between two tournaments I was playing and so as opposed to going back east home I just decided to stay out and play three in a row.”
Starting his round on the back nine, Cantlay drained birdie putts of 17 feet at No. 14 and 24 feet at the infamous par-3 16th.
“Making the 2 there, making like a 20-footer, it felt really good,” said Cantlay, who led the morning wave in Strokes Gained: Putting on Friday. “Different than some of the other 20-footers I made today for birdie.”
If he had to pick a part of his game that he needed to work on before the weekend, Cantlay cited his iron play, which was spotty at times – he lost strokes to the field on his approach to the greens – but he wedged it close for birdies at Nos. 3 and 6 and poured in a 29-foot birdie at the eighth. His bogey-free round was in danger after he left his chip at nine, his closing hole, 15 feet short and knocked the turf in a rare show of disgust, but snuck in the par putt to wrap up his latest round in the 60s.
“When the greens are this good and you can get in a nice rhythm you can make a bunch of putts out there,” he said, “and today I did.”
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