Tag: 2021 Fortinet Championship

Heeeeere’s Johnny: Part II of Golfweek’s exclusive interview with Johnny Miller

Miller on Tiger Woods: “He’s so unusually, fantastically good and he has so much talent that you can’t rule him out.”

Johnny Miller wants to make one thing perfectly clear: he hasn’t done an interview all year.

“If nothing else you have a rare interview,” he says.

For 29 years, if someone was choking during an NBC telecast you better believe he was going to let the viewer know. When he retired in 2019, he said he tried to emulate former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith, who hung up his microphone for ABC’s Monday Night Football and disappeared from the spotlight.

Miller is more than happy to turn up for a golf fundraiser if he believes in the cause and still manages to do a few corporate gigs, but only the Fortinet Championship at his beloved Silverado Resort & Spa, where he is part of the ownership group and typically does a stint in the broadcast booth as well as hosts the trophy presentation, brings him around the life he’s done his best to leave behind.

For Part I of the interview, click here.

Let’s hear it for Jimmy Hard K, who has nothing to lose and everything to gain at the Fortinet Championship

If you’re unfamiliar with Hard K’s story, you’re probably not alone. It’s time to catch up.

NAPA, Calif. – When Jim Knous drained an 18-foot birdie putt from the front fringe at 18, he dug into the Phil Mickelson playbook and gave a thumbs up to the crowd. It wrapped up a splendid round of 7-under 65 at Silverado Resort & Spa’s North Course and by end of day he held a share of the 54-hole lead with Maverick McNealy at the Fortinet Championship, the kickoff event of the 2021-22 PGA Tour season.

That’s pronounced Kuh-NOUSE, or as a first tee announcer on the Gateway Tour dubbed him back in 2012, Jimmy Hard K, or just Hard K for short. If you’re unfamiliar with Hard K’s story, you’re probably not alone. The 31-year-old Colorado native, who played his college golf at the Colorado School of Mines, is making just his 25th career Tour start this week after earning the last available card via the 2018 Korn Ferry Tour Finals.

But as Harold Varner III, who also was 50th on the priority ranking order when he originally got his card, put it, “Last guy to make it through medical school is still a doctor.”

Hard K notched his lone top-10 finish on the PGA Tour here in wine country in 2018, but later that season he injured his right wrist at the RBC Canadian Open and it required surgery in August 2019. Asked if the wrist is 100 percent, he said, “maybe.” He paused and said, “more like 95 percent. I’m not sure it will ever be 100 percent again.”

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He’s competing on a medical extension and is down to his two final starts. Hard K picked a good week to show off his talents. He needs to earn 152.463 FedExCup points, the equivalent of a two-way tie for third or better, to maintain full PGA Tour status, or 64.916 FedExCup points, a 12th-place finish or better, to secure conditional Tour status (No. 126-150) and full Korn Ferry Tour status.

“I’d probably be lying to say it wasn’t on my mind,” he said. “I try to put it to the back of my mind as much as I can.”

He’s trying to adopt the philosophy of his wife, Heidi, who told him this week, “Do your best, let God do the rest.”

On Saturday, his putter heated up and he made six birdies on the front nine, including five circles in a row on the scorecard beginning at the fifth. A bogey at No. 12 was a mere distraction and he rolled in birdie putts on two of the last three holes to tie for the low round of the day. Of his putting grip, which combines using a claw with his right hand and the grip going up his left forearm is something to see.

“I got a lot going on,” Hard K said. “My buddy back home, Derek, he said, ‘What are you doing with that? What is that? A Moose claw?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I used to just use it for practice strokes and then it just feels good so I kind of went with it about a month ago and it’s been working great.”

Hard K has never entered a final round of a PGA Tour event in a position better than T-18 and now he’s going to be sleeping on a share of the 54-hole lead and will play in the final pairing. His last win? He thinks it was the 2016 San Juan Open and that he earned $15,000.

“Great community in Farmington, New Mexico,” he said. “Shout out to San Juan Country Club.”

On Sunday, he can lock up his card for the next three seasons, earn a seven-figure check and forget about having to sign up for Korn Ferry Tour Q-School. He hasn’t yet and said, “I don’t want to.”

No pressure. In addition to McNealy, a Stanford alum and Northern Cal native who is trying to win for the first time in front of hometown fans, there are 18 players within four strokes, including the Hall of Famer Phil Mickelson, World No. 22 Webb Simpson and last season’s rookie of the year Will Zalatoris. But to Hard K, he’s got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

“I just want to go out there and play with a winner’s mindset and try to win the tournament,” he said.

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Phil Mickelson, Max Homa ‘get on a little heater’ to close third round at Fortinet Championship

Phil Mickelson, 67, and Max Homa, 65, charged up the leaderboard with birdie binges.

NAPA, Calif. – Walking from the ninth tee to No. 10 at Silverado Resort & Spa’s North Course, Phil Mickelson wheeled toward fellow playing competitor Max Homa and said, “Let’s get on a little heater on the back.”

To that point, Homa had traded three birdies with two bogeys and Mickelson two birdies and a bogey as they both turned in pedestrian front-nine scores of 1-under 35. But the pep talk worked.

Mickelson strung together five birdies in a row after a sloppy bogey at No. 12 and Homa went one better with six birdies in all, including the final three holes. It added up to 67 for Mickelson and 65 for Homa as they charged up the leaderboard at the Fortinet Championship in the third round.

“Max, playing as well as he did shooting 6 under on the back, made my round feel not as great, but it was still fun,” Mickelson said.

Lefty was even for the day after blocking a 4-foot putt left of the hole. But it didn’t deter him. He capped his five-birdie stretch with a 24-foot birdie putt at No. 17.

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“I just felt like I had been putting really well all week and I just needed to settle down and let one go in, not force it,” said Mickelson, who improved to 10-under 206 through 54 holes. “I needed to get a couple of fairways hit because so much easier from the fairways getting to these pins. I just rolled a couple in, so it was nice.”

Mickelson has been using a longer arm-lock model this week and has found it mostly to his liking. He ranks fifth through three rounds in Strokes Gained: Putting.

“It’s how I putted as a kid. Like I always had a lot of forward press and all it’s doing now is getting in the same position as a kid, but it’s getting to that same position every time,” explained Mickelson. “I’m not overpressing, I’m not underpressing, so my launch characteristics when I get on the Quintic system is very consistent and that’s what I’m looking for.”

Mickelson’s hot run on the back nine lifted him into the top 10 (T-7) heading into the final round and lurking just three strokes behind leader Mito Pereira of Chile, who was still on the course at 13 under through 13 holes.

“I’m in a position where a good round tomorrow will do some good, and it’s fun to have a little later tee time and to feel some of the nerves and so forth,” Mickelson said. “I know I’m going to have to shoot probably 7, 8, 9 under par to have a chance, but either way it’s fun having that chance.”

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From sick stomach to sick with his play: World No. 1 Jon Rahm misses cut at Fortinet Championship

Jon Rahm has a rare weekend off after struggling on the greens at the Fortinet Championship.

NAPA, Calif. – Jon Rahm will enter next week’s Ryder Cup after having a rare weekend off.

The World No. 1 missed the cut at the Fortinet Championship, the season-opening event on the PGA Tour’s 2021-22 season. Rahm posted 1-under 71 at Silverado Resort & Spa’s North Course, missing the 36-hole cut by two strokes and 11 strokes behind Maverick McNealy, the leader at the midway point. It marked Rahm’s first missed cut since the Wells Fargo Championship in May, just his second of the calendar year and 13th in 113 career starts.

“It’s very simple, not my best ball-striking-wise,” said Rahm, who hit just 11 of 28 greens in regulation through 36 holes. “Still wasn’t bad. Could have been better on the greens, you know. Feel like I might have made a couple of mistakes mentally on some approach shots, maybe I could have focused a little more, visualized better, but I think I left a lot of shots on the greens.”

Rahm ranked 113th out of 156 in Strokes Gained: Putting, losing slightly more than a stroke and a half to the field on the greens. He barely cracked 100 feet of putts made for 36 holes.

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“The back nine, starting on 10, I hit a lot of good putts, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17. Maybe I didn’t have the speed, but a lot of them were very close and they just didn’t go in. And yesterday I didn’t make enough putts, I feel like I left a lot of them inside 10 feet,” he said. “Make a couple others and at least I’m making the cut, maybe a momentum change and I finish a little better. It’s unfortunate to start the year with basically one of my worst Tour rounds in a while. It’s what it is. Course was tough out there today and just need to be better.”

Rahm’s week began inauspiciously with a stomach ailment on Wednesday that kept him from competing in the pro-am.

“I feel like with having those stomach issues early, I wasn’t nearly as rested as I could have been, my body got a little bit tight, but I’m feeling good today,” he said.

Rahm said part of the reason he came to the Napa tournament was to get out of the heat of his hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona, where the courses are heavily watered. But he was scheduled to head there before joining Team Europe on Monday for the 43rd Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin.

“If anything, I get to rest a couple extra days and be able to figure out what’s going on with my swing, which technically is not really anything bad,” he said. “It’s just I think a lot of those swings were made to look worse because of how tough it is out there. It’s firm, it’s fast, the fairways are hard to hit. I just maybe didn’t hit the shot sometimes. I just feel I could have been rewarded a little bit more, that’s about it.”

Other notables to miss the cut included: Brandt Snedeker, Kevin Na and 2019 winner Cameron Champ.

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Maverick McNealy’s rollercoaster second round at the Fortinet Championship and being a man on a mission this season

“It’s great to be at the top of the leaderboard now, but it means a heck of a lot more to be at the top at the end of 72 holes.”

NAPA, Calif. – When Maverick McNealy closed with a 77 in the final round of the BMW Championship, his 2020-21 PGA Tour season ended on a sour note. That snapped a streak of seven consecutive finishes inside the top 30, and suddenly the bloom was off the rose of the 25-year-old McNealy’s best season to date.

He flew home to Las Vegas, got up the next morning early and went right back to work.

“I’m a guy that’s motivated by not playing how I want to sometimes,” he said.

The PGA Tour’s 11-day off-season ended and perhaps no one was happier than McNealy to get back to his office, especially at one of his favorite Tour stops. McNealy played at Silverado Resort & Spa in 2017 while attending nearby Stanford University and in 2018 made his pro debut here. On Friday, he followed up a 4-under 68 with an 8-under 64 to grab a two-stroke lead at the Fortinet Championship over Beau Hossler and Mito Pereira with a 36-hole total of 12-under 132.

McNealy’s scorecard in the second round included a wild back nine filled with three bogeys in a row after making the turn in 31, followed by four straight birdies, a lone par and chip-in for eagle at the last.

“It was crazy,” McNealy said. “It was a tale of two nines.”

But while his round was the result of several unpredictable shots and breaks both good and bad, McNealy considered his good play the result of hard work and good old-fashioned tenacity.

“I think days like today aren’t a product of something I changed today, I think it’s a product of putting in a lot of work,” he said. “I think my average wake-up time this summer has been between 5:00 and 5:30. I get up early, get to work, practice, work out, eat right and have been really disciplined and really focused and I feel like I’m a better golfer than I was six months ago.”

For the past few years, McNealy undertook a thorough reappraisal of his technique and analysis of the mechanics of golf with instructor Butch Harmon. As a sign of how comfortable he has become with his game, he said he hadn’t seen his coach last week.

“But that’s a great thing because I’m swinging it the way I want to,” he said. “At this point we’re just telling jokes and hitting wedges.”

McNealy is a man on a mission. He entered the week ranked No. 113 in the world and still harbors an ambitious goal to reach No. 1 someday. First, he’d like to work his way into the top 64 and earn a spot in the WGC Match Play and then crack the top 50, which offers exemptions into many of the biggest tournaments. Asked to name his goals for the new season, he highlighted making it to East Lake for the Tour Championship as one of the top 30 in the FedEx Cup.

“I think that’s a fantastic benchmark for the elite players in this game, but I also want to win,” he said. “That’s something I wake up every day and motivates me. I just want to keep getting better and I want to improve my game and improve my skill set to the point where I will win. Just got to keep giving myself opportunities.”

That lingering bad taste in McNealy’s mouth after the 77 at the BMW had him texting his longtime caddie Travis McAllister and saying that he was going to take care of business this season and get back to beating some of the players he used to dominate when he was the world’s No. 1 amateur. McNealy took possession of the keys to his first house Friday and planned to move into his new address next week. The reason he upgraded from the 1,200-square-foot pad that he’d been calling home along with roommate Joseph Bramlett and a former Stanford baseball player had nothing to do with the need for a better man cave. This was an investment in himself to achieve his goals. McNealy is going to install a TrackMan room, where he can work on his game at all hours. It’s why he’s hired Hunter Stewart, his former Walker Cup teammate, to handle data analytics for him and why he’s often the first on the tee at 5:50 a.m. at TPC Las Vegas when he isn’t competing in tournaments.

On Friday, McNealy, starting at No. 10, birdied five holes on the front nine and played, to use the word he chose to describe it, “flawlessly.” Then his round went haywire.

“I got to the first hole and funny lie in the right rough and dumped it in the bunker and shanked the bunker shot, got up and down for bogey and then bogeyed the next two. I was kind of going, oh, man, this is going the wrong way quick,” McNealy said.

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At the second, he horseshoed a 6-foot par putt and one hole later, his drive drifted right, hit a tree and rolled down the cart path about 50 yards.

“Actually, I think a golf cart ran over my ball so I had to take a drop,” McNealy said. “It was just kind of how that 45 minutes was going.”

Somehow, he managed to right the ship in impressive fashion. McNealy said the birdie he made at the fourth hole was the turning point of his round. He had 91 yards to the hole and had to clear a pair of menacing bunkers with his wedge approach.

“My caddie, Travis, did his homework, he got me a great cover number that I felt really good about and really confident, had a perfect lob wedge right in there and made a good putt and that got things going the right way for me,” said McNealy of the first of four straight birdies.

For his final birdie of the day, he holed a bunker shot at No. 7 with his 60-degree wedge. But he wasn’t done yet. He chipped in from 74 feet short of the green at the par-5 ninth for eagle.

“I was actually a little nervous because it looked like it landed in a pitch mark and then shot forward and right,” he said. “Turns out it was a great kick.”

Just the type of break that McNealy knows he might need this week if the Northern California native is going to claim his maiden victory not far from where he grew up and attended college with family and friends in his gallery.

“Yeah, it’s great to be at the top of the leaderboard now,” McNealy said, “but it means a heck of a lot more to be at the top at the end of 72 holes.”

Jon Rahm on his Player of the Year snub: ‘Finishing runner-up doesn’t feel too good,’ says it will ‘absolutely’ fuel his fire

Count Jon Rahm among those who thought Jon Rahm should’ve won the PGA Tour’s Player of the Year Award.

NAPA, Calif. – Count Jon Rahm among those who thought Jon Rahm should’ve won the PGA Tour’s Player of the Year Award.

“Finishing runner-up doesn’t feel too good,” said Rahm, who was among the finalists for the Jack Nicklaus Trophy, which was awarded to Patrick Cantlay on Tuesday. (The PGA Tour doesn’t publish the results of the voting so it’s unclear if Rahm actually finished as runner-up among the five candidates.) “I felt like I played good enough to be able to earn that title, but unfortunate situations like the one at Memorial cost me, right? Had I been able to play, maybe win it, I think it would have tipped the balance towards myself. Maybe even play in the Olympics, have a good showing and maybe even earn a medal could have tipped the balance as well.

“It’s tough, you know, but I can say when you’ve won four times in a year, you’re FedEx Cup champion, it’s a very deserving honor, so I’m pretty sure I know Patrick deserves it, but I’ll get my chance.”

Rahm, the World No. 1, recorded 15 top-10 finishes and claimed the U.S. Open in June at Torrey Pines, had the better statistical year and record in the majors, and led Cantlay by six strokes at the Memorial when he had to withdraw after the third round because he tested positive for COVID-19. Cantlay went on to win that title, the FedEx Cup and notched four overall wins. The Player of the Year award is voted on by members of the Tour and Rahm made it quite clear that the snub would provide fuel to his fire.

“Absolutely, yeah,” he said. “I played really good this past season. I mean, I played amazing golf. To think it could have been better does nothing but motivate me. I know I can get better. I do pride myself on consistency, so seeing all those top-10s, it’s a job well done, but hopefully next year I can add a couple more W’s to the stats.”

He failed to activate “Rahmbo mode” on Thursday at Silverado Resort and Spa’s North Course, carding just two birdies – both on par 5s – that were canceled out by two bogeys, including a 3-putt at No. 7, for an even-par round of 72 at the Fortinet Championship. That left the 26-year-old Spaniard trailing first-round leader Chez Reavie, who birdied four of the last five holes to shoot 65, by seven strokes at the kickoff event to the Tour’s 2021-22 season.

“I played a little bit better than I thought I was going to, to be honest,” Rahm said.

That’s because Rahm, who tested positive for COVID-19 not once but twice, suffered from a stomach ailment that kept him out of the pro-am on Wednesday and to cancel his pre-tournament press conference. He said he didn’t have a fever and had heard that a stomach bug was going around. He hadn’t eaten a solid meal since Tuesday morning, and lacked his usual mental focus. His body also felt stiff after being in bed for most of Wednesday.

“Stomach just wasn’t agreeing with me. It’s not like I couldn’t have played the pro-am, but I would have had too many unnecessary stops, let’s just say it that way,” he said. “I think a lot of people out there have played with worse. Tiger Woods won a U.S. Open with a broken knee, so I’m OK.”

With the Ryder Cup on the horizon next week, Rahm considered withdrawing from the tournament, but ultimately decided that it would behoove him to get some competitive rounds under his belt.

“I’m going to get better in due time whether I play here or not,” he said. “A good meal tonight and a good night’s sleep and I should be OK.”

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Stewart Cink has a pretty legit reason why he’s not defending his title this week at the Fortinet Championship

Blame Cink’s son Connor for the reason that Cink isn’t back to defend in Napa.

NAPA, Calif. – Stewart Cink’s victory at the 2020 Safeway Open (since renamed as the Fortinet Championship) was one of the feel-good stories of the year.

At age 47, Cink shot a final-round 7-under 65 on Silverado Resort’s North Course to end a 4,074-day winless drought in wine country. He did so with his son Reagan filling in on the bag and that partnership turned out to be so fruitful that the father-son duo not long thereafter made it official as a full-time job. (They later won the RBC Heritage together.)

But blame Cink’s other child, son Connor, who happened to be celebrating his 27th birthday on the day Cink turned back the clock at Silverado a year ago, for the reason that Cink isn’t back to defend.

It turns dear-old dad was double booked with Connor’s wedding scheduled for this Saturday, September 16. As Cink tweeted, the tournament was originally scheduled for a week earlier before being shifted back to its current  dates. Cink added, “Can’t wait for many more events in Napa.”

This marks the second year in a row that the defending champion has not played. Cameron Champ, who won in 2019, skipped after making it to the Tour Championship, which ended on a Monday and the new season resumed that Thursday.