View photos of U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover throughout his professional career.
A consummate professional, Lucas Glover is having a well-earned late career resurgence.
The proud Clemson alum made his professional debut in 2001. Playing the then-Nationwide Tour from 2002-03, Glover earned PGA Tour status beginning in the 2004 season.
Making more than half of his cuts in his rookie season, Glover picked up his first win in 2005 at the FUNAI Classic at Walt Disney World Resort, holing out from a greenside bunker for the win.
Fast forward to 2009 and Glover wins the U.S. Open, surviving a wild-weather week at Bethpage Black. He became the first ever U.S. Open champion to win the event after having to qualify through sectionals.
The 2009 season was his best year on Tour, finishing inside the top 10 on the money list and earning a spot on the Presidents Cup team.
2012 brought a knee injury that tuned Glover into a shell of his former self on the golf course. Continued struggles from 2016-2018 meant Glover would play the 2017-18 season on the now Korn Ferry, then Web.com Tour.
Regaining his PGA Tour card following a Web.com finals run in 2019, Glover hasn’t looked back since. Wins at the 2021 John Deere Classic and the 2023 Wyndham Championship have given a boost to one of the most well-liked guys in the locker room.
Matt Kuchar owns the distinction of being the only player to qualify for the playoffs every year since 2007.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — And then there was one.
Matt Kuchar now owns the distinction of being the only player to qualify for the playoffs in each season since the inception of the FedEx Cup in 2007.
Kuchar finished T-39 at the Wyndham Championship on Sunday and enters the playoffs, which begin next week in Memphis, at No. 60 in the season-long point standings.
This season, only the top 70 in the FedEx Cup standings qualify for the first playoff event, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, down from 125 (2009-2022), which made it much tougher.
After plenty of drama, only one player, tournament winner Lucas Glover advanced to the playoffs and Austin Eckroat, who entered the week at No. 70 but missed the cut, got knocked out.
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It might be small consolation after making bogey on his final three holes to lose the lead and finish T-2, but Russell Henley, along with Harris English, who finished T-35, became the 26th and 27th players to cross the $5 million mark in earnings this season during the FedEx Cup regular-season finale.
Glover banked $1.368 million from the total purse of $7.6 million.
Scotte Scheffler, who took the week off, still leads the money list with a single-season record of $19,138,342, the highest single-season mark of all time. The top five on the money list behind him — Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Wyndham Clark and Viktor Hovland — have all earned more than $10 million to date.
Here’s a closer look at how much each player earned this week for four days of work at Sedgefield Country Club.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Justin Thomas’s pursuit of a spot in the 2023 FedEx Cup Playoffs came down to the wire at the Wyndham Championship on Sunday. He was out, he was in, he was out again and then he nearly holed a walk-off birdie pitch but it wasn’t to be. Ben Griffin, who missed the cut this week hung on to the final spot and Thomas was the odd man out at No. 71, just nine points behind.
“I made the best out of every situation that I had. And just, I mean, fought as hard as I possibly could,” Thomas said after his round but before he learned he was officially eliminated. “That’s kind of what I’ve done my whole life, my whole career and I didn’t want to stop here.”
Thomas, who entered the week at No. 79 in the season-long points standings, shot a final-round 2-under 68 at Sedgefield Country Club to finish T-12.
Thomas had qualified for the playoffs, which begin next week with the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, in each of his first eight seasons, winning the title in 2017, and finishing in the top 10 in the final standings in five of the last six seasons.
With only the top 70 advancing to the playoffs instead of 125 as in previous seasons, Thomas did everything he could to extend his season, including adding the 3M Open to his schedule last week and making his first appearance in the Wyndham since 2016. While Thomas ended up 71st, he said he gained a lot from the experience.
“I feel like I’m back to me again,” he said. “Personally, I think this was harder today than trying to win a golf tournament.”
Thomas bounced back from an opening-round 70, which dropped him to 81st in the standings, with rounds of 65-66 and entered the final round projected to finish No. 72. On Sunday, he drained a 39-foot birdie putt at No. 6, but then strung together eight straight pars, including missing an 8-foot birdie putt at 14.
Just when his chances were starting to look bleak, he took advantage of the par-5 15th, splitting the fairway with a 332-yard bomb. Walking to his ball, he turned to his caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay and said, “It sure is nice to play the hole for the first time all week from the fairway.”
Thomas made the most of it, drilling a 7-iron from 214 yards to 15 feet and his downhill eagle putt trickled in. Thomas clenched his right fist and pointed to the sky. It lifted him to No. 70 in the standings. But one hole later, he made a bogey that would prove costly. The wind switched directions on him when he hit 9-iron at the par-3 16th and his ball ballooned in the air. He hit a poor chip from short of the green and missed a 30-foot par putt. At first, it didn’t hurt his position; that is until Adam Svensson made a birdie at 15 to vault ahead of Thomas in the tournament and steal some valuable points.
Thomas scrambled for par at 17 but tugged his tee shot at 18 left and into the trees. From a lie in pine straw and with a tree forcing him to hit a low hooking 8-iron, he contorted his body in a whirlybird motion reminiscent of Tiger Woods escaping trouble over the years. It was a remarkable shot, stopping 34 feet short of the flag.
Justin Thomas plays a shot on the 18th hole during the final round of the 2023 Wyndham Championship at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Photo: Logan Whitton/Getty Images)
Thomas weighed his options: using his 56-degree wedge he determined to be the conservative play to make an up-and-down par but he elected to trap a 60-degree to try to make it, knowing that a birdie would lock up a playoff spot. His ball bounced three times and kissed the flagstick, coming to rest a foot from the hole. He put his hands on his head and fell to the ground in disbelief, knowing that he was that close to punching his ticket to Memphis in dramatic fashion.
“It would have been a lot more incredible if it would have gone in,” Thomas said.
Shortly after Thomas tapped in, play was suspended for more than 2 hours and so started Thomas’s waiting game to see if he could get any help. He recalled that in 2015 he was told his spot was secure to earn a berth in the Tour Championship but then players still on the course made birdies and he was bumped to No. 32. He knew he was going to need help, which he didn’t get, but he was proud of the fact that he’d done his part.
“I played the best I could and I fought as hard as I could and shot the lowest I possibly could,” he said.
GREENSBORO, N.C. – Lucas Glover was at the end of his rope.
The yips, the involuntary wrist spasms that occur most commonly when golfers are trying to putt, had plagued Glover for the better part of a decade.
“I had no control over my faculties sometimes,” he said. “I could just lose all feelings over a 10-inch putt. It was frustrating. I fought it for a long time.”
But thanks to a long putter and a split-handed putting grip, he has regained his confidence on the greens and he holed enough putts on Sunday to win the Wyndham Championship and earn his fifth career PGA Tour title.
“It’s been a revelation for me,” Glover said.
He closed with a 2-under 68 at Sedgefield Country Club and finished with a 72-hole total of 20-under 260, one stroke better than Russell Henley and Ben An.
Glover points to a 4-putt on the fifth green at Colonial Country Club in the first round of the Charles Schwab Challenge a decade ago as the start of the dastardly affliction. The winner of the 2009 U.S. Open among his four previous titles had tried just about everything, including putting with his eyes closed. The stats tell the ugly story of his steep decline: he was 180th in Strokes Gained: Putting this season entering this week. But he’s been downright putrid on the shortest of putts. In the 2020-21 season, Glover missed 24 putts from 3 feet and in (863 for 887), a miss rate of 2.71 percent that ranked 196th on Tour. In 2021-22, he missed 27 shorties (193rd). The 43-year-old was struggling so mightily this season – already 26 misses from short range through July – and his confidence was so dented that he considered a switch to putting left-handed or with a long putter.
“I just tried the long putter first,” he said. “I had two weeks off before Memorial and just ordered [a new putter] and taught myself how to use it and been kind of sticking to that.” He added, “If you ever want a Tour player to practice more, you give them a new club because they’ve got to get used to it, figure it out. That’s kind of how it’s been.”
Last month, at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, Glover switched to a broomstick-style putter with a mallet head, the L.A.B. Mezz.1 Max, and ranked fifth in Strokes Gained: Putting that week, registering his first top-10 finish of the season.
“Making all your tap-ins is nice,” said Glover, who ranked 15th in SG: Putting this week. “When my speed’s good, I seem to make a lot of putts.”
Glover ranked 189th in the FedEx Cup when he taught himself his new split-handed grip, where the left hand hovers away from his chest and his right hand is separated and positioned farther down the club in a claw-style grip, in his garage ahead of the Memorial in early June. In July, he reeled off three straight top 10s — a T-4 at Rocket Mortgage Classic, a T-6 at John Deere Classic and a T-5 at the Barbasol Championship — and after a missed cut last week, he climbed back into the trophy hunt at Sedgefield CC, where he made his 19th career start, the most of any player since 2004, after rounds of 66-64-62. Beginning the week at No. 112 in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, he needed to finish no worse than a two-way tie for second to have a chance to qualify and did better than that, vaulting to No. 49 in the season-long points race.
In the final round, Glover, who shared the 54-hole lead with Billy Horschel, got off to an inauspicious start with a three-putt bogey from 27 feet. But he knocked his approach from 141 yards to 4 inches at the fourth and tapped it in. He drained a 7-foot birdie at No. 8 and 15-footer at No. 11 to reach 20 under. He and Henley were tied for the lead when play was suspended due to inclement weather for 2 hours and 3 minutes.
When play resumed, Henley, who has done everything but win this tournament the last four years, grabbed the lead with a 2-putt birdie at 15 but proceeded to bogey his final three holes to shoot 69 and suffered another disappointing result.
“Felt a little jittery out there, just never got into a good sync with my swing, felt kind of rushed from the top of my swing, just didn’t do a good job of handling the restart,” Henley said.
At 18, Glover caught a fortuitous break when he pulled his drive left. It appeared to be headed into tree trouble but bounced off a golf cart and closer to the fairway. Glover opted to lay up and got up and down for a closing par, fittingly sinking an 8-foot putt. When it dropped, Glover held his trusty long putter and smiled with glee.
“It’s what I needed,” he said of his putting technique. “This is a completely different motor skill and just a way to rewire my brain. … When you struggle as long as I have, or had, it just happened to be what happened to be the answer.”
Charley Hoffman made an albatross on the par-5 15th hole Sunday during the final round of the 2023 Wyndham Championship.
After a 343-yard drive, Hoffman holed out his second shot from 198 yards over water to a back-right pin at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Hoffman was even par on his round after a bogey, a double bogey and three birdies. The double-circled 2 got him to 3 under and into a tie for 11th. The four-time winner on Tour has a season-best finish of T-14 at the WM Phoenix Open this season.
🚨 ALBATROSS! 🚨@Hoffman_Charley makes a 2 on the 546-yard par-5 15th.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Back in May, Justin Thomas was asked what he missed most while doing a dairy- and gluten-free diet.
“I want a pizza like you can’t imagine,” he said during a press conference at the Wells Fargo Championship. “Like, I would do some really messed up things for a pizza just doused in ranch.”
Well, Thomas wrapped up his six months of eating dairy-free and celebrated last week after returning from England and the British Open by eating not one, not two, but three gluten-free pizzas while in Blaine, Minnesot, for the 3M Championship.
“It was my first pizza since January and I could’ve cried,” he said on Saturday at the Wyndham Championship.
Asked if he thinks the diet has helped him improve his energy levels, he said, “I mean this is my fourth week in a row, obviously I missed two of the cuts, but it’s been a lot of travel and I feel pretty good.”
Props to Thomas for sacrificing one of his favorite guilty pleasures to chase greatness. While he hasn’t won this year and has endured the biggest slump of his career, he’s shown he’s willing to leave no stone unturned. He noted he still has a few more months to complete his quest to spend a full year without eating gluten.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Just two months after Billy Horschel opened with an 84 at the Memorial and said through tears during his post-round press conference that his confidence “is the lowest it’s been in my entire career,” Horschel grabbed a share of the 54-hole lead at the Wyndham Championship.
One day after shooting 62 at Sedgefield Country Club, the low round of his career, Horschel backed it up with a bogey-free 7-under 63 on Saturday to tie Lucas Glover at 18-under 192. With time to kill at the end of the broadcast window, CBS re-aired the clip of Horschel’s emotional press conference, which included him saying, “I’m close.”
“That interview, that moment, as I’ve talked about a while, it was sort of like a release. I don’t fully understand why it happened then and there, because I had shared some of that with my team and my family before leading up to that, but right then and there it just happened,” he said. “From that moment I’ve been in a better head space, the game’s been going in the right direction since then.”
It doesn’t hurt that the putts have been dropping like old times. Last week, Horschel switched to an Odyssey putter and it’s been a game-changer this week. He ranks first in the field in Strokes Gained: Putting, gaining more than nine strokes on the greens and registered seventh straight under-par round.
“Just felt like needed a new look,” he said. “We sort of messed around with a Ping putter earlier this week and we thought we were going to use that, but I had a little hard time with longer putts, judging the speed with it, so we went back to this Odyssey and it’s working well.”
Billy Horschel sets to putt on the 8th green during the third round of the Wyndham Championship golf tournament. Mandatory Credit: David Yeazell-USA TODAY Sports
Indeed, it is. Horschel, the 2014 FedEx Cup champion has qualified for the playoffs in each of the last 10 seasons but he entered the week at No. 116 in the point standings. He enters the final round projected to jump 63 spots and move on to Memphis next week, but he can’t finish worse than a two-way tie for second. The way he’s rolling the rock, his eighth win of his career is well within his sights.
“I’m happy where my game is, I’m happy where things are trending, I’m happy where mentally I’m heading,” he said. “So hopefully it’s just another day of moving forward, it’s another steppingstone. I haven’t been here in a while, but I’m prepared for whatever, however I may feel, whatever comes tomorrow.”
Here are four more things to know from the third round of the Wyndham Championship.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Pressure does funny things to golfers.
Just look at the players battling to earn a spot in the FedEx Cup Playoffs at this week’s regular season finale at the Wyndham Championship. With only the top 70 moving on to Memphis, Nos. 68 Ben Griffin and “Bubble Boy” Austin Eckroat missed the cut on Friday as did Ben Taylor, Garrick Higgo, K.H. Lee, David Lingmerth, the four players who entered the week Nos. 71-74.
Meanwhile, 54-hole co-leaders Lucas Glover and Billy Horschel have zoomed from No. 112 to No. 50 and No. 116 to No. 53, respectively.
But for a true sense of how the pressure is ratcheted up at Sedgefield Country Club, here’s what two-time major champion and former world No. 1 Justin Thomas had to say.
“It’s a lot harder than trying to win a golf tournament in my opinion. I think when you’re trying to win a tournament you’re there and if you don’t win it’s a bummer, but you still had a great week kind of thing,” he said. “If I just don’t get it done for what I need to get done this week, then it sucks and my year’s over.”
Thomas entered the week at No. 79 in the season-long standings, but after shooting 66 on Saturday to improve to T-11, he’s projected to finish 72nd, 19 points out of a playoff berth. He’ll need to go low again on Sunday. Even if the 54-hole co-leaders finish 1-2, Thomas could still get in with a T-7. Data Golf gives him a 30 percent chance of making the playoffs.
But to hear Thomas tell it, that isn’t even the biggest reason he’s feeling a different brand of nerves this week.
“I want to make the Ryder Cup team so bad. I mean, it’s so important to me. I mean, I legitimately would rather make the Ryder Cup than the Playoffs, which is really, really messed up to say, but it’s just the truth,” he said.“But because of that, I think that’s why I played so poorly the last month and a half or two months. Like it’s just I’m putting so much pressure on myself to play well, it’s very similar to what happened to me in 2016.”
Thomas also addressed how he will approach Sunday’s round.
“The only way I feel I would change strategy would be in a situation where I needed to birdie the last two holes or I needed to birdie 18 or something. The hope is to go play really well tomorrow and see how close to the lead we can get, and if I do that, then should be fine,” he said. “It’s very similar to Q-School. I didn’t go into the final stage of Q-School trying to finish 45th, I went there trying to win a golf tournament. If I just came up short, then it was going to be plenty to qualify. It’s a very different but somewhat similar situation here.”
With one round to go on the Tour’s 47-event regular season, here’s what the projected standings look like from Nos. 65-80:
