D6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 3 , 2020
BY JIMMY GOLENloudon, n.h. — Brad Keselows-
ki won at New Hampshire Motor
Speedway on Sunday for his third
victory of the NASCAR Cup Se-
ries season and the 33rd of his
career.
Keselowski and Denny Hamlin
swapped stage wins and had the
lead a combined 18 times before
Keselowski, who is in a contract
year for Team Penske, took the
chec kered flag 1.647 seconds
ahead.
A fter the victory, Keselowski
grabbed a U.S. flag and spun his
car around in front of a crowd
that was masked and socially
distanced for much of the race
before crowding the fence to
chant “Brad! “Brad!” at the win-
ning driver.
“It’s so great to be racing back
in front of fans again. It feels like
forever, so welcome back, guys,”
Keselowski said. “We’re just so
glad to have them all back. It feels
so weird to be racing without
fans, but we’re glad you’re here.
“I hope you stay safe and thank
you for being here.”
Martin Truex Jr. was third
after working his way back from
the rear of the field because of a
penalty for a runaway tire in the
pits. Joey Logano was fourth and
Kevin Harvick fifth.
Kyle Busch was last after a flat
front right tire on the backstretch
sent him skidding into the wall
after just 15 laps. The reigningCup Series champion is a 12-time
winner in New Hampshire, in-
cluding three in the top series.
“About halfway down the back-
stretch I felt it go flat and tried to
get slowed down enough without
taking everybody else running
over me behind me down the
straightaway,” he said.
“ Seems to be our luck with the
Pedigree car here at New Hamp-
shire.... I t’s still 2020, but soon-
er or later we have to turn this
stuff around.”
The track has a capacity of
76,000, but Gov. Chris Sununu
(R) said last week that he expect-
ed about 12,000 fans to attend. A
track spokeswoman said atten-
dance would not be announced,
but the stands appeared to beabout 10 percent full.
The governor gave a brief wel-
come before the race and
thanked fans for cooperating
with the restrictions. Fans were
required to wear masks when
making their way around the
track but could remove them in
their seats.
Hamlin won the first stage
after fighting for the lead with
Keselowski and Ryan Blaney. Ke-
selowski took the second stage,
passing Hamlin on the final lap
of a two-lap sprint following a
series of cautions late in the
stage. It was his sixth stage win —
the most of any driver.
“We were going back-and-
fort h,” Hamlin said. “Wow, that
was some really, really goodshort-track racing there.
“Hopefully the fans liked what
they saw there with me and the
[No.] 2 for most of the day. Some
great side-by-side racing. We
treated each other fair, and it’s
good that we got one-two out of
it.”
In his final start in New
Hampshire, where he swept the
Cup events in 2003, Jimmie
Johnson recovered from an early
spin to finish 12th. The seven-
time series champion entered
the day 19th in the playoff race —
below the cut line — and has only
six races left to make up ground.
Johnson, who has said this will
be his last year as a full-time Cup
driver, was presented with a rep-
lica Revolutionary War musketas a parting gift, and “Thanks
Jimmie 48” was painted on the
inner wall. A trail on the property
was named the Jimmie Johnson
5K trail for the fitness nut, who
ran in the Boston Marathon last
year.
Bubba Wallace and Corey
LaJoie were sent to the back of
the grid because of improperly
mounted ballast that was discov-
ered during prerace inspection.
Both crews were also docked 10
points in the driver and owner
standings.
Jerry Baxter, the crew chief for
Wallace’s No. 43 car, and Ryan
Sparks, the crew chief doe
LaJoie’s No. 32, were suspended
for the race.
— Associated PressNASCAR
Keselowski holds o≠ Hamlin in New Hampshire for third victory of season
ASSOCIATED PRESSJ ustin Thomas won the S t.
Jude Invitational on Sunday in
Memphis to take the No. 1 spot in
the world for the first time since
June 2018.
Thomas dueled defending
champion Brooks Koepka down
the final holes, sealing the World
Golf Championships victory on
the par-5 16th. Thomas took the
lead for good with his second
straight birdie, while Koepka bo-
geyed the hole.
Koepka pulled within a stroke
with a 39-footer for birdie on
No. 17. But Koepka put his tee shot
into the water along the 18th
fairway on his way to double
bogey, allowing Thomas to finish
up an easy par putt for what
wound up a three-stroke victory.
Thomas closed with a 5-under-
par 66 to finish at 13-under 267. At
27, he became the t hird-youngest
player since 1960 t o reach 13 PGA
Tour wins, trailing only Tiger
Woods and Jack Nicklaus.
This was the fifth time Thomas
rallied to win, and he matched his
biggest comeback after starting
the day four strokes back of third-
round leader Brendon Todd.
Thomas has three wins this sea-
son, two since the start of the year.
The last time Thomas was
No. 1, he spent four weeks at the
top. He will supplant Jon Rahm,
who became No. 1 after winning
the Memorial two weeks ago.
Koepka f inished with a 69 and
tied for second with Phil Mickel-
son (67), Daniel Berger (65) and
Tom Lewis (66)....
Richy Werenski holed a flop
shot f rom the 16th fairway for a
five-point eagle and birdied the
last for a one-point victory over
Troy Merritt at the Barracuda
Championship in Truckee, Calif.
Werenski won for the first time
on the PGA Tour, scoring 13
points in the final round on Tahoe
Mountain Club’s Old Greenwood
Course. He f inished with 39
points, with players getting eight
points for albatross, five for eagle,
two for birdie, zero for par, mi-
nus-one for bogey and minus-
three for double bogey or worse.
l LPGA TOUR: Danielle Kang
played the brand of steady golf
that wins on tough golf courses,
closing with a 2-under 70 a t In-
verness Club in Toledo to win t he
Drive On Championship by one
stroke in the tour’s first event in
more than five months.
Kang, the No. 4 player in the
world, f inished at 7-under 209 to
win for the fourth time in her
career. Celine Boutier of France
finished second, and Minjee Lee
of Australia f inished alone in
third, three shots behind.
l PGA TOUR CHAMPIONS:
In Grand Blanc, Mich., Jim Furyk
closed with a 4-under 68 to win
the Ally Challenge as Brett Quig-
ley bogeyed his last two holes.
Playing his first event on the
50-and-older circuit, F uryk, a for-
mer U.S. Open champion with 17
titles on the PGA Tour, f inished at
14-under 202. Q uigley and R etief
Goosen were two shots back.
l EUROPEAN TOUR: Sam
Horsfield shot a final round 4-un-
der 68 to win the Hero Open by
one stroke over Thomas Detry in
Birmingham, E ngland.Daly, Singh will not play PGA
John Daly and Vijay Singh are
the l atest players to withdraw
from the PGA Championship,
which is t his week at TPC Hard-
ing Park in San Francisco, making
12 players either exempt or of-
fered invitations who have cho-
sen not to play.
Daly c ited health concerns,
and Singh cited an injury.GOLF ROUNDUPWin puts
Thomas
back atop
rankings
BY GENE WANGBefore taking a practice swing
upon arriving at Woodmont
Country Club in Rockville for the
first time late last week, Gabriela
Ruffels and Emilia Migliaccio
headed straight to a specially de-
signed U.S. Golf Association test-
ing area to have a swab inserted
into their nasal cavity.
It was far from the typical rou-
tine for two of the most accom-
plished players at this week’s U.S.
Women’s Amateur, but Ruffels,
the reigning champion, and Migli-
accio, ranked fourth in the world,
the highest in the field of 132,
embraced the procedure amid the
novel coronavirus pandemic.
The 120th U.S. Women’s Ama-
teur is the first tournament that
will crown a national champion
since the outbreak placed the
sports world on hiatus. All players
and their caddies must test nega-
tive to compete and each day
thereafter receive a temperature
check before being permitted on
the course.
“The USGA actually has done
an incredible job with all the test-
ing and safety precautions,” said
Ruffels, a r ising senior at South-
ern California who spent part of
her youth in Australia. “They’re
very strict about all of us wearing
masks, even when you’re just out-
side.
“Even walking to the different
facilities, you have to wear a mask.
It feels super safe around there,
which is nice. I m ean, obviously
it’s all very different. Just seeing
everyone in masks, it’s hard to
recognize some people. When I g o
past them, I’m like, ‘Wait, who are
you?’ ”
Ruffels ascended to promi-
nence at last year’s event at Old
Waverly in West Point, Miss., de-
feating Albane Valenzuela, 1 up, in
the championship match. She be-
came the first Australian to win
the U.S. Women’s Amateur and
since has climbed to No. 16 in the
world.
The last repeat winner of the
U.S. Women’s Amateur was Dan-
ielle Kang in 2010 and 2011.
Ruffels, 20, also made a historicstart at the Jacksonville Amateur
late last month as the first woman
to play in the tournament in its 59
years. Ruffels missed the cut by
four strokes in a rare opportunity
to play competitively since the
virus outbreak.
“I think it was a big deal for
them to have me come over,”
Ruffels said. “I mean it was super
special for me, too. I just wanted
to play a tournament to kind of get
in the competitive mode leadi ng
up to this week. I think it was good
to try to handle the pressure and
expectations that I’d probably
have this week, too.”
The daughter of former profes-
sional tennis players Ray Ruffelsand Anna-Maria Fernandez is no
stranger to the spotlight. When
she was 12, Ruffels rose to the No. 1
ranking in the Australian junior
tennis circuit before giving up the
sport, citing burnout.
At 14, she took up golf at the
suggestion of her parents, and by
2016 Ruffels finished ninth at the
Australian Women’s Amateur.
Migliaccio, meanwhile, also is a
seasoned international player,
having won two gold medals at the
Pan American Games in Lima,
Peru. She claimed the individual
title by four shots and helped the
United States win the men’s and
women’s combined champion-
ship.
The senior at Wake Forest, the
runner-up to Duke at last season’s
Division I women’s golf champi-
onship, became the first Ameri-
can, regardless of gender, to win a
gold medal in golf at either the
Pan American Games or the
Olympics since the sport was rein-
troduced in 2015.
Like all the competitors at the
U.S. Women’s Amateur, which be-
gins with two rounds of stroke
play Monday and Tuesday before
the field is trimmed to 64 for
match play culminating in Sun-
day’s final, Magliaccio has had to
get creative to keep her game in
shape during the pandemic.
“In practice every day, you al-
ways want to try to simulate the
same amount of pressure — you
can never really do that, but you
always want to work toward that,”she said. “Just things like that to
get your adrenaline back in the
mode that it is in competition.
That’s how I’ve been trying to get
back into that mind-set.”
Playing in her first U.S. Wom-
en’s Amateur, Migliaccio has won
five individual titles with the De-
mon Deacons and qualified for
the 2018 U.S. Women’s Open at
Shoal Creek in Alabama. She’s
scheduled to play in this year’s
U.S. Women’s Open in December
at Cypress Creek in Houston.
Migliaccio also was invited to
participate in the second Augusta
Women’s Amateur, with the final
round played at hallowed Augusta
National, site of the Masters, be-
fore the outbreak led to the can-
cellation of the tournament.
Migliaccio, 21, is eligible for the
2021 Augusta Women’s Amateur,
provided the former ACC fresh-
man of the year retains her ama-
teur standing.
The outbreak also kept the
reigning ACC individual champi-
on from competing in several in-
ternational events.
“It definitely was tough in the
beginning when things were can-
celed because I was planning on
going to Europe and I had tourna-
ments in Wales and Ireland,” she
said. “I had some pretty cool op-
portunities that were canceled,
and so it was pretty hard to pro-
cess. It all came as kind of a shock,
but everyone was in the same
boat.”
[email protected]Ru≠els, Migliaccio highlight field for U.S. Women’s Amateur
ATSUSHI TOMURA/GETTY IMAGES
Gabriela Ruffels will attempt to defend her title at the 132-player
U.S. Women’s Amateur this week at Woodmont Country Club.BY CHUCK CULPEPPERTo alert the uninitiated, the
PGA Championship used to dan-
gle on the end of the annual
chronology of the four men’s golf
majors, coming forever in Au-
gust and in fourth. In 2019, it
leapfrogged from August to May
and into its splashy new place as
second. In wretched 2020, it’s
about to move back to August
and go, somehow, first.
It’s also about to become the
biggest major American sporting
event since the novel coronavi-
rus pandemic stilled the world.
It’s also about to open the major
golf year in the month that used
to close the same, with the virus
having hurled the PGA Champi-
onship from May back to August,
the U.S. Open from June to
September, the Masters all the
way from April to November and
the British Open into cancella-
tion. And when the PGA Champi-
onship convenes without specta-
tors Thursday to Sunday at TPC
Harding Park in the preposter-
ously pretty western edges of San
Francisco, it’s also about...
It’s also about to remind us
that in lousy old 2020, all that
oddity can eclipse some serious
gravity, burying even the fact
that this PGA will stage the hunt
for a sports feat that would
quali fy as bewildering.
Initiated souls might even re-
member, in this time of hard
remembering: If Brooks Koepka
could dip into his bales of major
know-how and win the 102nd
PGA Championship, it would be
his third straight. He would
become the first man to do so
since Walter Hagen from 1924 to
1927, back when the event used
match play rather than stroke
play to determine its winner and
when Hagen won in French Lick,
Ind.; Olympia Fields, Ill.; Long
Island; and Dallas.
Asked on Wednesday at the
World Golf Championships
St. Jude Invita tional in Memphis
whether he could carry his envi-
able confidence to San Francisco
after the trying season he has
had in 2020, Koepka said, “I am
defending, aren’t I?”
“Yeah,” the knowledgeable
qu estioner replied.
“Okay, just checking,” Koepka
winked.
Unrelated: The next day in
Memphis, he shot a 62.
In fact, as Koepka turned 30
as one of only 29 men in the past
160 years to win at least four
majors, it’s helpful to remember
people used to needle him for
being better at majors than at
non-majors. Of all the nitpicks
to withstand in life, that would
have to rank among the most
desirable. He still has four major
titles and three other PGA Tour
titles, four of the hardest and
three of the not-as-hardest.
If Koepka can make it five and
three, h e would continue his
dizzying trek up into the stars
among the sport’s hallowed
names. Already in 2018 he be-
came the fifth player to win the
U.S. Open and PGA Champion-
ship in one year, after Gene
Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nick-
laus and Tiger Woods. Now he
would manage something Woods
couldn’t quite in 2001 and 2008,
when Woods came off consecu-
tive PGA Championship titles to
finish tied for 29th in 2001 in
Georgia and to miss 2008 inMichigan for surgery after his
towering U.S. Open win on a
mangled leg.
Koepka would turn up almost
alongside Hagen, who himself
won 11 majors, third all-time.
“To even have a chance to put
my name with his would be
incredible, and it would be su-
per-special,” Koepka once said,
long ago.
That statement came back on
Feb. 17 and allegedly upon this
same planet, when the PGA held
a news conference with Koepka,
yielding a transcript that feels
like some sort of breezy fairy
tale and contains not one men-
tion of the word “virus.” Yeah,
sure, he would try to hit some
balls into famed McCovey Cove
when he got to San Francisco!
Yeah, sure, he had seen the
Giants at Oracle Park before,
snagged some tickets from
catcher Buster Posey, whom
Koepka knew from Florida
State! Yeah, he said of Harding
Park: “It’s a big-boy golf course,”
having been there for the WGC
match play event in 2015, whenhe bested Russell Henley and
Marc Warren but then bowed to
J.B. Holmes.
Back then, everyone inclined
to remember might have remem-
bered: Koepka showed the con-
siderable intestines to ignore
booming crowd noise for Woods
to win the 2018 PGA Champion-
ship at Bellerive near St. Louis
and to ignore booming crowd
noise for Dustin Johnson to win
the 2019 PGA Championship at
Bethpage Black Course on Long
Island.
Since his celestial majors re-
cord from 2019 — second at the
Masters, first at the PGA, second
at the U.S. Open, fourth at the
British — golf has treated him to
one of the thuds it seems to
administer peerlessly. In the cal-
endar year 2020, he has gone tied
for 43rd, cut, tied for 47th, 91-day
coronavirus hiatus, tied for
32nd, seventh, cut, tied for 62nd
and cut before tying for second
in Memphis. He has done this all
while having reporters ask the
necessary question nobody
hopes to hear, “How’s yourknee?”
(It hurts after a long ball-
beating session and walking
downhill, he said here and
there, but it ’s not the reason he
has sagged.)
He arrived in Minnesota for
the 3M Open two Mondays back
and riffed on some of those
greatest hits of talking to himself
in a lonely sport: “I just need to
play good. I’ve played so bad
lately. Yeah, just trying to find
things. Every week I feel like the
results aren’t there, but it’s get-
ting better and better. My good
shots are good, but I’ve just got to
bring that bottom level up. I’ve
hit some real costly shots.”
Luckily, he also rummaged
around to remind listeners of the
cocksureness still bubbling with-
in. To a question about the
revelation of long, long hitters
such as Bryson DeChambeau and
Tony Finau, he said: “I don ’t need
to keep up with anybody. I’m
good.”
By the time he got from that
cut in Minnesota to that runner-
up finish in Memphis, he told of
how being coached can change
things rapidly and how he had
just consulted Phil Kenyon about
putting. In one of those passages
that helps explain how the game
can menace even its masters, he
said: “First o ff, you always know
my ball sits off the toe [of the
putter], so that’s changed; it’s
over the center, over the line
now. My heel is usually off the
ground, and it’s no longer off the
ground. Just the way my left
hand kind of works through the
putting stroke has become a little
different.”
Of his short-game coach Pete
Cowen, he told reporters in
Memphis: “I think with Pete, it ’s
psychological. He’ll beat me
down, tell me I can’t do some-
thing; he’ll jump on me pretty
good. And I enjoy that, when
someone tells me I can’t do
something. You know, telling me
I’m not going to win, it will be a
while.”
If only enough people might
tell Koepka it will be a while,
sometime well beyond next
week, maybe golf’s first men’s
major of 2020 could carve a little
slice of golf history in this, of all
years.
[email protected]Here c omes the PGA Championship — and here comes Koepka
STACY REVERE/GETTY IMAGES
After struggling for much of the year, B rooks Koepka tied for second place at the St Jude Invitational.