D6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022
GolfBY GENE WANGRory McIlroy was standing to
the side waiting to speak to the
media late Saturday afternoon
following his round of 2-under-
par 68 at the Wells Fargo Cham-
pionship when 54-hole leader
Keegan Bradley walked past him
after wrapping up his round of
interviews.
“Hey, Keegan,” McIlroy said.
“Might be opening that bottle of
wine sooner than you thought.”
McIlroy’s pat on the back
came after Bradley shot the low
round of the day to take a
two-stroke lead into the final
round. But the four-time major
champion did put himself some-
what back in contention as well,
especially considering he made
the cut Friday afternoon on the
number.
He’s six shots behind Bradley
but has had his share of sublime
Sunday scoring. The most recent
came last month, when he holed
out from the bunker at the
72nd hole for an 8-under 64 in
the final round at the Masters,
finishing second with the lowest
round of the tournament.
“I mean six shots is still six
shots,” McIlroy said. “It depends
on what the weather is like
tomorrow. I’d like it to be pretty
tough. It’s probably not going to
be as wet. It’s going to be quite
cold.
“I don’t know what the wind is
going to be like. I can’t imagine
tomorrow being any tougher
than today was.”
McIlroy’s round began on the
back nine with bogeys at Nos. 10
and 11, but he settled in with a
birdie at the par-3 12th, hitting
his tee shot within nine feet and
making the putt. The three-time
Wells Fargo champion, includ-
ing last year in Charlotte, added
a birdie at the 301-yard par- 4
14th.
He closed his first nine with
consecutive birdies. At the par-3
17 th that played 175 yards, McIl-
roy’s tee shot came to rest nine
feet from the pin just off the
fringe and steps from a bunker
protecting the b ack l eft. He m ade
that putt to continue a splendid
performance on the greens.
At the 450-yard par-4 18th,
McIlroy’s approach landed inside
of six feet, and the ball disap-
peared into the hole on his next
stroke. He needed just 24 putts in
his round, the fewest of any
player in the field Saturday.
McIlroy is first in the Wells
Fargo Championship in fewest
putts (72) and 17 th in strokes
gained putting.
Putting pushed the Northern
Irishman into the weekend after
McIlroy holed a seven-footer on
his 36th hole Friday afternoon to
get to even par.
“When you see conditions like
this, you have a pretty upbeat
attitude toward it,” said McIlroy,
who has played frequently in
similar weather in Europe. “I
mean, I was just grateful to be
here. I didn’t play great [Friday],
but I was able to just hang in
there and make that par on 18.
“A ttitude was just happy to be
here and then just try to make
the most of the next couple of
days.”
Hahn scrambles to 2-over 72
James Hahn earned himself
an extended tour of TPC Potomac
at Avenel Farm by spraying iron
shots all over the layout. But he
summoned an exquisite short
game, underscored by his first-
place standing in scrambling
through 54 holes, to move into a
tie for third place with Anirban
Lahiri.
He shot a 2-over 72 with three
bogeys, including one on which
he missed an 11-foot putt at
No. 18, and a lone birdie at No 7.
Hahn had a three-hole stretch
of daring escapes that saw him
make pars from greenside bun-
kers each time (Nos. 8-10). The
capper came when he was
68 yards out and blasted his sand
shot within two feet at the par-5
10th.
“Biggest grind that I’ve had a
in a long time,” Hahn said. “I
don’t like counting how many
up-and-downs that I had....
Had a really good day out there.
“It was fun.”
WELLS FARGO NOTES
McIlroy
is lurking
after solid
round of 68
Three-time champion
on fringe of contention
after battling elementsApparently, Monahan hasn’t
been able to sell the nation’s
capital to corporate America.
The tour goes where the
sponsorship money leads.
Perhaps the polarized political
climate makes the area
inhospitable to corporations,
which want nothing but good
news and talk of their charity
work during tour telecasts.
It also may be that the tour
doesn’t care all that much about
the void here as long as it has a
full schedule. Except during the
pre-Avenel years and the early
Woods years — all at
Congressional — the tour has
treated the D.C. area as a Class
AAA town.
Much of the problem goes
back to the premature move to
Avenel in 1987. Love’s line
lingers on tour driving ranges.
The irony is that it was Love
who did the golf course’s
redesign in 2008. Most who
have played the rebuilt course
love it.
“I think it’s terrific,” Rory
McIlroy said after playing it
Tuesday for the first time. “It’s
hard, but it’s fair. I think playing
here every year would be a good
thing for the tour.”
McIlroy is a member of the
tour’s policy board. Maybe he
can nudge Monahan and his
sales team to push harder to
find a title sponsor.
In the meantime, judging the
area during a rainy weekend
with a decent but unspectacular
field — McIlroy is the only top-
10 player taking part — would
be unfair. Then again, the tour
has rarely been fair to
Washington.
The tour will leave town
Sunday. It may not be back for a
long, long time.an event in Atlanta in May that
was about to go away and it was
possible the tournament might
be moved earlier in the year.
Atlanta went away, but the D.C.
date was never moved to before
Memorial Day.
But the moment that more or
less sealed the relationship
between Woods and the
membership came when
someone asked Woods why the
club would want to host a
midsummer event. Woods
looked shocked. “Why wouldn’t
you want to host this event?” he
responded.
For the record, I am a
member at Congressional. I
voted to renew the contract, and
it was renewed, barely — by a
margin of 52 percent to 48
percent.
Woods’s relationship with the
club began to crater after the
accident. AT&T pulled out as
title sponsor in 2014 and was
replaced by Quicken Loans. The
last time the tournament was
played at Congressional was in- A year later, after the event
had moved back to a redesigned
Avenel (now known as TPC
Potomac at Avenel Farms),
Quicken Loans informed the
tour it would no longer be a title
sponsor, unless its tournament
was moved to its corporate
home of Detroit. The
tournament was played one
more year at Avenel — with no
title sponsor — and then
disappeared.
That year, I asked new PGA
To ur commissioner Jay
Monahan if he thought there
would be a tournament in
Washington in 2019. “Yes, I
think we’ll find a sponsor,”
Monahan said. He smiled and
said, “I can sell anything.”
thanks, and the last Booz Allen
Classic took place in 2006.
Appropriately, that
tournament finished on a
Tuesday after several days of
heavy rain, with no spectators
allowed on the grounds to
witness the conclusion. The
rainy, empty golf course was
reflective of how far the
tournament had fallen. The only
thing it had in common with the
sparkling event once hosted by
Congressional was that the
winner, Ben Curtis, was a major
champion.
Just when it looked like the
tour would depart the D.C. area
for good, fate — and
sponsorships — came to the
rescue. The International, an
event played outside Denver,
was also struggling with
sponsorship. Believing his event
wasn’t supported enough by the
PGA To ur, tournament founder
Jack Vickers folded it.
By then, Tiger Woods was
golf ’s dominant player. He
wanted his own event, a la Jack
Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.
Then-commissioner Tim
Finchem thought that was a
great idea, and Congressional
was willing to host again in
return for the tour’s highest
rental fee and the presence of
Woods.
But the relationship between
the tour, Woods and the club
began to go south even before
Woods’s infamous automobile
crash in November 2009. At a
“town hall meeting” to discuss a
contract renewal in 2008, a
number of members expressed
concern with giving up the club
for a week in midsummer when
school was out, regardless of the
rental fee. Finchem said the
tournament sponsor, AT&T, hadCongressional Country Club.
The fields were strong,
attendance was excellent, and all
was well. In fact, five of the first
six winners were major
champions, including Greg
Norman, who won in 1984 and
1986.
But then Beman and the tour
jumped the shark. Beman’s
dream of building a golf course
near where he had grown up, as
part of the To urnament Players
Network, had come true when
TPC Avenel opened in 1986. A
year later, the Kemper Open
moved to Avenel, a decision that
turned out to be penny-wise and
pound-foolish.
Because the tour owned
Avenel, there was no rent. But
the golf course was flawed and
not nearly ready for a PGA To ur
event. The players’ attitude
toward Avenel was best summed
up by Davis Love III. “Avenel
isn’t a bad golf course,” he said,
“unless you have to drive past
Congressional to get here.”
The fields became worse and
worse, although attendance
remained terrific. Norman
stopped coming after saying that
Avenel’s ninth hole “should be
blown up.”
When Chicago-based Kemper
abandoned the event after the
2002 tournament, two local
businesses stepped in to keep it
alive: Friedman, Billings,
Ramsey for one year, followed by
Booz Allen. But in 2005, when
the tour overhauled its schedule,
Booz Allen was offered a date in
October — meaning it wouldn’t
even be part of the new FedEx
Cup schedule. A fall date — in
the middle of football season
and with no real incentive for
top players to show up — was
untenable. Booz Allen said noThe PGA To ur
came back to
town this week
after a four-year
absence. When —
or if — it will
return is an open
question, with no
one from the tour
giving any indication it is a
priority.
Which is shocking.
This is, after all, the nation’s
capital. It is also a golf hotbed
and a place that in the past drew
huge crowds, regardless of the
quality of its tournament fields.
And yet, thanks to myriad
mistakes and a lack of care, the
next PGA To ur event scheduled
for this area is the PGA
Championship — in 2031.
The only reason the Wells
Fargo Championship is here this
week is because its regular site,
Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte,
is hosting the Presidents Cup in
the fall, and the tour — which
likes to sell people on the idea
that the Presidents Cup is
somehow important — didn’t
want two events there in the
same year.
This area has traveled a long
way — in the wrong direction —
over the last 42 years.
When Deane Beman was the
tour’s commissioner, he very
much wanted an annual event
played in this region. There were
two reasons: Beman believed the
tour should have a presence in
the nation’s capital, and he grew
up in the area, graduating from
the University of Maryland
before going on to win four
times on tour.
Beman was the major reason
the tour came to Maryland in
1980, when the Kemper Open
was moved from Charlotte toWashington area has always deserved better from the PGA TourJohn
Feinsteintions as this tournament flashed
a wide smile on his first putt
after making the turn when his
ball stalled inches from the cup
on a birdie bid from outside 70
feet.
Also with a 33 over his first
nine was Rory McIlroy, the high-
est ranked player in the field at
No. 7. The three-time winner of
the Wells Fargo Championship,
including last year at Quail Hol-
low in Charlotte, fired a 2-under
68 for the day’s second-lowest
score.
“It feels like I’ve just gone 12
rounds in a pro boxing match
you’re fighting everything,” said
Lahiri, who made bogey at 18 to
finish his round at even par.
“You’re fighting your body, the
elements, the water. It’s tough
work. You just have to grit your
teeth and kind of grind it out.”yard par 4, and had a putt inside
10 feet for birdie, but he was
unable to capitalize.
“Unfortunately I just didn’t
have my stuff today,” Day said. “I
made a lot of errors out there and
hitting into penalty areas. It’s
okay. I’ve just got to get back to it
tomorrow and try and find some
positives from the first two days
going into tomorrow’s round.”
Three groups in front of Day
was Lahiri, who wielded his
putter masterfully over Nos. 8
and 9, holing putts from 24 and
16 feet, respectfully, to get within
a shot of the lead after complet-
ing his outward nine with a 33. It
was his first weekend appear-
ance at the Wells Fargo in four
starts.
The native of India and run-
ner-up at the Players Champion-
ship contested in similar condi-right side of the green. His sand
shot wound up on the other side
of the putting surface, and a
pitch back toward the pin came
to rest inside of nine feet.
After making that putt for
bogey, Day pulled his tee shot at
the 443-yard par-4 fourth into
the water along the left side of
the fairway. He followed by driv-
ing into the right rough, laid up
86 yards from the flag, pitched to
eight feet and missed that putt
for a triple-bogey 7.
Day landed in the water on the
left again with an errant tee shot
at the 354 -yard par-4 fifth, took a
drop and left his third shot 46
yards from the hole. He pitched
to five feet and made the putt for
bogey, dropping out of the lead.
The misery ebbed briefly
when Day finally found land off
the tee at the next hole, a 449-Orleans at which he shot a
third-round 63.
“Today and yesterday were
just really good ball-striking and
really good putting,” Bradley
said. “It’s rare that you match
those up, and I matched those
up the last two days. So if I can
just continue that, I like my
chances.”
A swing that broke down
seemingly overnight plagued 36-
hole leader Jason Day. The 2015
PGA Championship winner en-
tered the weekend three shots
ahead of his closest pursuer but
made three bogeys and a triple-
bogey on the front nine on the
way to a 9-over 79 to fall nine
shots off the pace.
Day’s travails began at the
par-3 third, where his tee shot
plugged some 85 yards from the
pin in a bunker protecting thebirdies came at No. 3, where
Bradley holed a 14-foot putt.
At the par-4 11th, Bradley sank
a 22-footer for birdie before
landing his tee shot at the par- 3
12th less than three feet from the
pin, displaying accuracy that
helped him become PGA To ur
rookie of the year in 2011, when
he also won the PGA Champion-
ship at Atlanta Athletic Club.
That victory placed Bradley
among a half-dozen players in
golf history to win their first
start in a major championship.
Bradley had been trending up
coming into the first PGA To ur
event in the suburbs of D.C. since
2018, logging three top-10s in his
previous five events. Most re-
cently he finished tied for fourth
at the Zurich Classic near NewWELLS FARGO FROM D1
As conditions worsen, Bradley finds comfort zone
GREGORY SHAMUS/GETTY IMAGES
“When conditions get like this, I find a sense of calm,” said Keegan Bradley, who was one of just four players to shoot below par Saturday at TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm.