Jun 22, 2020
Putting key to Simpson's win at Harbour Town
TSN's Bob Weeks look at Webb Simpson's improvement with the putter that helped him to a win at Harbour Town, Brooks Koepka's resurgence and more.
By Bob Weeks
Webb Simpson won the RBC Heritage largely on the strength of his putting. The 34-year-old finished second in Strokes Gained: Putting for the week, picking up 6.6 shots on the field. He was also a remarkable 56 for 57 on putts made from seven feet and in.
His back nine on Sunday also included a brilliant stretch on the greens where he made five birdies over a seven-hole stretch, with four of them coming from 10, 22, 14 and 17 feet. Those putts pushed him out in front of a log jam on the leaderboard and into the winner’s circle.
There was a time in his career when making four putts from those lengths in a single month would have been an achievement for Simpson. He was one of many golfers who anchored the putter to his body, using a belly putter for many years. In fact, he is one of three golfers to have won a major championship with an anchored putter, taking the 2012 U.S. Open.
Anchoring was banned in 2016 and in the first years when Simpson was forced to switch, he suffered. In 2016, he was ranked 177th in Strokes Gained: Putting. But he worked diligently at it, adopted a method that has an extended putter running up his arm with a claw grip, and he’s become one of the PGA Tour’s best at putting. Last year, he was 13th in the putting category.
"I think the struggles of 2015 and '16 on the greens especially -- you know, I didn't make the team events," said Simpson after his win. "I didn't make TOUR Championship, not in Maui, and once I got back into Atlanta and back into Maui, I realized just I was thankful. I realized I'm not going to take any success out here for granted anymore. It doesn't come easy, and it's a fleeting game. I mean, the best players in the world have struggled from time to time. A lot of times you don't know when it's coming. The only thing you can do is kind of stay day-to-day and try to prepare and get better."
Brooks is Back
It may seem hard to believe but the seventh-place finish by Brooks Koepka on Sunday was his first top 10 since last year’s Tour Championship – a 10-month gap. Koepka injured his knee last year and required a stem cell injection shortly after the Tour Championship that kept him off the grid for three months. When he returned to play in October, he slipped and re-injured his knee during a tournament in South Korea. He didn’t play again until January but his game was lacking. In his last complete tournament at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, he shot a round of 81, the worst of his career.
"It feels like it's been a really long time since I've even felt some juices flowing,'' Koepka said after his final-round 65 at the RBC Heritage. "It just felt nice to be in contention again.''
Koepka’s return to form couldn’t come at a better time. His weak play through this season had him in 204th spot on the FedEx Cup points list heading into last week and in danger of missing the playoffs. The good finish moved him up to 148th with eight more tournaments on the calendar before the first playoff event. One of those is also the PGA Championship, scheduled for Aug. 6-9, where Koepka will attempt to become the first three-time winner since Walter Hagen in 1925-27.
Bye-bye Rory
There are courses for horses and it appears Harbour Town Golf Links isn’t a good track for Rory McIlroy. After a final-round 70 on Sunday that left him in a tie for 41st, McIlroy accepted that the Pete Dye-designed layout simply doesn’t fit his style of golf. He’s unlikely to keep this stop on his schedule in future years.
"Once I got here and I played the golf course, I sort of remembered why I haven't been here for a while," said the four-time major winner who last played the Hilton Head, S.C., stop in 2009. "It's tough. Like it's a lovely place. There's other courses on TOUR that probably fit my game a little bit better, and obviously the week after the Masters is always a tough one. Guys like to come here and decompress, but my idea of decompression is not seeing golf clubs for a week."
McIlroy is in the field this week at the Travelers Championship where he’s had better success in his two previous appearances. He finished tied for 17th in 2017 and tied for 12th in 2018.
Stat of the Week:
Abraham Ancer led the field in Greens in Regulation, landing on 65 of the 72 he played at the RBC Heritage. That’s 90.28 per cent for the week. It’s all the more remarkable because the greens average about 3,700 square feet in size, among the smallest on the PGA Tour.