TULSA — It grew clear in the Oklahoma wind Friday at the 104th PGA Championship that Chile has squeezed some dazzling golfers from its 18 million on its long, narrow, gorgeous land on the lower western edge of South America. Just look at 23-year-old Joaquín Niemann, who won wire-to-wire at storied Riviera in Los Angeles in February and who has played the exacting Southern Hills course here in 1 under par through two days, including a 71 in the impolite morning wind of Friday.
Thriving at the PGA Championship: Will Zalatoris, Justin Thomas, Chile
“It was a lot of work,” he said.
There was a lot of Chile, too, because even in a respectable 17th-place tie, Niemann proved to be the runner-up golfer from his faraway country. First would be 27-year-old countryman Mito Pereira, whose gorgeous red scorecard preened with seven birdies and left him at 8 under par, sharing the lead for a while before Will Zalatoris grabbed it. Pereira’s dreamy round of 64 included even a missed seven-footer at No. 18 that would have tied the event record of 63, a record Bubba Watson tied moments later. As Gary Player proved long ago, it’s not ruinous to have to cross the equator just because all four majors happen to play in the huffy Northern Hemisphere.
The lead at 9 under par belonged to 25-year-old Zalatoris, the 2021 Masters runner-up from San Francisco and then Texas by the teen years, the wiry blond who looks not so far out of his school because he’s not so far out of high school. His obvious promise flared again with a bogey-free 65 to follow on his opening 66. To be bogey-free at Southern Hills on Friday was not just good but damned good.
“Yeah, I got away with murder a few times today for sure,” Zalatoris said, “especially starting off the day hitting the left trees and hitting it to a kick-in.”
A birdie would follow, as would four other birdies, 13 pars and an acknowledgment it had been luckier to start in the calmer afternoon than in the harsher morning.
“The conditions were obviously very difficult,” Justin Thomas said from earlier, and he said so from 6 under par, which was first place as he spoke in midday but became third place later on. Thomas would be the one of the three previous major winners up in the happy rafters of the leader board, and his second straight 67, both rounds in trying conditions from unlucky tee-time draws of afternoon Thursday and morning Friday, cast him as perhaps a favorite heading for the weekend.
“You have a lot of crosswinds,” Thomas said, “so your ball is doing a lot of curving as it’s in the air. In order for it to come down on the target I want, I need to kind of start it in a certain window. Although hitting it solid is important, club-face control is also extremely important.”
“The course is super hard,” Niemann said.
“You can’t play from the rough,” said four-time major winner Brooks Koepka, 2 over par after rallying from 6 over at one point Thursday. “Simple.”
With the Godzilla of the season, Masters winner and top-ranked Scottie Scheffler, gone at the discretion of the cut — he shot a 71 and a 75 to finish 6 over — the field prepared for the second major winner of 2022. It could be the one guy at 5 under par, Watson, the two-time Masters winner nowadays 43, whose 63 included birdies on Nos. 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15 and 17. (And wow.)
“Slower greens obviously helps,” Watson said of the afternoon crowd.
It could be one of three guys at 4 under, Rory McIlroy, the star whose 65 on Thursday left him up top and whose 1-over 71 of Friday featured some good old hanging on. “Maybe it’s a case I wasn’t quite as committed or aggressive as I was yesterday,” McIlroy said.
It also could be Thomas, 29 already, whose win in the 2017 PGA Championship at Quail Hollow in Charlotte came from behind. There, he shot a 73 in the first round before starting to matter in the second with a 66 that left him tied for seventh, tying for fourth with a 69 in the third round and then winning with a closing 68 that overhauled those who had led him: Kevin Kisner (74 on Sunday), Hideki Matsuyama (72) and Chris Stroud (76).
As for Friday, when Tulsa awakened to 30-mph gusts that showed rudeness toward tree branches, Thomas wound up saying, “I stayed very patient, tried to get in my own little world and get in a zone and just tried to execute each shot the best I could.”
As for No. 9, his last, he said: “The way I played the last hole, I couldn’t have really drawn it up any or much better. A perfect kind of little slider driver and leaving the gap wedge just under the hole there and making that putt right in the middle. That was a nice way to end it.”
That would be 303 yards to the fairway, 92 yards to nine feet, nine feet to plunk-down.
“I mean, I like this golf course,” said Thomas, whose 15 majors since his Charlotte win have featured four top-10 finishes but no splashy near-misses.
That would be a guy long pegged to win more than one major who will spend the weekend trying to make it more than one major.
Around him, there will be the usual heavy traffic of a PGA leader board. There will be Pereira, whom much of the golf-casual country might get to meet via TV, who began the game in Santiago with plastic clubs as a tyke, played his first tournament at 6, spent a season (2014-15) at Texas Tech and then ventured out into the unforgiving wilderness of golf tours. He had some impressive annual rankings on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica, then won thrice on the Korn Ferry Tour to earn passage to the top rung in June 2021.
His best showing this 2021-22 season came in September right at the outset, at the Fortinet Championship, the annual event played in Napa, Calif. He finished third there. He also finished tied for 15th at Riviera at the Genesis, the venerable event Niemann won. His interests include motorcycles, fútbol and Universidad Católica, which plays its home soccer in Santiago.
This would be his second major, following by a long way his cut at the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and following by a much longer way the two years he took off from the game as a teenager, a point at which anyone telling him he would be here and now and up there this week would have heard . . .
“That you’re crazy,” he said.
Source: WP
