By Christopher Powers
After a crushing three-putt par on the par-5 15th hole, it seemed to be quite clear that this wasn’t Robert Streb’s day. While the rest of the contenders at the RSM Classic were throwing up 62s and 63s, Streb was plodding along at one under. That wasn’t going to get it done on a day when there was virtually no wind on Sea Island.

But Streb stayed in it, even after watching his three-shot lead vanish and seeing that he was now going to have to do the chasing. Up head at the 72nd green, Kevin Kisner had posted a 63 to reach 19 under. Streb needed to make something happen.

He did exactly that at the difficult par-3 17th, stepping on a 6-iron and drawing it in to the back right pin. His tee shot came to rest 11 feet from the hole, and he poured in the birdie putt to tie Kisner.

Coming up clutch with the pressure on. ?@therealstrebber is back in the co-lead and controls his own destiny with one hole to play. pic.twitter.com/14A2YJaruz

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) November 22, 2020

A par at the 18th put them in a sudden-death playoff, and Streb began the playoff by hitting his tee shot in the left bunker. His week appeared dead again, but yet again he stayed within himself, grinding out a par and watching Kisner’s birdie effort for the win just slide past the hole. On the second playoff hole, the 18th once more, Streb found the left rough and pulled off hero shot No. 2 to all but end the tournament:

WHAT A SHOT. ?@therealstrebber nailed his approach on the second playoff hole to win @TheRSMClassic. ? pic.twitter.com/sAmFE6otjR

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) November 22, 2020

Kisner’s approach sailed the green, and when he failed to chip it in for birdie, Streb had locked up his second tour win in style. His first victory also came at Sea Island in 2014. When asked what it is he likes so much about the event, Streb was very matter of fact.

“I don’t have a good answer for you,” he said. “My finishes here are all over the lot, but I do like it here. Greens are always pure. I feel like if you’re playing good, you can do well.”

No lies detected there. Play well, do well. Simple as that. Pulling off a pair of hero shots in the clutch usually helps, too.

Here are three other takeaways from Sunday on Sea Island.

Sam Greenwood

What else does Kevin Kisner have to do?
If Robert Streb’s win came out of nowhere (Streb had just three top 10s on tour since August 2018), a Kisner victory would have been one many prognosticators saw coming. Kisner, who also previously won the RSM in 2015, had been playing so well of late. But each time he had a great week, somebody else had an even greater one. Bryson DeChambeau at the Rocket Mortgage. Jim Herman at the Wyndham. Dustin Johnson at The Northern Trust. Each of those events, Kisner was knocking on the door but couldn’t quite get it done.

But he’d yet to come as close as he did on Sunday, shooting a closing 63 to get into the playoff after not bogeying a hole since Friday. Which has to make this one the most crushing. Knowing Kisner and his Bulldog mentality, he’ll more-than-likely finish one off soon, but at some point even he has to wonder what the hell else he needs to do to get his fourth win on tour.

Sam Greenwood

That was still a special week for Camilo Villegas
After he shot rounds of 64 and 66 to get into contention, we couldn’t hide the fact that we were cheering hard for Camilo Villegas this week. If anybody “deserved” a win, it was Villegas, who went through a terrible tragedy when his 22-month-old daughter passed away in July. Winning a golf tournament wasn’t going to make that any easier to live with, but it would have given the 38-year-old Colombian something to smile about during what has to be one of the worst years of his life.

He was unable to get it done, a third-round even-par 70 costing him a real chance, but this was still a very special week for the four-time tour winner. He wound up finishing with a Sunday 66, which earned him a T-6 finish, his best since the 2016 RSM Classic when lost in a playoff. When you’ve had a few lean years like Villegas had, top-six finishes are like gold. Still a ways to go in this “Super Season,” but Villegas’ strong result on Sea Island puts him in position to make a run at the FedEx Cup Playoffs, somewhere he hasn’t been since 2017.

Sam Greenwood

Zach Johnson will have nightmares about the par-5 seventh tonight
All these guys who finished a few back could play the “what-if” game for all 72 holes this week. But for Zach Johnson, there is no more painful “what if” than “what if he hadn’t triple-bogeyed the par-5 seventh on Sunday?”

That’s right, Johnson finished just three shots out of a potential playoff at the RSM Classic, and that was because of a snowman on the Seaside Course’s first par 5 on the scorecard. Making it even worse was the fact he bogeyed it a day earlier, meaning he’d played it in four over on the weekend. Ouch.

“That hole’s kind of bitten me both days,” Johnson said. “A 6 there yesterday and an 8 today, and it’s a par-5, which is very frustrating because those are the ones you usually try to take advantage of, especially today with, well, relatively speaking very benign conditions. Hit the worst shot of the week on the tee. I’m still at that point I’m trying to make a 5 instead of a 4, but got a little aggressive with my next shot, which is my third shot, and it just kind of snowballed from there. How do you make an 8? Well, I missed about a seven-footer for a 7, so I made an 8.”

Good to see him laugh it off—he still shot a two-under 68 on the day for a T-6 finish—but we wouldn’t blame him if he spent the whole night staring at the ceiling wondering how it all went wrong.

The post Robert Streb pulls off multiple hero shots to claim RSM Classic over Kevin Kisner appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Ryan Herrington
If PGA Tour win No. 2 is the last in Robert Streb’s career, he will forever have one sweet highlight to remember it by.

Nothing came easy for the 33-year-old on Sunday at the RSM Classic. The Oklahoma native had a three-stroke lead entering the final round at Sea Island Golf Club, only to see it slip away on the back nine as a handful of players got aggressive on a scorable day at the Seaside Course. Still, a birdie on the 17th hole allowed him to get into a playoff with Kevin Kisner at 19 under.

Streb got a bit lucky on the first playoff hole, the par-4 18th, getting up and down for par from short left of the green after hitting into a fairway bunker off the tee. Kisner then missed a 12-footer for birdie, sending them back to the 18th tee for another sudden-death hole.

This time, both missed the fairway off the tee, Streb in the left rough, Kisner right. From 158 yards, Streb then hit a pitching wedge and did this:

WHAT A SHOT. ?@therealstrebber nailed his approach on the second playoff hole to win @TheRSMClassic. ? pic.twitter.com/sAmFE6otjR

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) November 22, 2020

As the Golf Channel announcers would note during a few replays of this, it look like the ball rolls over the left edge of the cup, begging the question of how did it not fall in the hole.

Seriously, how did that not fall in?!?

Kisner hit his approach over the green and chipped his third shot 10-feet by the hole. While he managed to make the par putt, it was academic and Streb tapped in his birdie for the victory.

The post Watch Robert Streb nearly hole this clutch approach shot en route to winning the RSM Classic appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Shane Ryan
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — In changeable weather, there’s a luck-of-the-draw element to every golf tournament—did you tee off in the placid morning or the torrential afternoon?—and that’s particularly true at those events staged at multiple courses over the first two or three days.

In the RSM Classic at Sea Island, each player spends one of his first two rounds at the Plantation Course. Traditionally, it’s easier than the Seaside Course that hosts all of the weekend rounds. All things being equal, there would be no special advantage to playing it on Thursday rather than Friday, or vice versa.

But all things are never equal, and the raging wind helped to mitigate Plantation’s vulnerability on Thursday, such that the scores between the two courses were relatively balanced. Come Friday morning, though, the wind had all but vanished, the dark clouds dissolved and calm, sunny conditions smiled on the barrier islands. Half of the players smiled, too, because the Plantation Course lay unguarded for the morning wave, abandoned by its natural defences.

The result? The top seven players and nine of the top 10 after two rounds were beneficiaries of playing at Plantation on Friday. Rarely is the evidence of imbalance this clean. The 2014 Open Championship comes to mind, when 17 of the top 20 players before Saturday came from the Thursday morning/Friday afternoon rain-and-wind-dodging wave.

Playing in the first group off the first tee on Friday at Plantation, Robert Streb, whose lone PGA Tour win came at this event in 2014, birdied exactly half of his holes with hot putting, bogeyed none, and posted a career-low 63 to take a two-shot lead at 14 under over Camilo Villegas, who notched the lowest 36-hole total of his career. If it weren’t for Joel Dahmen shooting an anomalous 61 at the Seaside Course on Friday, it would be tempting to write off half the field without a second thought.

“That one’s a little nicer over there, you get a little shelter,” Streb said afterwards of Plantation. “Obviously, when it gets really windy you’re at the mercy of a gust, but yeah, it was nice to get over there [on Friday].”

Streb’s body language and manner is emphatically unruffled, and he greets most questions with an American version of the Gallic shrug, as if to say, “Who’s to say?” or “It’s not such a big deal.” His natural inclination is to downplay anything dramatic, and while it doesn’t make for the most compelling quotes, he does seem ideally suited to his current situation—contemplating his first PGA Tour win in six years. When asked if he expected to enter a less casual mental zone as the tension mounted, he stayed true to form.

“It will be a little different,” he conceded. “I probably haven’t been quite in a lead like this for a while, but obviously there’s a lot of golf left out there. I’m sure it will be pretty compressed starting tomorrow and there’s a lot of golf left.”

Pushed a little bit, Streb was asked if he was truly unperturbed or if this was a convenient act to help stay calm. The half-accusation produced a brief smile, but it disappeared quickly as he returned to his mantra.

“It’s what you try to do,” he said. “Obviously your mind wanders sometimes, but you try to do it. It’s only half the tournament, so there’s a lot left.”

The story of Streb’s career centres on one extremely good year—starting with a win and ending with an appearance in the 2015 Tour Championship—followed by an increasingly fallow period for which he hasn’t found a great explanation. Aside from perhaps a few regrets about his scheduling, the 33-year-old chalks up the lull in characteristic fashion to taking “too many shots to get the ball in the hole.” He secured his five-year pension with his one great season, but there’s an awareness that he’ll need something a little more inspiring to jumpstart the latter half of his career. By that metric, even Streb understands how important the next two days could be.

On lighter topics, he talked about bringing his family to St. Simons Island for the week. His kids enjoy the beach, digging for crabs, but when asked if he enjoyed the beach, it was back to the shrug.

“I don’t mind the beach,” he said. “My problem is when I hit the beach, I want to plop down with a cooler of beer.”

He is correct that there’s “a lot of golf left,” and even with a bit of wind and the possibility of rain in the weekend forecast, there are low scores to be had and plenty of fluctuation left. But if Streb is in the mix on Sunday afternoon, it’s difficult to imagine that he’ll be overcome by nerves. The stakes are high, particularly with the end of a long victory drought in sight, but in this sleepy island town, you can’t perturb the unperturbable.

The post A lucky weather draw and stellar putting have Robert Streb eyeing an end to victory drought appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Christopher Powers
When Robert Streb won his first PGA Tour event at the RSM Classic (then the McGladery Classic) in 2014, he checked off an important bucket-list box: earning an invitation to the Masters. The only other thing the Chickasha, Okla., native said he needed to check off? Attend an Oklahoma-Texas game, otherwise known as the Red River Rivalry.

Streb, who posted a second consecutive bogey-free round on Saturday on Sea Island, leads Zach Johnson by three shots, having posted a three-under 67 to reach 17 under. He’s not dropped a shot in 43 holes and has put himself in position to claim his second tour win—at the venue where he first won. Should he close it out, he’ll be back at Augusta National in April for the first time since 2016. He still hasn’t been to an OU-UT game, though.

“Sadly, I have not, no,” said Streb, who went to Kansas State but was born in Oklahoma and currently resides there. “I think I’ve been working a few times, and I think I had something going on last time where I think I could have made it. Might have been this year actually, but with all this stuff going on, wasn’t going to go, it wouldn’t have been that much fun.”

Winning on Sunday, even if no fans are there to see it, would be very fun for Streb. The 33-year-old has had just two top 10s since November of 2018, both coming in the Barracuda Championship. On Saturday evening, he plans to do the same thing he did here six years ago—get ice cream.

Flavour?

“I don’t know, I think I’ve just been doing like a chocolate vanilla and caramel or something,” Streb said. “They’ve only got a few flavours in there, but it’s good.”

Here are three other takeaways from Day 3 of the RSM Classic.

Turn on the fan for Zach Johnson

Sam Greenwood
Zach Johnson has played well in the wind in the past.

As if Zach Johnson didn’t have enough of a home-course advantage this week (Johnson lives on St. Simons Island), it’s been extremely windy, and those are conditions he thrives in. If you recall, he won his Masters in very difficult conditions, and the week he won the Open Championship at St Andrews was about as windy as it gets.

“I do not dislike wind,” Johnson said Saturday after shooting a five-under 65.

Gale force winds are not in the forecast for Sunday, but it will still be breezy. No one should be surprised if ZJ ends up winning this thing.

Can Kevin Kisner finally capitalise on his good form?

Sam Greenwood
Kevin Kisner doesn’t live on St. Simons Island, but is a member of Sea Island Golf Club.

Kevin Kisner, who, in the upset of the century, is not a member of the Sea Island mafia, has quietly been playing some excellent golf over the last few months. But he hasn’t been able to capitalise on his good form with a victory. Considering the fact he’s five back after a four-under 66, he probably won’t pull one out this week either.

“You can’t get too aggressive over here because you’ve got to give yourself a lot of chances on the greens,” said Kisner. “The greens are so pure, you can knock the putts in. Just don’t need him to get too far away and see if I can’t put some heat on him early tomorrow.”

Surprisingly, Kisner is in the mix despite the fact he’s losing strokes gained on approach. Of course, it helps that he’s putting well and he knows the place well. He doesn’t live on the island, but he is a member, and he is a former winner.

“Knowing where to miss it on the greens, using the wind to your advantage coming in so that you’re either chipping or putting back into the wind,” Kisner explained. “Hardest part with this northeast wind is all the crosswind; it’s so hard to judge how much the wind’s going to take it on the approach shots. You’ve got to miss it in the right areas and then you’ve got to know when to be aggressive.”

Kiz will have to be aggressive from the start if he wants to claim his fourth tour win. That said, just “adding to your bank account” might not be a bad strategy either.

Camilo Villegas needs a miracle

Sam Greenwood
Camilo Villegas will need others to stumble in front of him to win RSM Classic.

Just by being in (semi) contention, it’s been Camilo Villegas’ best week on the PGA Tour probably since the 2016 RSM Classic, when he finished runner-up in a five-man playoff. The 38-year-old is five back, which means he’ll need to shoot something in the five or six under range on Sunday and get some help from the guys ahead of him. And by help we mean an over-par score. Wishing bad golf on anyone, especially Robert Streb, who is looking to end a win drought, is a no-no. We aren’t going to do that. But we’d be lying if we said we weren’t rooting for a Camilo miracle on Sunday. If anybody deserves one, it’s him.

The post Robert Streb in position for his first win in six years after second straight bogey-free round appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Mike Stachura
In the early weeks of the PGA Tour’s new driver testing program for the 2019-’20 season, a handful of players appear to have had drivers tested that have exceeded the speed limit. According to a story from Reuters, five tour pros at last week’s Safeway Open were found to have drivers whose spring-like effect was outside the USGA limit.

The tour’s new protocol uses the pendulum test that measures the Characteristic Time (CT) of driver faces to determine whether they flex too much. The Reuters story named five players it says are “believed” to have drivers that did not pass the test: Corey Conners, Jason Dufner, Mark Hubbard, Robert Streb and Michael Thompson.

The tour’s driver testing program grew from concerns expressed over the last year that driver faces are getting springier through use. The issue drew headlines when the R&A selectively tested drivers at the Open Championship at Royal Portrush in July and several clubs were found to be over the limit, most notably that of Xander Schauffele.

Tyler Dennis, PGA Tour senior vice president and chief of operations, told Golf Digest earlier this year that the testing program is an effort to investigate whether drivers that were conforming at initial use can be worn into a nonconforming state over time.

“We really want this to be about the driver models currently being played on the PGA Tour, not the players,” Dennis said earlier this month. “We have seen evidence of some models that over time are starting to creep over the limit. The only way to understand what’s happening is to test drivers that are actually being played on tour.”

The protocol calls for random player testing to be conducted during non-competition days at unannounced tournaments. Dennis would not specify how many players would be tested at events or how many events would have testing implemented. According to the Reuters story, 30 drivers were tested in Napa.

Dennis did not immediately return a request for comment on the report of drivers failing the CT testing at the Safeway Open. A tour spokesman told Reuters the tour would not be commenting on the testing program or its results.

Under the testing protocol, drivers receive either a green light for those that measure under the CT limit of 239 microseconds, a yellow light when they measure within the CT test’s tolerance zone of 240-257 microseconds and a red light if the measurement is above 257 microseconds. The testing on the PGA Tour is conducted by representatives of the USGA.

Most insiders agree on two things with regard to the CT testing: First, there are extremely few drivers on the tour that would measure green on the CT test. Most are likely to register yellow, at least. Second, the difference in terms of distance is negligible, and that even if every driver on the tour suddenly measured green, there likely would be no effect on the driving distance average on the PGA Tour.

Driving distance on the PGA Tour was down for the 2018-’19 season by 2.2 yards in 2019 versus 2018. Through the early part of the 2019-’20 season, driving distance is 304.4 yards. That would be 10 yards longer than last year through a similar number of events, and almost 11 yards longer than 2017.

After the 2017 season, golf’s ruling bodies expressed concern about driving distance and announced a Distance Insights research project. The project’s initial report is due later this year.

The post Report: Five players have drivers fail PGA Tour’s new testing protocol at Safeway Open appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.