Matt Kuchar’s explanation, Golf’s Olympic miracle, nightmare 8 | Monday Finish
Clockwise from top left, Matt Kuchar, Lydia Ko, Max Greyserman and Aaron Rai.
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Welcome back to the Monday Finish, where the reality is setting in, as it does bienially, that I may never be an Olympian. Anyway — to the golf news!
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GOLF STUFF I LIKE
Golf’s Olympic miracle.
After watching roughly 230 hours of Summer Olympics coverage these last two weeks, there’s one athlete I can’t stop thinking about: sprinter Akani Simbine.
Simbine is from South Africa and he runs the 100-meter dash, one of the Games’ marquee events. This was hardly his first time at the track; at the 2016 Games he finished fifth in the 100, missing the podium by 0.02 seconds, and when he made it back to the final in Tokyo in 2021 he finished fourth there, 0.04 seconds off the podium. He fell into a depression post-Olympics, he said in one interview, locking himself in his house for a week and ultimately stepping away from the sport for a while. But he worked his way to a positive new mindset, battled his way back into form, qualified for a third Olympics and made his way into the final. Again.
And then, last week, he finished fourth. Again.
This time Simbine’s margin was even more excruciating. Not only had he finished just 0.01 seconds out of the medals; his time of 9.82 was less than four hundredths from gold.
That gold went instead to Noah Lyles, who won by five thousandths of a second and, because of those five thousandths, earned the coolest title ever: Fastest Man on Earth.
So what does this have to do with golf?
For one thing, golfers should feel lucky. Every year we talk about the scarcity of the majors. Golfers’ careers are defined by performances in majors, specifically victories in majors, and because there are only four per year (five, for the LPGA) every chance to win one is incredibly precious. Golf is a game of inches, the difference between winning and losing can be a lip-in vs. a lip-out, you need luck on your side, etc. You’ve heard the cliches. But there’s a world of difference between four four-day majors per year and one 10-second “major” every four years, which is how most of the world views the Olympics 100-meter race.
So while it’s still not yet clear where Olympic Gold fits in golf’s hierarchy, there’s a scarcity to the accomplishment that just doesn’t exist elsewhere in the sport. It might have seemed silly after the 2016 Games to suggest that gold could be bigger than a major, but that’s a far less crazy suggestion now; some athletes would certainly make the trade. It’s certainly more unique: We gave out 31 men’s major championships between the 2016 and 2024 Olympics, after all, but only one gold medal.
For another thing, golf should feel lucky. Because the game’s tendency towards randomness is where where golf in the Olympics could have gotten weird. Without the assistance of some high-level pharmaceuticals, the 350th-ranked high jumper will never come from nowhere to win Olympic gold, nor will someone running a 10.1-second 100 meters suddenly run 9.7. In many Olympic sports there are upsets but there aren’t usually random flukes. But in golf? The 100th-ranked player wins all the time! So while they would be deserving champions, a gold medalist like Esther Henseleit (No. 54 in the world before her silver this weekend) or Rory Sabbatini (No. 161 before his silver in Tokyo) would feel a bit random as golf’s global representatives for the next four years.
Instead, something special has happened since the sport’s Olympic reintroduction — a golf miracle, if you will. The perfect players have won.
In 2016 the men’s gold medalist was Justin Rose, a respected major champion who’d emphasized the Games’ importance and showed up enthusiastically even as many other top-ranked players bailed. On the women’s side gold went to Inbee Park, a seven-time major champion and the best player of her generation.
In 2021 the golds went to Xander Schauffele and Nelly Korda, which proved a sign of things to come; each was already among the best players in the world at the time and each is even better now.
Things got even better this year; Paris and Le Golf National brought out the best from the best. On the men’s side there was World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler rallying to a Sunday 9-under 62 to chase down Jon Rahm and the rest of the field to win by one. And then this weekend there was Lydia Ko, already the only person in history with multiple golfing medals, needing gold to complete her set of three and needing a win to cement her place in the LPGA’s Hall of Fame. A red-hot putter carried her into the lead and an all-around game kept her there; her perfect wedge at the last sealed the deal, she finished with birdie and walked off the course and into history.
Because of their star moments, Olympic golfing gold now seems like something special to aspire to. Scheffler’s win and Ko’s win were incredible on their own — but they make the medals of Schauffele and Korda and Rose and Park seem that much shinier, too. Now the countdown to 2028 is on.
As for Simbine? His Olympics had a happy ending after all. South Africa’s 4×100 relay team made the final, Simbine took the baton for the anchor leg, he ran the fastest split in the entire field and his team finished second. Silver. Simbine had his medal.
“This is not just for me but for everybody,” he said post-race. “I’m just super happy, man. I’m really, really, really happy.”
Scarcity creates value. But extra chances create meaning, too. See you in L.A.
WINNERS
Who won the week?
Lydia Ko is now a Hall-of-Famer thanks to her gold medal, which delivered the 27th “point” she needed to get over the line. Points come from wins (one point each, two for majors) or season-long honors like Player of the Year.
Aaron Rai won his first PGA Tour title at the Wyndham Championship after a summer of close calls; he finished T2-T7-T4 before a T75 at the Open. He needed some help to get across the line but Rai’s 72nd-hole birdie sealed the deal in style.
Rianne Malixi won the U.S. Women’s Amateur over Asterisk Talley in a rematch of the final of the U.S. Girls Junior Amateur final just three weeks ago; Malixi won that event too.
Matt McCarty won the Pinnacle Bank Championship, his second Korn Ferry Tour title of the season, to move to No. 1 on the points list and No. 101 in the world. He’ll be on Tour next season.
Stephen Ames won the Boeing Classic on the PGA Tour Champions, erasing a seven-shot deficit and making birdie at No. 18 to repeat as winner.
NOT-WINNERS
Some 8s are handled better than others.
How do you respond to massive, shocking failure? To taking a four-shot lead on the back nine of the final round of a PGA Tour event and immediately making quadruple bogey to kick it away? Max Greyserman could have moped, raged or made excuses. Instead he took it on the chin — and kept his chin up, too.
“Played really well today, obviously had a couple blunders but came back with a birdie on the par-5 after that quad,” he told CBS’s Amanda Balionis. “Just gonna take away that I hung in there, that I’m playing good golf … I mean, it’s golf. Stuff happens. I’ll go pet my dog after this, I’ll hang out with my wife, fly tomorrow to Memphis and right back to work just like I did after the 3M.”
Greyserman’s 3M reference is a reminder that he’d finished runner up in his last start, too. Not bad for a rookie.
“I don’t know,” he concluded with a grin. “It kinda feels like my own 2006 Phil Mickelson moment. So hopefully that equals good things to come [for me] like it did for him.”
SHORT HITTERS
Exit interviews from Olympians, in brief.
Charley Hull, who shot 81-71-69-68: “Eight under par for the last three rounds, so I feel like my game is iheaded in the right direction. A shame about my first round but at the end of the day I had a good fight back … now I feel like I got my confidence back, and my golf game is as good as it’s ever been.”
Nelly Korda, who was in contention before a triple bogey at No. 15 on Sunday and faded to T22: “I think recently what’s been happening to me is I make a mistake and then I make another mistake on top of it. [I] need to control that bit of it where I don’t compile all the mistakes, which that’s what I’ve been kind of doing recently.”
Celine Boutier, France’s pride and joy, who led after the first round but fell to T18. “[The week] was kind of two-fold. I think it was a great experience from the spectator standpoint and everything went so smooth. The course was incredible. The amount of fans that showed up was also incredible. So on that end, it was just the best. I don’t think we could have expected any better. Personally on the golf course, it was a little bit more difficult for me the last three days. So a little bit disappointed with that. But we try to focus on the positive.”
Esther Henseleit, silver medalist: “It was really cool. I mean, after my birdie on 17, I was really calm. Going down 18, I managed to actually enjoy everything, to look at the crowds, and sitting in the clubhouse, knowing that I had a medal, and then to share it with my fiancée who is on the bag this week, definitely special. And we were saying, if there’s one person who I would want to finish in front of me, it’s probably Lydia.”
Lydia Ko, after winning gold: “Being tied for the lead going into today, I knew that the next 18 holes was going to be some of the most important 18 holes of my life. One of the things that I had said earlier in the week was I don’t know if there is like another Olympics for me, and I will say: this is my last Olympics. I’m going to say it in front of everyone … I kept telling myself, ‘I get to write my own ending’ like Simone Biles had said and I had heard in her documentary. I kept telling myself that, and I wanted to be the one that was going to control my fate and the ending to this week. To have ended this way, it’s honestly a dream come true.”
ONE DUMB GRAPHIC
Lydia Ko over everyone.
ONE SWING THOUGHT
Will Zalatoris on finding his game.
Add Will Zalatoris to the list of pros admitting he’s gotten stuck playing “golf swing” instead of golf.
“Getting back to really playing the game. I spent maybe a little bit too much time focusing on the mechanics throughout the season and trying to get to certain positions in my swing to try to fix it, but when you’re not aligned in the right spot, it’s not going to work,” he said.
“Just getting back to playing the game as opposed to maybe even ‘playing golf swing,’ if you will. So in these two weeks off, I played a lot of golf at home. I didn’t really practice where I was spending four, five hours on the range type thing. It was a lot more go out and play 27 holes or 36 holes or whatever in a cart and just get back to shooting scores. Being OK with hitting shots on the range and instead of ‘I hit one bad one, OK, what did I do wrong there, let’s fix it on the next one.’ It’s ‘OK, well, I hit this one in the bunker, let’s go make up-and-down.’ I think throughout this year I was so hyper-focused on certain mechanics that when I would get into a tournament round, I felt if I hit one bad shot, it would kind of kill the momentum.”
ONE BIG QUESTION
What on earth was Matt Kuchar doing?
It was a moment so strange, mysterious, so meaningless and so deliciously golf that it immediately caught the attention of the entire sport. Matt Kuchar, comfortably outside contention, mathematically eliminated from golf’s postseason and stuck in the left rough on the 72nd hole at the Wyndham Championship, decided that he and he alone would keep the tournament going for another day. Just before sunset on Sunday Kuchar marked his ball while the rest of his group played on. The golf world responded with a mix of incredulity, amusement, bemusement, criticism, [limited] defense and more.
After taking relief, hitting his approach just short of the green, lipping out his birdie chip and finishing out for par, Kuchar explained himself. He said he thought Greyserman would probably wait for the morning, given he was just a shot back to begin the hole.
“I’m figuring no way Max is going to finish out with a chance to win a tournament. I thought Max for sure had a shot to win and I thought no way in this situation do you hit this shot; you come back in the morning 100 percent of the time,” he said. “So I said, well, Max will stop, I’ll stop, kind of make it easy on him. And for me, coming back in the morning, like, I never would have taken [the relief that he was able to take] last night, I never would have thought to ask. I knew I was in a terrible situation, I was praying to make bogey from where I was. To walk away with par, nearly birdie, is a huge bonus.
“Again, it stinks to — nobody wants to be that guy that’s showing up today, one person, one hole. Not even one hole, half a hole to putt.
“So apologies to the tournament, to everybody that had to come out. I know it stinks, I know the ramifications, I know it stinks. Certainly I apologize to force everybody to come out here.”
As for the social media reaction?
“Thankfully, I avoid that stuff,” he said. “I did get a call from my agent, said hey, you’re causing quite a stir, so that was the little I heard.
“I’m grateful to not be a part of the social media thing.”
ONE THING TO WATCH
Chi Chi Rodriguez.
Rest in peach, Chi Chi. The golf world misses you already.
NEWS FROM SEATTLE
Monday Finish HQ.
Fred Couples staged a comeback at this week’s Boeing Classic; this was his first event since the Masters in April. It went well — Couples finished T18.
“I’m tickled pink to be playing,” he told the Seattle Times. He also showed off his bag, which features a whole bunch of headcovers.
“I have six woods,” Couples said. “Driver, 3-wood, 5-wood, 4-rescue, 5-rescue, 6-rescue. And I’m loving life. It’s going to get me through these three days.”
Good to have you back, Fred. And I hope you all — my smart, clever, discerning, good-looking readers — will be back next week.
Before you go, a quick request: If you like the Monday Finish, subscribe for free HERE to get it in your email inbox!
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
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