Shane Lowry looked at his caddie, Darren Reynolds, and laughed.
For the better part of the last five hours, Lowry had battled Bay Hill, and now — on his walk up the 18th fairway — the battle was over. In the bout between the burly, rugged golfer whose game could be described similarly, and Saturday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational? Arnie won in a knockout.
“Better day tomorrow,” Lowry said as he peeked at the scoreboard, which had once shown his name in the lead, but now flashed to reveal Lowry six shots behind Collin Morikawa.
Lowry was not alone in his moving day tumble at Bay Hill. In fact, he was quite the norm on Saturday — an afternoon in which one of the stiffest challenges on the PGA Tour bore all its teeth. If the typical soundtrack of PGA Tour golf is a symphony of ovations, Saturday at the Arnold Palmer could best be described by its chorus of groans. Those who attended in the afternoon elicited an array of pained whimpers as the best players in the world battled almost cartoonish conditions: rough that began this week at four inches high and has remained unmowed, fairways painted like a checkerboard between bouncy and soft landing areas, and — as nearly every player attested — putting greens that might well be cement.
“If they have a media day here on Monday it’s going to be carnage,” said Bones Mackay. “It’s wicked fast.”
Officially, Mackay’s NBC teammate Kevin Kisner reported, they were rolling at a 13 on the stimpmeter, which makes them fast and firm by PGA Tour standards. But by the time the leaders came around in the afternoon, the speed and rigidity of the greens at Bay Hill had clearly changed. The best golfers in the world were not just missing putts, they were struggling to keep them within the general proximity of the hole.
“You get on these greens and they’re slippery,” said Morikawa, owner of a Saturday 67, the second-best round of the day. “I think just because there’s no friction on the greens, right? They’re so fast that you’re hitting it even softer than you normally would, so it’s just a very different way of playing.”
Sam Burns explains ‘multiple problems’ with slow play, has 1 bold solution
Morikawa (10 under) was one of the few golfers in the final groups on Saturday who survived unscathed. Lowry and his buddy Rory McIlroy each recorded scores over par to fade from “in the hunt” to merely lurking, while reigning champion Scottie Scheffler and fellow contender Wyndham Clark saw their tournament chances evaporate like the final drops of humidity in those greens, which had oxidated into a greenish-brown by the end of play.
It seems trivial to speak about the physical appearance of a putting surface in attempting to understand a golf tournament, but in this instance it is warranted. While most weeks on the Tour are defined by lush, receptive surfaces that let players chase pins like darts into cork, the “greens” on Saturday at the Arnold Palmer were defined by a much different set of physical characteristics.
