Coming down the stretch of the Rocket Mortgage Classic Sunday, a once-getable Detroit Golf Club had turned mean and it was taking out contenders one by one.
An overnight cold front made the Donald Ross layout play nearly two and a half strokes harder than Saturday.
Aaron Rai, the overnight co-leader who quickly grabbed the outright lead, fell first with two bogeys to end the front nine. Cameron Young snap hooked his drive on 14 and promptly snapped his driver as he faded from contention with four 5s in his last five holes. Cam Davis grabbed a share of the lead and then landed his ball on the par-5 14th in two, but watched as it slowly drifted back into a pond. Then Min Woo Lee birdied 14, 15 and 17 to tie the lead at 18 under, but he too dropped back, bogeying the final hole.
In the end, fitting to Sunday’s conditions, the tournament wasn’t won. It was lost.
After failing to get up and down for birdies on both back nine par-5s which would have extended his lead, Akshay Bhatia came to the 72nd hole tied with Davis at 18 under. He hit his approach to 32 feet. He left the birdie putt to win short.
Then, the putt from four feet to tie slipped low. It kissed the lip. It missed.
“It sucks, no other way to put it. I mean, just sucks,” Bhatia said.
Davis, after a final-round 70, was given his second PGA Tour title at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, the same site as his first win three years ago, but Bhatia walked away shaking his head. The 18th green was his only three-putt of the week.
“This is a little emotional actually,” Davis said. I” wouldn’t wish what happened to Akshay on anyone, but I’ve done a lot of grinding to kind of get myself out of a hole and just all of a sudden to do that, it’s pretty good.”
Since the Masters, when he finished T12, Davis hadn’t finished better than T38 in seven previous starts before this week. He missed the cut in both the PGA Championship and U.S. Open.
Even before Augusta, he was struggling with his game. He had yet to record a top-10 this season until this week.
Bhatia was the overnight co-leader, along with Rai at 17 under, but woke up to strong, 20-mph winds Sunday and 15-degree cooler temperatures thanks to an overnight cold front that made an already soaked Detroit Golf Club play even longer Sunday.
After nine holes, Davis and Bhatia were knotted at 18 under.
It looked like Bhatia, who claimed his second PGA Tour win in April at the Texas Open, blinked first when he badly pulled his tee shot on the short 13th hole into a tree on the right. It dropped just under 100 yards from the tee, but he made par anyway.
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Then after a perfect tee shot, Davis knocked a fairway wood on the green on 14 from 281 yards and his ball landed on the front corner of the green, seemingly stopping 80 feet from the pin. But then it started trickling, agonizingly back toward the water. There was no rough cut to stop it as it trickled into the drink.
He dropped, pitched and missed a putt, making bogey.
Bhatia watched the whole thing from the tee and later faced a similar shot. The 22-year-old hit a huge cut with a 3-wood that landed just short of the green and mere feet from the water on the right. But he couldn’t take advantage of the break and missed a 10-footer, short.
Davis got the shot back three holes later on the par-5 17th, but Bhatia had another chance to pull away at 16 with a 30-foot birdie putt. It came up short, again. This time by nearly five feet.
At 17, Bhatia had another 10-footer for birdie. It came up short, again.
And finally, after Davis got up and down from the right side of the green on 18, Bhatia had his chance to win it all. The putt never had a chance. It came up short, AGAIN.
“It’s hard, you’ve got so much slope there so you don’t want to run it five, six feet by,” he said. “Yeah, just a little bit of nerves, honestly. I’m human and yeah, the greens get slower throughout the day here, poa annua’s pretty tough.”
The putt to tie? It only missed because it didn’t have enough speed.
