PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — It was the offseason of Collin Morikawa’s life — the reset and recharge designed to springboard Morikawa’s return to world dominance.
And then he woke up on Saturday at the Sony Open without a tee time.
“I went into this year feeling really good about myself,” Morikawa said. “You go out and play two rounds at Sony and I missed the cut and you realize, man, do I need to redo everything that you thought you were doing for the last two months?”
Professional golf can be unusually cruel in this way. The margin between the best players in the world and the guys who spend their 40s as insurance brokers is less than 10 shots a week — and the margin between those at the very top and the very bottom of golf’s many statistical categories is, on average, less than 1.5 shots per round.
Morikawa has lived on both sides of the totem. He arrived on the PGA Tour on a rocketship, winning a pair of major championships before his 25th birthday to announce himself as one of the game’s preeminent young talents. He has spent the back half of his twenties mired in the innermost circle of golf hell: putting woes (to go along with an unpleasant cocktail of poor form and near-misses and swing changes and caddie changes).
On Saturday at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, though, Morikawa came alive. He shot a blistering 10-under 62, recording 11 birdies to just one bogey, to vault into the final pairing for Sunday’s final round with Akshay Bhatia. Sunday will mark Morikawa’s best shot to record a signature victory in some time, perhaps since his near-miss at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in 2025.
But before he can get there, he’ll have to overcome the challenges that have marred the last several years of his golfing life: The ones arriving with the putter in his hands.
“Yeah. I think I might be [uncomfortable with my putter] for the rest of my career,” an unusually candid Morikawa said Saturday afternoon. “It’s a comfort thing for me. I think I play a lot with my feel and I play a lot with my gut and unfortunately that changes a lot.”
Morikawa’s putting challenges have manifested in particularly painful ways: After winning five times in less than two years to start his career, Morikawa has recorded just one victory in the last five years, which arrived at the comparatively light field at the Zozo Championship in Japan, and has watched as other stars from his rookie class (notably Scottie Scheffler) have ascended into the upper-echelons of the sport.
In that time, the putter has fallen from a solid complement of Morikawa’s otherworldly ball striking to a legitimate liability. He ranked 156th on Tour in SG: Putting in 2025, the third time he ranked worse than 100th on Tour in the same category since the winning drought started in 2022.
But putting is an art — and art is fickle. Some weeks, it can be enough to derail an entire tournament — and this week, it has hardly moved the needle. On Saturday, Morikawa ranked near the bottom of the field in most putting stats, making just 55 feet of putts all day, and he recorded one of the best rounds of his year.
The lesson, he said, came not from a shift in putting technique or ability but from a change in mindset.
“[Mental coach Rick Sessinghaus] reminded me yesterday when I first came out and turned pro, like I didn’t care about honestly making cuts or top-20s, I came out to win,” Morikawa said Saturday. “When he told me that yesterday, there was that mindset switch going into today. I wanted to come out and win, win the weekend, win the tournament.”
Morikawa certainly looked the part of a Pebble Beach winner on Saturday, displaying the same dizzying iron play that made him such a formidable foe in the early days of his career. He also benefited from a third round played before a whipping wind blew in from the south, altering the course conditions so much that the final group played the 18th hole in 36 minutes.
Good putting is part of winning, but good fortune is too. The latter has been on Morikawa’s side as he prepares for Sunday’s final round in the final pairing. The last group off on Sunday in Pebble may find themselves quickly in a rock fight, with conditions expected to deteriorate further throughout the afternoon. Only the strongest competitor will survive the chaos — putter be damned.
“I’m out here to win When you finish 30th, 15th, 3rd, at the end of the day like I want to win,” Morikawa said. “I’ve got to set that mindset at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of the week and now I think we’ve given ourselves at least a chance come tomorrow.”
