Collin Morikawa is reminded by tough losses that winning on the PGA Tour is hard
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — It’s hard to win on the PGA Tour, a sentiment usually heard from players when they are sitting next to the trophy and realize what it took to get there.
Collin Morikawa keeps getting reminded after some painful losses.
The player who won five times on the PGA Tour in just over two years as a pro has only one title in his last 75 starts. Morikawa is No. 4 in the world ranking, and that’s not an accident. He is playing good golf and giving himself plenty of chances.
Small consolation.
“I don’t look back and be like, ‘Man, I had a great week’ because I do care about the wins and I do care about finishing on top,” Morikawa said Tuesday. “So there’s a little bit of yes, I feel great because I know I can keep putting myself in contention, and if I just keeping doing that, it’s going to happen.
“But for me, it does suck because I do look back at the wins and I do care about winning,” he said. “So that’s where it kind of hurts.”
He can look back to being in the final group of two majors last year. Morikawa was done in at the Masters when it took him two shots to get out of bunker on No. 9 for double bogey. He shared the 54-hole lead at the PGA Championship with Xander Schauffele at Valhalla. That requires good golf.
But remember, Morikawa won two majors — the PGA Championship in 2020, the British Open a year later — before his 40th career start on tour.
Golf felt easy back then, not so much at the moment.
Morikawa has better scoring statistics now than when he was winning, but he speaks more about the freedom he felt on Sunday when he was winning with a little more regularity.
There wasn’t much freedom when he took his place in the PGA Tour record book for losing a six-shot lead in the final round at Kapalua to start 2023. He played 67 consecutive holes without a bogey that week until one shot after another went wrong.
Even more frustrating is losing without really doing much wrong. Such was the case last week at Bay Hill, when Morikawa lost the lead without really losing control of his game. He was three shots ahead with five holes to play on a course with really one one birdie opportunity left. The other four holes were ranked among the top six in difficulty that day.
Morikawa had made only three bogeys in the previous 58 holes at that point. It wasn’t a matter of what went wrong as much as it what went right — a lot — for Russell Henley.
There was a two-shot swing on the par-3 14th — the toughest hole Sunday at Bay Hill, which at that point had yielded only one birdie. Morikawa missed the green and made bogey. Henley made his best swing of the tournament with a 5-iron to 10 feet for birdie.
And then came the breaks that win tournaments.
Morikawa found a bunker off the tee at the par-5 16th (the easiest hole of the final round) and had to lay up and hit wedge to a front pin, no easy task. Henley went just over the green in rough so thick he could only see his golf ball by standing over it.
And then he chipped in for eagle, a good shot because it was on line, a massive break because it hit the middle of the pin. An inch to the right or to the left, and Henley isn’t sure the ball would have even stayed on the green.
Instead, he had an eagle and the lead for the first time when Morikawa made par.
And that’s the way it stayed for the last two holes until Henley held his nerve to make a pair of par putts (the combined length of those putts was 10 feet) for the biggest of his career.
Henley’s words were telling when he turned his attention to Morikawa.
“Sometimes golf is just mean like that,” he said.
Morikawa clearly is trending with his game. The world ranking might not include LIV Golf players, but it’s generally accurate at the top. The trick now is moving on, just like he had to do after Kapalua in 2023, after the Masters and the PGA Championship last year.
He was in no mood to talk Sunday and offered no apologies given how he felt in the moment.
“I don’t owe anyone anything,” he said to a roomful of media at the TPC Sawgrass. “No offense to you guys, but for me in the moment of that time, I didn’t want to be around anyone. Like, I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
He was headed up the highway that evening for The Players Championship, another chance to get in the mix, another reminder that it is coming up on 18 months since his last win, and it was two years before that since he won in Dubai to capture the European tour season title.
The game is there while the frustration mounts. Winning is hard. He needs no reminders and is getting plenty of them, anyway.
“I love being in that position. I don’t take it for granted because you just never know,” he said. “But it was frustrating Sunday night. I have to get over it. … I’m going to think about it. I know what happened. I fully am aware of how it played out. But I just have to move on and I have to learn from it. I have to keep getting better.
“Like I always say, why not win this week?”
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On The Fringe analyzes the biggest topics in golf during the season. AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
By DOUG FERGUSON
AP Golf Writer
