seven players shared the 18-hole lead, the most in 57 years at a major<\/a>. Midway through the third round, 28 players were separated by two shots. <\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s difficult to make a ton of birdies,\u201d said Aberg, who managed seven of them after a double bogey at the start for a 65. \u201cIt gives me a little bit of sort of Aronimink vibes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aaron Rai finally pulled away to win his first major by three shots at the PGA with a 40-foot eagle putt and a 70-foot birdie putt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis tournament feels a lot like Aronimink, where there\u2019s a lot of people around the lead,\u201d McIlroy said. \u201cIt feels like you can make some birdies, but it\u2019s like a good score is 67 and a bad score is 71. There\u2019s like not a lot of separation of the field.\u201d<\/p>\n
That’s what got Scheffler’s attention, perhaps because he is the supreme ball-striker in golf and felt handcuffed by the large greens with big slopes and pins that required caution. He caught a gust to a back pin on the 17th hole Friday and could get no closer than 12 feet.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have really, really large green complexes like these and they tuck the pins very close to the edges, it\u2019s a balancing act between how much you want to bite off,\u201d Scheffler said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love seeing rewards for good shots and punishments for bad,\u201d he said. “I think sometimes, especially when you look at these modern golf courses, they do a lot of the same stuff to the golf courses. They make the fairways bigger. They make the greens bigger. Then in order to protect par, we shove the pins up against edges.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why I think you see the scores get really close like they are this week.\u201d<\/p>\n
The ninth hole was maxed out at 270 yards \u2014 back tee, back pin \u2014 and Scheffler hit 5-wood just short of the green. McIlroy hit 3-iron. Players feel the best par 3s are the short ones, but Scheffler didn’t seem to mind how the ninth played for the third round.<\/p>\n
\u201cI actually thought it was better from the back box because you might see a few more bogeys,\u201d Scheffler said.<\/p>\n
Alas, no such luck Saturday \u2014 one birdie, one bogey, 27 pars.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
See AP\u2019s full golf coverage here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA (AP) \u2014 Scottie Scheffler was signing for another bogey-free round when he was curious enough about the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[44,531,4368,21621,56],"class_list":["post-58187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pga-championship","tag-golf","tag-pga-championship","tag-s","tag-scheffler-tour-championship-east-lake-leaderboard","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}