OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. – There’s no mistaking the lines of demarcation on the PGA Tour. They’re a series of numbers. Black and white.
The top 125 maintain playing status.
The top 70 advance to the playoffs.
The top 50 earn a spot in next year’s signature-event series.
And this week: The top 30 to reach the Tour Championship, with an $18 million bonus for the eventual FedExCup champion.
Fall on the right side of those numbers, it seems, and it’s been a successful year. Progress. But at this level, to these players, it’s not always that straightforward. Professional careers aren’t always that binary, judged solely by numbers or rankings, by cuts made and benchmarks cleared.
“It’s so results-based,” Max Homa said. “It’s just this tour and golf in general that rewards high finishes versus consistency. But I think the people who have the most success are the ones who know internally, Hey, I am getting better.”
And that’s what brings us here to the BMW Championship, where by Sunday night the playoff field will be trimmed from 50 to 30. At the moment, at least, there are some surprising names on the wrong side of the number who need to find slivers of solace amid the season-long frustration.
Full-field scores from BMW Championship
It starts with 2022 U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick, who entered the week at No. 40. When asked to assess his season to date Thursday, the Englishman didn’t mince words.
“It’s disappointing, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “There’s not really much to add to it. It’s disappointing. I wanted it to be better.”
Did he horribly regress? Not by any reasonable measure. He’s remained among the top 10 players in the world. He won a signature event, the RBC Heritage, with a macho shot in the playoff. He had a top-10 at the Masters and a top-20 at the U.S. Open. But he also knew that he often didn’t have his best stuff.
At Los Angeles Country Club, his caddie, Billy Foster, woofed, “How the hell have you finished top 20 in the U.S. Open driving the ball like me?”
Indeed, short in stature, Fitzpatrick has built his career driving the ball on a string and being tidy on and around the greens. But that hasn’t been the case this year – he’s 58th in strokes gained: off the tee, including 141st on Tour in accuracy. That’s down significantly from 10th and 51st, respectively, a year ago.
“For me who’s always been relying on good driving and been a strength of my game hitting fairways,” he said, “it just makes it difficult.”
And yet he was also quick to point out his improvement in his iron play, specifically his distance control. Those are areas in which he has made sizable gains this year, even if it doesn’t always show up in the stats. And after making a driver tweak with swing coach Mike Walker last week in Memphis, Fitzpatrick took dead-aim Thursday at rain-softened Olympia Fields and ranked third in the field in approach, opening with a 4-under 66 that left him a shot off the early lead. It has him, finally, optimistic about a big finish to the year, first at the playoffs and then in the Ryder Cup.
“Really pleased,” he said. “Really, really, really, really, really, really pleased. Just not played great of late; it’s pretty obvious. But I feel like we turned a corner.”
It continues with Sahith Theegala, for the second year in a row squarely on the FedExCup bubble, at No. 31 in the standings. A year ago, the dynamic rising star was 28th and just eked into the finale. Afterward, he spoke emotionally about his “dream” rookie season and the desire to make it all the way to East Lake, to stand among the other 30 best players of the Tour season.
“It would mean everything,” he said then. “It’s the validation of the season.”
But Theegala didn’t speak like that Thursday at Olympia Fields, where he posted one of his best ball-striking rounds of the year and shot 66. He said he tries not to compare himself to others but rather against his former self. And in that respect, he said, he’s in better shape physically. Feels like he has more energy for a playoff push. He’s acquired some intangibles simply with more experience.
“All you can do is grow and practice whatever is best for you and hope that you get the most out of it,” Theegala said. “You could be practicing the hardest you’ve ever practiced, and the scores could be getting worse, but you know that you are making progress and you’re going toward the right direction.
“You’re chiseling at a rock and you hit it 100 times, and it’s the 101st time that it breaks, but it’s the 100 hits before. That’s something I’ve kept in my mind too, because I feel like I got better, but I had a little bit of a tough stretch in the middle of the season and had to remind myself of that.”
And it ends with Cameron Young, who was at No. 46 points and, surprisingly, hasn’t taken the leap after his Rookie of the Year campaign in 2022. Asked to grade his season, he first offered a “C-minus” before toning it down to a “B.”
Last year, Young was a major factor, a constant presence on the leaderboard, a wildly impressive masher who had a whopping seven top-3 finishes without a victory. But this season? “There’s not many tournaments I look back on and think, Man, I just played so good that week,” he said. “I feel like last year there was more of that, but I don’t think the golf has been that different. That’s why I kind of went back up (in grading).”
Without the myriad chances to win – outside of the Match Play finals loss to Sam Burns – Young has needed to view success differently. During a seven-tournament stretch this summer, he needed a late birdie or two just to make the cut. All but twice, he pulled it off.
“So even though I did struggle,” he said, “I think I did some things that I’m proud of.”
That’s why, even for the notoriously harsh self-critic, his sophomore season wasn’t entirely disappointing.
“I’m better at being a professional golfer than I was a year ago,” he said.
Better routines. More productive tournament weeks. Greater efficiency in his at-home work.
“I’m understanding my golf more and more,” he said, “and I think it’s really hard to measure those things, but I know they’re there even if some of the results don’t really speak to that.”
Like Fitzpatrick and Theegala, Young started with a solid opening round at the BMW. He’s two off the early lead, a welcome sign if U.S. captain Zach Johnson is perusing scores of the Ryder Cup hopefuls. As of now, it’s projected to move Young only to 35th in the FedEx race. It wouldn’t be enough to get to next week. He’d be on the wrong side of the Tour’s arbitrary cut line.
“There’s no pressure from either of those things – it’s all from me,” he said. “It’s the same things I feel every week, trying to prove to myself that I can do what I want to out here, and just trying to be as good as I can at the game of golf. That’s why we show up every week.”
For the feeling that can’t be quantified – the hours of effort that turn into moments of elation.
