Let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way... Would Patrick have won if he didn't change from black shoes to white shoes right before the round?
We're starting a new series of blog posts where we track the winning round of the past weekend's PGA Tour event. In our fourth post, we're taking a look at Patrick Reed's 67 (-4) at Club de Golf Chapultepec in Mexico City that beat an extremely strong field of golfers by 1 stroke.
You can see the tracked round here in the Wasted Shots app:
At one point during the broadcast, someone mentioned that they thought someone had to get to -20 to win, though they also said that changed during the day, so we're assuming that Patrick had that goal in mind when he started the day at -14, one back of Justin Thomas and in a tight bunch that included world #1 Rory McIlroy, eventual runner up Bryson DeChambeau, and red-hot John Rahm. That meant he needed to gain 7 shots overall. With the reachable par 4 first and a couple of reachable par 5s, we figured he'd set his subcategory goals as shown in the following image. Here's how he did...
* Patrick had some trouble in the long game when trying to play it safe, pushing his long iron to the right a few times, but the -4 in approach shots definitely was definitely helped by his long game on the holes that required aggression. This drive with his "helicopter finish" setup a solid second shot that skipped approach range and let him hit a simple pitch and putt for birdie... just as it looked like Bryson was going to run away with it...
* Patrick didn't do much with his approach game to hurt scrambling, nor really help his cause until he reached the 16th and hit this gem of an approach...
* Outside of the par 5 #11, his scrambling was on point all day. Most notably this dagger on #17 to basically put it away...
* Patrick had a boring day in the makeable putt department, with no more than 1 putt per hole (and a few skipped by some solid scrambling putts), which is something we should all strive for if we're trying to achieve our goals.
Overall, Patrick didn't quite reach the goals we set for him, but it took extremely solid play to win on Sunday and Patrick brought it when most scuffled on the back 9. Congrats Patrick!
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