Matthew Fitzpatrick needed to take an alternate path to the seventh inexperienced.
NBC Sports activities
Maybe what makes the Open Championship so interesting to us American hackers is seeing the very best on the planet encounter conditions they by no means see on the PGA Tour.
And that usually leads to seeing the very best on the planet hit pictures that we American hackers would by no means dream of.
On Friday at Royal Troon, Matthew Fitzpatrick, the U.S. Open champion from simply two years in the past, hit simply such a shot.
After opening with a 70 on Thursday, the Englishman was off to a troublesome begin within the second spherical as bogeyed the par-5 4th and doubled the sixth, one other three-shotter.
On the seventh, Fitzpatrick put his drive right into a left fairway pot bunker.
In case you haven’t heard, the bunkers are Royal Troon this week aren’t any joke.
“They’re hazards,” R&A CEO Martin Slumbers stated Wednesday morning of Troon’s bunkers. ”They’re deep. They’ve obtained massive faces, they usually’re designed to remain out of. We’ve been wanting very fastidiously on the sand, and I feel a number of the gamers have commented how we’ve pushed them up somewhat bit to offer them a slight likelihood to have the ability to get out.”
That slight slope across the fringe of the bunker wasn’t sufficient to assist Fitzpatrick Friday. If issues weren’t going sideways sufficient already, the 29-year-old actually needed to play out sideways.
What’s worse is that since Fitzpatrick is right-handed and was up in opposition to the face on a left-fairway bunker, so his solely choice was to pitch out towards the heavy fescue. He had only a yard or two of sunshine tough between the sting of the bunker and the fescue.
It was a fragile shot and he performed it a contact too far. Fitzpatrick watched hopelessly as his ball bounded into the lengthy fescue grass.
“It’s only a factor you by no means see in a traditional event,” a broadcaster on the Open’s world feed stated.
Fortunately, Fitzpatrick’s lie wasn’t too dangerous as he obtained his third shot onto the placing floor and two-putted to drop only one shot.
The 2-time PGA Tour winner and nine-time DP World Tour winner turned in 40, however after a disastrous 7 at Royal Troon’s eleventh, the railway gap, he discovered himself at six over for the event and properly outdoors the projected cutline.
