Summer of 62 hot stuff
Record-tying day puts Garrigus in happy place … and contention
The key to playing a good round of golf, Robert Garrigus was saying after he played one of the greatest rounds in the history of the RBC Canadian Open on Saturday, is not thinking about golf.
“That’s the hardest thing about being on tour,” Garrigus said. “There’s a lot of good golfers that can play golf, but not under pressure.”
And surely only the robots among us wouldn’t have felt a wee bit overexcited if they’d been responsible for Garrigus’s superb display of shot-making during Saturday’s third round — a two-eagle, six-birdie 62 that tied the tournament course record previously set most recently by Greg Norman back in 1986. The 10-under-par masterpiece moved Garrigus to 15 under for the tournament, two shots back of Charley Hoffman, whose 65 put him in sole possession of the lead heading into Sunday’s final round.
On the second hole, Garrigus chipped in for eagle — the kind of pleasant break that makes a guy think this might be his day. On the eighth hole, he drained a 35-footer for his fourth birdie in six holes — the kind of epic stretch that makes a guy believe he’s a world beater, even if Garrigus happens to be the world No. 243.
“(After the 35-footer) I’m just thinking: Oh my gosh, what is going on right now? I’m not going to think about anything,” Garrigus said.
Making his head a mostly empty vessel is a skill the 39-year-old Garrigus has cultivated. And it’s a useful one. On the same day he was threatening an unprecedented score around Jack Nicklaus’s first solo design — save for a drive into a fairway bunker, Garrigus would have likely had a shot at his third eagle on the par-five 18th hole — one of the two Canadians remaining in the field was acknowledging that thinking about the burden of home-soil performance possibly led to a dismal result.
“I think playing in front of friends and family makes it even more challenging,” said Mackenzie Hughes of Dundas after a two-over-par round of 74.
That was a stroke worse than compatriot Graham DeLaet’s disappointing 73.
“I mean, you can feed off it, and at the same time you start struggling. It becomes a bit of a burden.”
Garrigus carried no such baggage on Saturday.
“My mind shuts off. I might be kind of an idiot when it comes to that, but that’s fine. I’m almost so dumb I can play golf good,” Garrigus said. “That’s a good quality to have out here, because you’re not thinking about anything. You’re not thinking about missing a shot or hitting it close or whatever.”
Garrigus said he thought about some things, actually. Between shots he and playing partner James Hahn — with whom Garrigus practises occasionally in his hometown of Scottsdale, Ariz. — talked about their kids, and “TV shows and music and whatever.” Garrigus, as it happens, said he’d watched a Dateline news feature on TV on Friday night that piqued his interest: “The border patrol was making this kid drink meth and they killed him and they didn’t get arrested. It was great,” he said. So he talked about that with Hahn.
It certainly beat discussing the huge professional implications that a hot round might have on his career. Garrigus has struggled at times this year, at one point missing seven straight cuts. So he came into the week ranked 131st in the FedEx Cup standings, knowing only the top 125 at season’s end get full-time playing privileges for 2018.
“You want to keep your job. This game is so hard and we work really hard and we fight, we practise and we work out,” Garrigus said later. “It’s one of those things where you’re constantly searching for something good, and I found it today. I’m going to try and build on that tomorrow, so I’m really excited.”
That part about practising and working out and working really hard — there was a time in Garrigus’s career when those weren’t his habits. Garrigus has spoken openly about his descent into an abyss of marijuana smoke and alcohol, a blur of excess that lasted most of a decade and coincided with mostly disappointing work in golf’s minor leagues.
“The smoking got to be habitual: five, 10, maybe 20 times a day. I didn’t keep track of how much. I constantly needed to be high. And I took it to the max. Every single day. Mostly just smoking, smoking, smoking,” Garrigus said back in 2012.
Garrigus went to rehab, where he met his wife Ami. And he made headlines a few years back when he recalled for Golf Digest how he and other players smoked pot midround on the Nationwide Tour back in 2002.
“It wasn’t until I quit that I realized how stupid it was,” he has said. “But I don’t regret any of it, because it put me on the path I’m on now.”
He strode his path with confidence on Saturday. Coming into the week he ranked 183rd of 201players on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting, an advanced metric that has become the standard judge of shortgrass prowess. And yet in the third round he was draining seemingly everything he looked at. It didn’t hurt that he was striking the ball with rare purity. On his second shot into the par-five 16th — a 208-yard 4-iron — Garrigus embellished his follow-through with a Tiger Woodsworthy club twirl. He made no mistake with the flourish, landing the shot three feet from the hole and making good on the eagle.
“I know when my shots are perfect,” Garrigus said, “and I knew that was perfect.”
Golf, it’s been said, is not a game of perfect. Garrigus hasn’t won a PGA Tour event since 2010 — when he got his only victory in Orlando — back when he was known as one of the longest hitters on tour. But he’s been in contention at the Canadian Open more recently, holding the 54-hole lead at Hamilton Golf and Country Club back in 2012, only to lose by a stroke to Scott Piercy thanks to an unreliable putter.
Come Sunday afternoon at Glen Abbey, you can bet Garrigus won’t be thinking about that setback.
“The position I’m in, I’ve put myself there many times in my career. I’d like to think that I’ve got enough experience to close it out. If I shoot (62) again, I’m definitely going home with the trophy,” Garrigus said. “Hopefully I can do the same (Sunday), just go out and focus on one shot at a time. It’s the only cliché in golf. But it’s the most important one.”