Fan favorite Stricker finishes 1st day with flourish at PGA

“But what a comeback today”, he said.

“It’s not fire ants or anything, so there’s no relief on them”.

“It’s burrowing. It’s digging a hole”, Watson continued.

Par-4, 397-yard No. 14: Coming off a birdie to pull within three shots, Jordan Spieth was in the fairway and pulled a wedge over the green. “That’s my ultimate goal, to get back in the winner’s circle”. Stricker has said he is playing a little less this year as a precaution.

But he made the cut at Whistling Straits and shot 70 on Sunday to finish at 284, 4 under par.

“Walking up there, that was pretty special when I was getting that standing ovation there, and I took a moment there, for sure”, said Stricker, among the most respected players on the tour.

It took Dustin Johnson just one hole in Sunday’s final round of the PGA Championship to get his butt kicked by a couple of the 1,000-plus bunkers that dot the links-like Whistling Straits track.

As was the case all week for Stricker, a few errant shots late in the round were costly.

Former UK Golfer, J.B. Holmes, started off his PGA Championship run with a -4 par, 68 on Thursday. After two pars, he couldn’t get a 3-iron to turn over on the 223-yard 17th hole and came up short in the right rough, leading to another bogey.

The next major in Wisconsin will be the U.S. Open at Erin Hills in 2017.

“But I chose this path and I knew this was probably going to happen at some point in time that you slowly fade away out of that category and that exemption area”.

“Obviously, I’m not going to give up trying… but, I don’t know, it could be my last”, Stricker said about this year’s PGA.

But boy, does Gaffney have a good excuse for missing time.

Johnson, who is best known at Whistling Straits for the two-stroke bunker penalty he incurred on the 72nd hole of the 2010 PGA Championship that cost him a place in the playoff, had a quadruple-bogey eight on No. 1. “So, thank you, guys, for taking care of me”.