PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – It was the offseason of Collin Morikawa’s life – the reset and recharge meant to springboard Morikawa’s return to world dominance.
And then he woke up Saturday at the Sony Open with no tee time.
“I started this year feeling really good about myself,” Morikawa said. “You go play two rounds at Sony and I missed the cut and you realize: Man, do I have to redo everything you thought you were doing for the past two months??”
Professional golf can be unusually brutal in this way. The margin between the best players in the world and the guys who are in their 40s as insurance brokers is less than ten shots a week – and the margin between those at the very top and the very bottom of golf’s many statistical categories is, on average, less than 1.5 shots per round.
Morikawa has lived on both sides of the totem. He arrived on the PGA Tour on a rocket ship and won a pair of major championships before his 25th birthday, establishing himself as one of the game’s premier young talents. He spent the last half of his twenties trapped in the inner circle of golf hell: posting misery (to go along with an unpleasant cocktail of bad form and near misses and swing changes and caddy changes).
On Saturday, however, Morikawa came alive during the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. He shot a blistering 10-under 62 and notched 11 birdies against just one bogey to jump into the final pairing for Sunday’s final round with Akshay Bhatia. Sunday will be Morikawa’s best chance to pull off a signature win in some time, perhaps since his near-miss at the 2025 Arnold Palmer Invitational.
But before he can get there, he’ll have to overcome the challenges that have marred the last few years of his golfing life: the challenges that come with the putter in his hands.
‘Yes, I think so [uncomfortable with my putter] for the rest of my career,” said an unusually candid Morikawa on Saturday afternoon. “It’s a reassurance for me. I think I play a lot with my feelings and a lot with my feelings and unfortunately that changes a lot.”
Morikawa’s putting challenges have manifested themselves in particularly painful ways: After winning five times in less than two years to start his career, Morikawa has only one victory in the past five years, which came on the relatively light field of the Zozo Championship in Japan, and has watched as other stars from his rookie class (notably Scottie Scheffler) have risen to the upper echelons of the sport.
In that time, the putter has fallen from a solid complement to Morikawa’s alien ball to a legitimate liability. He arranged 156th on Tour in SG: Putten in 2025, the third time he has scored worse than 100th on Tour in the same category since the winning drought began in 2022.
But putting is an art – and art is fickle. Some weeks can be enough to derail an entire tournament this week the needle has barely moved. On Saturday, Morikawa was near the bottom of the field in most putting stats, making just 55 feet of putts all day, and recording one of the best rounds of his career. year.
The lesson, he said, came not from a shift in putting technique or skill, but from a change in mindset.
“[Mental coach Rick Sessinghaus] reminded me yesterday when I first came out and turned pro, like I didn’t care about making fair cuts or getting top 20, I came to win,” Morikawa said on Saturday. “When he told me that yesterday, there was a change in mentality today. I wanted to come out and win, win the weekend, win the tournament.”
Morikawa certainly looked like a Pebble Beach winner on Saturday, displaying the same dazzling iron play that made him such a formidable foe in the early days of his career. He also took advantage of a third round played before a strong wind blew from the south, which changed course conditions so much that the final group played the 18th hole in 36 minutes.
Good putting is part of winning, but good fortune is too. The latter was by Morikawa’s side as he prepared for Sunday’s final round in the final pairing. The last group to leave Pebble on Sunday could quickly find themselves in a rock battle, with conditions expected to deteriorate further throughout the afternoon. Only the strongest competitor will survive the chaos – putter be damned.
“I’m here to win. At the end of the day, if you finish 30th, 15th, 3rd, like I want to win,” Morikawa said. “I have to set that mentality at the start of the day and the start of the week and now I think we’ve at least given ourselves a chance tomorrow.”
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