NAPA, Calif. – What was looked upon as a Ryder Cup training camp for the American team turned into a typical week for Scottie Scheffler.
Scheffler wanted to stay sharp ahead of the Sept. 26-28 matches at Bethpage Black. The world’s No. 1 player looked every bit of that Sunday in the Procore Championship when he closed with a 5-under 67 for a one-shot victory over Ben Griffin.
It was his sixth PGA Tour title of the year. Scheffler joined Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer as the only players since 1960 to win at least six times in consecutive seasons.
“This was a week in which I was playing a new golf course, a golf course that was pretty challenging to play for the first time,” Scheffler said. “Did a really good job of kind of staying in the tournament the first two days and then the last two I played some really good golf in order to be in this position.”
He made up an eight-shot deficit on Griffin on the weekend with rounds of 64-67 and finished at 19-under 269. The victory pushed his season total to just over $27.6 million.
Silverado had its strongest field and largest gallery since the tournament moved to Napa in 2014. And it got quite a show under a blazing sun when Scheffler and Griffin went down to the wire until Griffin came up one putt short.
Griffin, a two-time winner this year who will make his Ryder Cup debut at Bethpage Black, had a 60-foot eagle putt for the win on the par-5 18th hole. He left that lag about 5 feet short, and the birdie putt to force a playoff caught the left lip. He shot a 70.
“I felt like I just wasn’t quite as sharp from short range as I needed to be,” said Griffin, who has finished runner-up to Scheffler twice this year. “But I’ll get to work this next week and hopefully make every single one of them at the Ryder Cup.”
Scheffler was one of the players who earlier in the year targeted the Procore Championship as a good spot for the Ryder Cup team to play so they could avoid the mistake of two years ago when all but two of them had a month off before the Rome matches.
Four of the Ryder Cup players finished among the top 10, with U.S. Open champion J.J. Spaun (66) finishing sixth and Cameron Young (67) tying for ninth.
“We floated the idea of doing a scouting trip to Bethpage or coming here and playing this event. We felt it would be a little bit more valuable to get all the guys together here this week to play tournament golf in order to stay in shape,” Scheffler said.
“For me there’s just a difference between practicing and playing at home and getting under the gun in a tournament.”
But once the tournament started, Scheffler was all about winning.
It was his 19th career victory on the PGA Tour, and now he heads to match play in the Ryder Cup against Europe, which has had the upper hand in these matches the last three decades.
Lanto Griffin had as much pressure as anyone, coming into the Fall portion of the schedule at No. 142 in the FedEx Cup in the first year of only 100 players keeping full cards.
He delivered a 65 to finish alone in third, his best finish in nearly four years. That moved him up to No. 100 in the standings with two months and at least five tournaments to go.
“It’s huge,” Griffin said. “One of my goals this week was to give myself a chance. … I kind of wish Scottie wasn’t here, but I’m sure the fans enjoyed it.”
Scheffler started two shots behind and fell as many as four shots back early when Ben Griffin birdied the opening three holes. But Griffin missed a 4-foot par putt on the fourth and went 10 holes without making birdie.
Scheffler pecked away with four birdies through 10 holes. After a careless three-putt bogey from 15 feet on the 11th, he answered with two birdies on the par 5s to take the lead when Griffin struggled to get anything going.
Auburn junior Jackson Koivun, the No. 1 amateur in the world who played in the final group, was two shots behind with seven holes to play when he took a soft bogey on the par-5 12th and then bogeyed the 13th when he went long of the green.
Koivun closed with a 71 and tied for fourth with Emiliano Grillo (66). It was Koivun’s fourth consecutive finish at 11th of better on the PGA Tour, and he gets in the Sanderson Farms Championship in three weeks unless the 20-year-old has other plans at school.
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