[Photo: David Cannon]
Less than 24 hours ago, we – and by “we”, I mean “I” – analysed Justin Rose’s iron game both before and after his change to McLaren after the Masters, and we found a pretty big discrepancy. A day later, it’s a good thing I mentioned the possibility of a small sample size because Rose posted a 65 in the third round of the PGA Championship to move to two-under and currently leads the entire field with three strokes gained in approach for the day.
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Rose’s round, complete with five birdies on the front nine alone, punctuated a scorching early wave filled with more birdies than Aronimink had seen in the previous two rounds. Chris Kirk, Kristoffer Reitan, Matti Schmid and Nick Taylor also posted 65s.
What changed? Was it inevitable that his irons would click into gear, and that the narrative of him making some drastic, disastrous change to tank the sunset of Rose’s career was overblown?
“I’m very confident. I’m very experienced. I’m very curious. I’m very detail-oriented,” Rose said after his third round. “I won’t be doing anything stupid.”
“I know these things are great,” he added about the irons that he’s been designing for not days, or weeks, or even months, but years. “I’ve worked really hard on the process. Yeah, it was good to kind of play well today and see the evidence of that statistically, I suppose.”
As to what made Saturday different, Rose simply chalked it up to bad play generally in the past few weeks – “if you put a poor move on it, I don’t care what you’re playing.”
On a course that’s playing more than half-a-stroke under par for the day, after two days of playing more than two strokes over par, Rose was a red-hot early beneficiary, reeling off four straight birdies between holes three and seven, with putts ranging from 19 inches to 11 feet thanks to the accuracy of his approach shots. He added another on the par-5 ninth and then played even on the back to cruise in with his 65.
On day two, Rose made eagle on his last hole to make the cut, and he said afterward that the trampoline effect from snatching two more days of golf from the jaws of an early exit paid dividends.
“A bit of freedom,” he said by way of description. “Obviously, a bit of gratitude just to be here… I was actually just joking with my caddie walking down the seventh hole. We were suddenly one-under-par for the tournament, and we were five-over-par, like, seven holes ago. So I said, ‘You wouldn’t have thought I’d be walking down No.7 under par in the tournament, would you?’”
Aronimink is clearly showing some unexpected kindness to the field so far in round three, but for Rose the difference is subtle and mostly has to do with pin locations.
“I think we’ve seen a lot of pins on crowns and edges,” he said. “I think the pins are just a bit more predictable… when the pins get off of those little knobs and crowns, they’re not so much easier to get at, but they’re easier to putt at.”
Almost to prove his point, Rose said that the pin on the first hole was actually placed in a difficult spot, leading him to think it would be another day of struggle. And indeed, that hole is playing harder than both the opening two rounds. Elsewhere, though, the task became far simpler, and the scores followed.
Rose said that he hopes the lead doesn’t get past seven-under (memo: it won’t), but even if it stops there, and even with a bunched leaderboard, he’ll have his work cut out to make up shots on what will probably be a dozen contenders ahead of him. Still, he’s scored one for pride, and for McLaren. When you’re the best iron player in the field for the day, the doubters start to vanish.
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