The leaderboard was spinning like a tombola at Aronimink on Saturday, where at one point or another just about every player in the field had a birdie putt to take a share of the lead and then a bogey putt to let go of it again. When the drum finally stopped turning, Alex Smalley, a 29-year-old from North Carolina who has never won a professional golf tournament, was top of the leaderboard on six under, two shots clear of a five-way tie for second. No disrespect to Smalley, the world No 78, but the field are queued up like bowling balls on the rack waiting to take a run at him on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Philadelphia loves an underdog, but it\u2019s probably best if the trumpeter waits another day before he strikes up the opening notes of the Rocky theme.<\/p>\n
There are 21 players within four shots of a share of first, and eight major champions among them. Jon Rahm, who has finally rediscovered his major touch, is in the group closest behind him on four under, and Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele and Patrick Reed are all only one further back than that. It doesn\u2019t stop there. Justin Rose, Martin Kaymer, Cameron Smith and Hideki Matsuyama are grouped on two under. Even Scottie Scheffler<\/a>, whose stone-cold putter cost him a handful of birdies, may still fancy his chances from five shots off Smalley\u2019s lead.<\/p>\n It is the most congested major leaderboard anyone can remember. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like this,\u201d Scheffler said, \u201cI\u2019ve never seen a leaderboard this bunched up. It\u2019s quite literally anybody\u2019s tournament.\u201d<\/p>\n Smalley was playing in the final pair, along with Maverick McNealy, and until he pulled clear by making a birdie on the par-five 16th, he was part of a six-way tie for first place. It would have broken the record going into the final day in a major, beating the five-way tie at the Open at St Andrews back in 1933. Instead Smalley\u2019s out in his own. It is the first time in his life he\u2019s had the 54-hole lead in a professional tournament. \u201cI don\u2019t like being in the spotlight a whole lot,\u201d he said on Friday night. \u201cI\u2019m still trying to get used to playing in front of large groups of people like there are at tournaments like this one.\u201d<\/p>\n He seems to be catching up with it. He played a hell of a round on Saturday. He looked all but out of it after he scored four bogeys in his first eight holes, but then he went and played the next 10 in five under.<\/p>\n England\u2019s Aaron Rai is among the five players tied for second. Photograph: Matt Slocum\/AP<\/p>\n As well as \u00c5berg and Rahm, the group of five immediately behind him included England\u2019s Aaron Rai, who managed to hold on to his score at five-under through the late afternoon until he made a dreadful mess of the 18th, when he veered from the rough on the left to a bunker on the right. It\u2019s been over 100 years since an Englishman won this tournament, and Rai, 31, has a shot at breaking one of the longest jinxes in major golf. But it\u2019s awful busy up there at the top. By mid-afternoon it had got so bunched up there that a lot of the players admitted they had given up looking at the leaderboards.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so bunched it was kind of pointless,\u201d said Canada\u2019s Nick Taylor, also on four under, and besides, the greens here are so mean you couldn\u2019t afford to take your eyes off them long enough to take it in.<\/p>\n So a tournament that has been widely criticised by the players for being so damn difficult may yet end in one of the more extraordinary Sundays in major history. It helped that the sun was out and the wind had shifted so that some of the greens on the shorter par-fours were reachable off the tee, but it was true, too, that after all the criticism they received from McIlroy and Scheffler about the fiendishly difficult pin positions<\/a> on the first two days, the tournament committee were a little more generous with their set-up.<\/p>\n On Friday, Scheffler had described the pins as \u201cabsurd\u201d, and McIlroy had said they were \u201cnot great\u201d. After scoring 66, the Northern Irishman explained that he was just venting his pent-up irritation.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you have a set of greens like this, you can start to frustrate people pretty easily,\u201d McIlroy said. \u201cYou heard it in me last night, you heard it in Scottie. There was a lot of guys that were frustrated yesterday coming off the course. But at the same time, it creates a hell of an entertaining championship. If I wasn\u2019t playing this tournament, I\u2019d love what\u2019s going on this week, but watching and playing are two different things.\u201d<\/p>\n Rory McIlroy, pictured shaking hands with Brooks Koepka, has played himself back into contention. Photograph: Laurence Kesterson\/UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n He was in a better mood on Saturday. \u201cNo profanity today,\u201d McIlroy said as he walked in to talk to the press. Two days on from his \u201cshit\u201d performance in the opening round, when he made four back-to-back bogeys and was tied for 105th, McIlroy\u2019s right back in contention. \u201cI\u2019ve climbed my way out of that hole and I\u2019m proud of myself for doing that,\u201d McIlroy said. \u201cThere\u2019s one more day left, and I feel like I\u2019m close enough to the lead that I\u2019ve still got a good chance.\u201d Him, and just about everyone else holding a club.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is,\u201d Schauffele said, \u201cgoing to be an absolute free-for-all\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The leaderboard was spinning like a tombola at Aronimink on Saturday, where at one point or another just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-675792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}