ATLANTA \u2013 It was a nervous finish, even by Tour Championship standards.<\/p>\n
The 18th hole at East Lake has been the scene of plenty of chaos \u2014 Tiger Woods\u2019 victory walk in 2018 being the height of mayhem \u2014 but Thursday\u2019s finish with an approaching storm was certainly on-brand.<\/p>\n
In the day\u2019s final group, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy were wrapping up their opening rounds when things got interesting. From a greenside bunker, McIlroy hit his third shot thin but the ball bounded off a corporate suite and onto the green, leaving a 17-foot birdie putt.<\/p>\n
With a PGA Tour official poised to sound the weather-warning horn to stop play because of dangerous conditions, McIlroy rolled in his birdie putt at the par-5 finishing hole for an opening 66 and a share of eighth place.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, pretty lucky in the end. I think as well, if it hadn\u2019t have come down and we had to drop, we mightn\u2019t have got finished, so lucky in a lot of different ways, lucky for the score and lucky we got done,\u201d McIlroy said. \u201cI feel like I played well enough to shoot 4 under, if not better, so it was a nice and lucky way to finish.\u201d<\/p>\n
As soon as Scheffler rolled in his 4-footer for birdie at the last, the Tour official sounded the horn to clear the golf course.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have never rooted so hard for somebody\u2019s ball to come back, outside of my partner in a team event,\u201d said Scheffler, who shot a 63 and was alone in second. \u201cWe\u2019re walking to 18 and [Golf Channel on-course analyst Jim Mackay] told us they were going to blow at any second, so I\u2019m watching his ball fly towards the grandstand. I\u2019m like, oh, my gosh, we\u2019ve got no way of finishing this thing, so I was relieved when I saw it come back on the green.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA \u2013 It was a nervous finish, even by Tour Championship standards. The 18th hole at East Lake…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-88331","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}