JT’s got himself a new jacket. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Welcome to the Monday Leaderboard, where we run down the weekend’s top stories in the wonderful world of golf. Grab an Arnold Palmer, pull up a chair and let’s watch a major-winner enjoy a long-delayed win … again.
Justin Thomas captures RBC, first win since 2022
For most of the past few years, Justin Thomas has patrolled the PGA Tour as a player more famous for his vibes than his performance. Yes, he’s a two-time major champion, with a couple PGA Championships to his name. But his more recent claim to fame was as a Ryder Cup team locker room spark plug, which seems to work well stateside but not so much in Europe. Over the past nine majors, he’s missed five cuts and recorded just one top-10 — a T8 in 2024 at, yes, the PGA Championship. He wasn’t yet in what-ever-happened-to territory — he’s far too visible for that — but the questions were simmering.
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And now, at long last, another breakthrough. Thomas beat Andrew Novak in a playoff to win the RBC Heritage, a Tour signature event, marking his first victory since that 2022 PGA Championship. The walkoff victory came on a 21-foot birdie putt:
In one of those statistics so carefully drawn as to be ridiculous, Thomas is now just the seventh man since 1960 to win 16 tournaments, including two majors, before turning 32. (You know all the rest.) Next up on the major slate: yep, the PGA Championship. Even more good times might just be ahead for JT.
Nelly Korda’s Champions Dinner is a match for Scottie Scheffler’s
The Chevron Championship, the first of the LPGA’s five annual majors, tees off this week. Reigning champion Nelly Korda has the honor of crafting a menu for the week’s Champions Dinner, and Korda brought some game.
The meal will begin with regiis ova hybrid caviar and big eye tuna tartare, with cream of mushroom soup to follow. Then the main dish: herb roasted filet of American wagyu beef from Snake River Farms, with sides of Greek deli salad, Sacramento Delta white asparagus, garnet yam gratin and glazed mushrooms. Dessert is ovocné knedlícky, which of course you know are traditional Czech fruit dumplings with vanilla sauce. A touch more worldly than Scottie Scheffler’s Texas-themed chili, ribeyes and cast-iron skillet chocolate chip cookies.
Garrick Higgo captures Corales after Joel Dahmen’s late collapse
South African Garrick Higgo won the Corales Puntacana Championship, a feel-good win after he lost his PGA Tour card last year … and a feel-bad loss for Joel Dahmen, who had the win in his hands but coughed it up with three straight closing bogeys. Dahmen set the course record with a 62 on Thursday, claimed the 36-hole record, had a share of the 54-hole record … but a 76 on Sunday cost him a chance at a wire-to-wire victory. It would have been the first wire-to-wire victory on Tour since Lee Hodges at the 3M Open in July 2023. “All of a sudden I wake up,” Dahmen said after the round, “and I lost the golf tournament.”
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Higgo has struggled in recent years, losing his Tour card in 2024. But this victory gives him a two-year exemption … and it might just give him a new hat deal, too. After losing his previous deal, he was spotted wearing Boston Red Sox and New Orleans Saints hats on the course all week. Whatever works, right?
Ben Crane DQs himself over rules violation
It was a good-news, bad-news kind of weekend for Ben Crane. At the Corales, the vet made his first cut of the season … and then promptly disqualified himself over a Saturday rules violation. On the eighth hole, he drove his tee shot into a penalty area, and hit a second shot. But when he went to that second ball in the fairway, lo and behold, there was his first, too; apparently it had kicked off a rock and caromed back into play. Crane, by his own later admission, didn’t pay close enough attention to which ball was which, and played the first by accident. He could have escaped with just a penalty if he’d addressed the matter before he started the ninth hole, but he didn’t, and DQ’ed himself after the 11th. Tough way to go out, but it was the proper golf move.
In slightly better news, this gives us a chance to once again bring back the infamous Golf Boys video from the early 2010s, and we never pass up a chance for that. Behold Crane, Bubba Watson, Hunter Mahan and Rickie Fowler in all their glory:
Where does Rory McIlroy’s Masters win fit in golf history?
With a little bit of distance, we’ve been thinking about where Rory McIlroy’s spectacular Masters win last week fits in all of Masters — or even golf — history. Certainly it’s right there with Tiger Woods’ 2019 win and Phil Mickelson’s 2004 breakthrough for most emotional of the 21st century. But while Phil’s was a long-awaited debut major, and Tiger’s was the modern equivalent of Jack Nicklaus’ curtain-call 1986, there was something both more gripping and more spectacular about McIlroy’s.
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The fact that he’d been in contention for so many tournaments prior to this one, the fact that he combined both brilliance and self-sabotage not just in the same career but on the same damn holes, the fact that this culminated just the sixth career grand slam … it all adds up. Yes, you don’t get any more recency-biased than this, but it’s already certain this was one of the finest Masters of them all. And history could be even kinder, with some more distance on this. It was a good one, and McIlroy isn’t anywhere near done.
Shot of the week: Ingrid Lindblad’s tree-aided beauty
We’re big on the “better to be lucky than good” theme here, and Ingrid Lindblad was both on Sunday at the LPGA’s JM Eagle LA Championship. In just her third career start, the rookie won the tournament by a stroke when Japan’s Akie Iwai missed an 18th-hole putt that would have forced a playoff. Lindblad’s good fortune was aided by this lucky bounce on the 13th:
That’s a sign everything’s going your way.
Coming up this week: Rory returns at the PGA Tour’s Zurich Classic (Avondale, La.); the LPGA’s Chevron Championship (The Woodlands, Tex.); PGA Tour Champions’ Mitsubishi Electric Classic (Duluth, Ga.); LIV Golf Mexico City.