Longtime friends whose caddies are roommates this week, Lucas Glover and Patton Kizzire nearly earned early tickets home. They were among the 16 players who spent the later part of Friday afternoon and evening watching the 3M Open cut line teeter to 3 under, totter to 4 under and back again to 3 under at the last possible moment.
On Sunday, the pair made the most of their weekend opportunity. They combined to shoot 8 under on the front nine and 5 under on the backside. Glover led the charge, turning in a season-best 9-under 62 that gave the overnight leaders some company at the top by the time they teed off just after 1 p.m. Glover rolled 151 feet worth of putts on the TPC Twin Cities greens and finished at 16 under for the tournament to tie for seventh place.
"I didn't play that much different than the first three days," said Glover, the 2009 U.S. Open champion at Bethpage Black. "Made a lot of those 10- to 20-footers and confidence kept growing and my reads were solid."
Glover took a bogey at No. 5 but rolled a tricky 8½-footer for par on No. 9 that allowed him to make the turn in 30 strokes. His fourth birdie on the back nine, from 9 feet on No. 16, meant that an elusive 59 was in play. But he made par on the final two holes.
"I hit my spot," Glover said of the 18th hole. "Just not enough break. I've been over-reading [putts] all week. It was a good stroke, I flushed it. That's all you can do."
In Kizzire's opinion, Glover did plenty. "That was a lot of fun," said Kizzire, who shot 5-under 66 and finished tied for 34th at 12 under. "He got it going there early making all those putts and, man, I was just trying to keep up."
Earlier in the week, when Charles Howell III played with Keegan Bradley and Bryson DeChambeau and said their success — Bradley drained a 60-foot putt on No. 11 and DeChambeau shot a 62 — spurred him along.
"It's like drafting," Howell said, using the NASCAR analogy.
