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Tom Kim holds lead as stacked Travelers Championship leaderboard readies for final round

Joe Arruda, Hartford Courant on

Published in Golf

CROMWELL, Conn. – Sunday’s final round of the Travelers Championship is set up to be a shootout.

With Tom Kim still in the lead at 18-under, Scottie Scheffler and Akshay Bhatia right on his tail and the course only getting softer with all of the rain it took during delays Friday and Saturday, the winning score will likely be in the 20s again.

And there are a handful of players, five who are three shots back or less, still in contention for the $3.6 million winning share of the event’s $20 million purse.

With the weather forecast uncertain, the final round is scheduled to begin at 6:50 a.m. ET Sunday with Kim, Scheffler and Bhatia in the lead group set to tee off at 11:15 a.m.

The first shape on Kim’s scorecard Saturday was a foreign one.

The 22-year-old from South Korea suffered his only bogey, represented by a square, through 54 holes on No. 4, which he had to three-putt. He responded with back-to-back birdies on the next two holes to tie Bhatia at the top of the leaderboard, just before the horn sounded to stop play at 3:30 p.m. The delay lasted nearly two hours before the round resumed at 6:20 p.m.

 

Before all the rain, Cameron Young provided enough entertainment.

His 11-under 59 was one shot shy of Jim Furyk’s 18-hole tournament-record 12-under 58 in the final round of the 2016 tournament. Young shot a career-best 7-under 29 with five birdies and an eagle on the front nine and completed the round with two more birdies, one more eagle, on the back nine to move to 13-under through 54 holes. It was only the 13th sub-60 round in the history of the PGA Tour and the first since Scheffler shot 59 at the TPC Boston in 2020.

After the delay, Kim, looking for his fourth-career win on the PGA Tour and his first this season, came out and shot 3-under on the back nine to finish 54 holes at 18-under 192.

“The greens were really soft (after the delay) and fairways were soft and there’s no wind, so obviously there were a lot of birdies out there, I’m sure a lot of guys did. I didn’t really look at leaderboards, but when you get soft conditions out there it’s definitely gettable and I feel like I executed well enough to have a good round today,” Kim said. “It’s a stacked leaderboard, out here a 5-, 6-shot lead is not safe at all. So I have to go out tomorrow and do the same game plan and execute.”

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