3M Open
Brian Harman, listed as high as 175-1 pre-event, took control of the British Open in Friday’s second round with a 65 and held a five-stroke lead heading into the weekend. Despite starting +2 through four holes on Saturday and +2 through five holes on Sunday, Harman kept it together and never surrendered his lead to finish 13 under and six shots clear of second place.
Harman, with two career PGA Tour wins (last victory 2,258 days ago at the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship) before this weekend, has been a consistently good player but had never had a signature week like this one. After completing his major championship triumph, Harman walked into the scoring tent with his putter still in hand as he did not want to let it go considering he gained 11.57 strokes (No. 1 in the field) with it over four rounds. The 36-year-old is the oldest first-time major winner since Sergio Garcia won the Masters at 37. He now rises to No. 10 in the OWGR and will likely make his Ryder Cup debut later this fall in Rome.
Four players tied for second behind Harman: Tom Kim, Sepp Straka, Jon Rahm and Jason Day, who now has completed the runner-up Grand Slam. Emiliano Grillo and Rory McIlroy finished T-6. McIlroy’s major championship drought has reached nine years. Shubhankar Sharma and Cameron Young finished T-8 and rounding out the top 10 were Max Homa, Tommy Fleetwood and Matthew Jordan, a member at Hoylake who gave his hometown crowd a lot to cheer about over the weekend.
This week, the PGA Tour heads back to the States with only two events left until the FedEx Cup Playoffs, starting with a stop in the Twin Cities for the 3M Open. Defending 3M Open champion Tony Finau (12-1) missed the cut last week at the Open, and despite his victory in Mexico this spring, has been a bit out of form and is looking to rediscover it before the Ryder Cup selection in September.
Young (16-1) has had a disappointing 2023 campaign compared with 2022 when he had seven top-3 finishes or better. However, he does come into this week with consecutive top-10s at the John Deere Classic (T-6) and the Open (T-8). Sungjae Im (16-1) was runner-up in this event last year and has five top-10 finishes on the PGA Tour this season.
Hideki Matsuyama (18-1) finished T-13 at the Open.
Justin Thomas (25-1) missed the cut badly in his second consecutive major last weekend and was a late commitment to this event as he finds himself outside the top 70 for FedEx Cup points and is running out of time to play quality golf to avoid being on the outside looking in for the Ryder Cup.
Grillo (28-1) and Straka (30-1) have both won on the PGA Tour this season (Grillo, Charles Schwab Challenge; Straka, John Deere Classic) and both posted career-best major championship finishes at Royal Liverpool.
Ludvig Aberg (35-1) earned his tour card through 2024 finishing atop the PGA Tour U standings for college players and now is trying to make his way into the top 70 for the FedEx Cup over the next two weeks. He was fourth at the John Deere Classic three weeks ago.
A quartet of players are slotted at 40-1: Cam Davis, Gary Woodland, Keith Mitchell and Sahith Theegala.
Adam Hadwin (45-1) has finished fourth (2019) and sixth (2021) here in three career starts.
Akshay Bhatia (55-1) earned his full PGA Tour status by winning the Barracuda Championship in a playoff last weekend over Patrick Rodgers (45-1), who is tied for the all-time wins record at Stanford with Tiger Woods and Maverick McNealy but still has yet to win a PGA Tour event in 246 career starts. Bhatia was a late Monday withdrawal.
With the playoffs tightening from the traditional 125 to 70, the depth of the 3M Open field markedly improved this year compared with its first four tournaments. With the playoff bubble in mind, 27 players in this field fall between No. 55 and No. 85 in the current FedEx Cup standings.
Eleven of the OWGR Top 50 players play this weekend, including Finau, Young, Thomas, Im, Straka and Matsuyama. Eighteen players from last week’s Open Championship field made the 10-hour flight from Liverpool to Minnesota. That list also includes Theegala, J.T. Poston (55-1), Grillo and Nicolai Hojgaard (55-1), who round out the list of secondary contenders.
The Event
The 3M Open is just in its fifth year as an event on the PGA Tour. However, it does have a lengthy history from its previous incarnation as the 3M Championship, which was held annually on the PGA Tour Champions from 1993-2018. The Champions event was held on this TPC Twin Cities course from 2001-2018. Paul Goydos set the course record of 60 here in the 2017 Champions event. Title sponsor 3M is headquartered just outside the Twin Cities in Maplewood, Minn., and is only one of 30 companies to be part of the Dow Jones Industrial Averages. With $32.8 billion in total sales in 2018, 3M was easily able to part ways with the $16 million annually to be the title sponsor for this event.
The Course
TPC Twin Cities is in Blaine, which is 13 miles north of Minneapolis and 20 miles from St. Paul. The track was designed in 2000 by Arnold Palmer with consultation from Tom Lehman. Native Minnesotans Tom Lehman and Tim Herron along with Steve Wenzloff, PGA Tour vice president of Design Services, renovated the layout in 2018. TPC Twin Cities is part of the Tournament Players Club group of courses owned by the PGA Tour.
The course will be played as a par-71 of 7,431 yards, which is the 10th longest on the PGA Tour. It is a relatively easy and gettable parklands design with three shorter and drivable par-4s that longer hitters can reach. With three par-5s measuring 594 yards (6th), 593 yards (12th) and 596 yards (18th) in length, the longest holes on the course show some resistance here. The closing 18th is arguably one of the best finishing holes on the tour. The hole doglegs with water on the right throughout, which is in play on both the tee shot and approach if players want to get aggressive with a 220+ yard approach over water to reach in two. Matthew Wolff won in climactic fashion at the inaugural 2019 3M Open, responding to Bryson DeChambeau’s eagle on 18 with an eagle of his own from just off the fringe.
Both sets of par-3s and par-4s are easy from a PGA Tour scoring perspective. In total, 13 holes have a scoring average under par; the five holes on the property that do not are the four 450+ yard par-4s and the longest par-3 on the course, the 228-yard 13th.
The average round score over four years here is -0.79 under par. However, last year it played +0.44 over par with the rough bumped up to four inches, the course playing firmer and winds gusting to 20 mph each round. The rough growing out to four inches last year — added to some pre-existing smartly placed fairway bunkers — resulted in just over 50% of players being able to find the greens when missing fairways, decreasing from 55.73% in 2021 and 60.41% in 2020.
There are 27 water hazards in play over 13 holes (third most of the PGA Tour), so it resembles a bit of a Florida-type layout. While it is a relatively easy course, there is danger lurking with all of the water. Last year, it ranked second out of 40 courses in penalty strokes per round, and it has ranked inside the top six in this category each of the last four years.
In addition, there are 72 bunkers on the course. The fairways (35.5 yards average width) are constructed of Bentgrass and they will play hard and fast with plenty of rollout. In addition, the course is at around 900 feet altitude (sixth-highest elevation on tour), so the ball will fly a bit farther than normal. The rough can be a pesky four-inch Bluegrass/Fescue mix. The greens are large (6500 square feet) and average speed (12 stimpmeter) Pure Bentgrass.
In 2019, tournament founder Hollis Cavner gave an honest description of how they want the 3M Open to play, quoted as saying, “We want birdies and train wrecks, and we don’t want to be the hardest golf course on the tour.”
TPC Twin Cities is an Arnold Palmer original design, so here are some other Palmer designs played on the PGA Tour:
