BMW Saturday Notebook: Horschel shows the pain of a near miss

The race for the BMW Championship tightened up Saturday

By Jim Bebbington

Billy Horschel, a 15-year PGA Tour pro with one win this season, had a strong round Saturday at the BMW Championship at Castle Pines Golf Club.

But one hole showed how agonizing the difference can be between a good putt and a great one.

No. 16 at Castle Pines Golf Club on Saturday played as a 205-yard par three. Players hit over two ponds to a two-tier green surrounded by grandstands. It is built for theater.

Saturday Horschel’s tee shot landed 36 feet past the pin, and to his  dismay stayed up on top of a ridge on the edge of a steep embankment down to where the pin was cut.

The putt was going to have more action on it than a Vegas craps table.

Horschel aimed about 15 feet left of the cup and gently tapped it. His putt rode the top of the ridge, then finally dove down toward the cup. It grazed the edge, and finished 2-inches from glory.

“I feel like I’m better off sometimes with a hard putt like that than a 15 or 20 footer that has maybe a couple of balls outside the cup,” he said after his round. “I just think on those putts you gotta have a lot of imagination”

Horschel finished the day with a 68, 4-under par. He is among the players who is near the cut-line for making next week’s Tour Championship at Eastlake Golf Club in Atlanta. The top 30 players on the FedEx Cup rankings move on to Atlanta; Horschel finished Saturday in the low 20s, meaning if that holds he would move on to the lucrative Tour Championship.

Derrick White is a good friend

Derrick White, the NBA and Olympic champion who grew up in Parker, has been walking inside the ropes all three days of the competition to support Wyndham Clark.

This is no small favor. Castle Pines Golf Club is notoriously hilly, and hiking all 18 holes is an act of real support.

Clark said the two played basketball as young children in the same league, both point guards playing against each other.

“It’s really funny, I saw him the first day and thought it was cool,” Clark said. “Then I saw him the next day, then I saw him today walking all 18. I was like, man, you’re really into golf. He’s like, yeah, this is fun. It’s pretty cool. It’s great to see where Derrick has gone in his career.

“It’s honestly one of those pinch-yourself moments because we were third grade all the way to high school playing basketball against each other, and you would almost never think that he’d be at the highest level and I would be at the highest level at my sport, and two kids coming out of Colorado, it doesn’t happen very often.”

White plays for the NBA’s Boston Celtics, and was part of the team that won the NBA title this year. This summer he played on the U.S. Olympic team, which took gold.

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