In the second round of the PGA Championship, Tony Finau made 16 pars. Some of them represented missed opportunities, while a few others were scrambling achievements.
Two poor drives doomed him to bogeys. Those swings, combined with his inability to make any birdies Friday, cost the West High School graduate some ground at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla.
Finau’s 2-over-par 72 dropped him slightly out of the top 25 with a 1-over total, although he comfortably made the 36-hole cut for the seventh time in eight PGA appearances and the 20th time in 24 career major tournaments.
For the second straight day, Finau posted a minus rating in the PGA Tour’s “strokes gained putting” statistic, compared with the field. That’s mainly because he missed four birdie attempts from 11 feet or slightly closer on the first 13 holes. Yet he saved par with a 10-foot putt on No. 14 after a bunker shot and got up and down from another greenside bunker on the next hole.
Finau’s bogeys came on two par-4s: No. 2, where he took a penalty stroke after driving into the stream on the left side, and No. 12, where he drove into the left rough and had to lay up short of the water in front of the green.
Finau played the first two rounds with Xander Schauffele and Hideki Matsuyama, who also made the cut. Yet they didn’t maximize their favorable conditions, as most golfers who were assigned to tee off Thursday morning and Friday afternoon scored better than the other half of the field.
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