A week after Harris English needed eight playoff holes to subdue Kramer Hickok in the Travelers Championship, Cameron Davis went eagle-birdie to finish his round to get into extra holes with Joaquin Niemann and Troy Merritt. After Niemann bogeyed the first hole of the playoff, Merritt and Davis tied the next three holes before Merritt failed to get up and down on the par 3 15th hole and made bogey to allow Davis to secure his first PGA Tour victory.
The 26-year-old Australian was listed at odds of +12800 to win in the tournament played at the par 72 Detroit Golf Club, which means anyone that placed a wager on the latest Tour winner received an impressive payday. Tournament favorite and defending champion Bryson DeChambeau parted ways with his caddie prior to the start of the event and failed to make the cut.
Davis came in at +12800 odds to win the Rocket Mortgage Classic.
Davis earned $1,350,000 for the win and also picked up 500 FedEx Cup points which moved him from 81st to 34th in the standings. He also secured a two-year exemption on the PGA Tour as well as gaining entry into the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational in August as well as the Masters Tournament in April of 2022.
Davis, Merritt, and Niemann tied at 18 under par 270 after regulation, five shots worse than DeChambeau’s winning score from last year and seven shots behind Nick Lashley’s 25 under par 263 in the first year of the event in 2019. With soft conditions and the players enjoying lift, clean, and place privileges over the first two rounds, it appeared that the winning score would be closer to the totals from the first two years.
Rookie Davis Thompson shot a sizzling nine-under-par 63 to set the pace after the first round, leading most observers to believe that Lashley’s tournament record could be in jeopardy. However, Thompson couldn’t break par in any of his final three rounds, and no one put together multiple low scores to challenge either of the scores from the first two years of the Rocket Mortgage Classic.
Some familiar players had their names pop up on the weekend leaderboard, most notably Bubba Watson, who partially made up for last week’s back nine meltdown by posting a final round 64 to tie for sixth after making the cut on the number at three-under-par. Rickie Fowler, two and a half years removed from the winners’ circle on the PGA Tour, got into contention on Saturday after a four-under-par 68 got him to nine under par for the tournament, but faded to a tie for 32nd after a disappointing 71 on Sunday.
Phil Mickelson took issue with a newspaper report on gambling allegations from twenty years ago and vowed not to return to the Rocket Mortgage Classic in the future. On the course, he managed to birdie the 17th hole on Friday to make the cut at three-under-par, but the 51-year-old shot a pair of even par 72’s on the weekend and ended up in a tie for 74th among the 77 players that qualified for the final two rounds.
