PEBBLE BEACH — Collin Morikawa sounds desperate to win again on the PGA Tour. On an increasingly blustery Saturday on the Monterey Peninsula, he gave himself a chance in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am with a largely flawless 10-under-par 62 at Pebble Beach Golf Links. Apparently, it’s all a state of mind.
Having just one victory since he captured the 2021 Open Championship, Morikawa is rather frustrated with his results, and you can’t blame him after he won two of the first eight majors in which he appeared and had five wins in less than three full seasons since he turned pro in 2019. But after a career-low effort at Pebble Beach born of some exceptional iron play, he has a chance to get back on the track he thinks he belongs.
“The problem is the results matter sometimes, and for me in this world after the past year, three years, whatever you want to call it, I just haven’t had the results I’ve wanted,” the California native said. “But I know I’m making the right strides, I know I’m inching towards the right direction. It’s just I just haven’t seen this momentum to be able to go out and play a low round.”
He had a lowest round on Saturday, and it was about as stress-free as you could want it. After beginning the third round eight shots behind co-leaders Akshay Bhatia and Ryo Hisatsune, Morikawa rattled off 11 birdies and climbed within two shots of Bhatia through 54 holes of this $20 million signature event. Morikawa, tied at 17-under 199 with Sepp Straka and Jake Knapp, hit all 18 greens in regulation and converted just 58 feet of putts—a metric that exemplifies just how dialed in he was on his approaches. He gained nearly nine strokes (8.885) in that discipline, best in the field.
“Ball was going where I wanted, putts were dropping when I needed them. It was just never got ahead of myself,” said Morikawa, 29, who won the 2020 PGA Championship a few hours north of here at Harding Park in San Francisco. “This game is stressful enough, and I think I make it even more stressful for whatever reason. But I was able to just really take it a shot at a time and just enjoy the round when I could.”
Ranked 19th in the world, Morikawa won the 2023 ZOZO Championship in Japan, but in January that year he lost a six-shot lead to Jon Rahm at The Sentry at Kapalua, and at the end of 2021 he surrendered a five-stroke lead to Viktor Hovland at the Hero World Challenge. Those will give you scar tissue. Also an ulcer.
When the task of winning is so difficult and chances so few, there isn’t a player on tour who doesn’t feel a gnawing exasperation with the game. But it’s more pronounced for a player like Morikawa who enjoyed tremendous early success. He hasn’t had a top-10 finish since a T-8 at the Rocket Classic in June. He began this year missing the cut at the Sony Open in Hawaii and was T-54 at last week’s WM Phoenix Open.
“Look, I’m very hard on myself,” he admitted. “I think we all are, but I’m very, very hard. You ask anyone on my team, I can get down on myself pretty quickly because I know there’s just really fine margins out here. And I want to go back not necessarily to the player I was, but just kind of use everything I’ve learned over the last six, seven years and just put that into the golfer I am today. It’s very hard to do, it really is.”
Conversations with his mental coach, Rick Sensinghaus, recently have usually segued to things he might have been doing to stunt his own aspirations. On Friday, after shooting a 68 at Pebble that was filled with missed chances, Sensinghaus managed to instill in Morikawa a renewed sense of priorities.
“He reminded me yesterday when I first came out and turned pro, I didn’t care about honestly making cuts or top 20s; I came out to win,” Morikawa said. “When he told me that yesterday, there was that mindset switch going into today. I wanted to come out and win, win the weekend, win the tournament.
“It’s a small mindset adjustment and without him telling me that, who knows what I would have shot today. But I’m out here to win. I’ve got to set that mindset at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of the week and now I think we’ve given ourselves at least a chance come tomorrow.”
