After hitting the fairway on the lone par 5 on the back nine at the Travelers Championship, the wheels came off for the winner of the Memorial.
CROMWELL, Conn. — J.T. Poston was 3 under heading to the 13th tee on Sunday at the 2026 Travelers Championship and then hit a great drive down the middle of the fairway.
That was the last good thing to happen to the winner of the 2026 Memorial Tournament on the lone par 5 on the back nine at TPC River Highlands. To follow along with this septuple bogey disaster, break your abacus.
From 229 yards out from the hole, Poston’s second shot went into a greenside bunker right of the putting surface.
“First off, just hitting in that bunker is the last place we should have been,” Poston told Golfweek after his round. “It just ended up against the back of the lip (of the bunker) and I didn’t have much of a shot. I knew if I flew the bunker shot on the green, it was gonna go in the water based on where it was.”
Not wanting to find the water, his bunker shot came up short of the green and left him 59 feet from the hole in a fairway cut. From there, his fourth shot Poston hit what he thought was a good pitch shot, but the ball rolled through the green, down the slope on the left of the green and into the water, necessitating a penalty drop.
Poston said the area where his ball entered the water was partially shaved, with the grass growing back, toward the water. He said that if you dropped the ball it would roll back into the water, but he was able to place the ball on the turf.
“It’s not really rough, where you can kind of blast it out,” Poston said. “It’s into the grain, but it looks like you can get enough golf ball on it, which is why I kept trying to hit a good chip.”
Using a sand wedge on his sixth shot, the ball came up short and rolled back into the water, necessitating a second penalty drop. Hitting 8, his ball went rolled back into the water again, forcing him to drop for a third time.
Poston’s 10th shot, from rough, went 13 feet past the hole. He missed that putt for 11 and then tapped-in the 8-inch putt that remained for 12, a septuple bogey.
Did the idea of putting the ball ever cross Poston’s mind?
“Putting it, I feel like it’s just going to hop and that takes all the speed out of it. And you’ve got this big false front you got to get it over,” he explained. “So my worry with trying to putt it was it would not have enough speed to get. really get there. Yeah, I mean, obviously, in hindsight, I would have just hit to 12 feet and make by seven, but it’s one of those where, like, you feel like you can hit the shot, and so you try and execute it. I mean, we were in 40th place!”
As if that wasn’t humbling enough, after Poston made that 12 on the par 5 13th hole, his tee shot on the driveable par-4 15th hole found the water on the left. He made double-bogey six on that hole, and within the span of an hour, his score at the Travelers Championship went from 8 under to 1 over. He finished the day with a 76 that left Poston in 69th place in the 72-man field.
David Dusek is a senior writer at Golfweek covering equipment.
