The beginner player takes FIVE swings to find the fairway, crashes out of the fight

It all resulted in a triple bogey 7 and Lee was back in pursuit mode.

“It went very quickly,” he said after his lap. “It’s one of those things where it’s Sunday and you just make some bad decisions and it kind of all falls into place.”

In fact, it was the kind of messy hole in the biggest lap of his life that could have sent Lee reeling. But he kept his composure and played evenly for the next six holes. The problem was that Scheffler had started doing Scheffler things, birdieing 8, 9 and 10 to take control of the tournament.

When the pair got to the par-five 11th, Scheffler was six ahead of Lee and four ahead of clubhouse leader Tyrrell Hatton, who was 12-under. Lee had to make a move, and fast. Instead, he uncorked what might have been his worst swing of the week and hooked his drive shot deep into the pines to the left of the fairway.

Lee could have gone high or low with his recovery shot. He went up and cut a branch, his ball falling back into the barky prison it came from. Now hitting three, he still had no clear route back to the fairway and hit a chunky shot out of the pine straw. His ball advanced just 36 feet — and quiet Lee had no clear route back to safety. He hit his fourth shot under encroaching branches and over a bunker on the left side of the fairway. His ball barely carried the sand and landed in the left rough. After four Swing, Lee still hadn’t found the fairway.

He hung up on his fifth shot and let himself a 30-yard pitch, which he bounced for a double bogey 7.

It’s hard to win a Tour event with a pair of hockey sticks on the map — let alone the Players Championship — and that was the case with Lee on Sunday.

“It’s funny how yesterday I felt like I had the best swing in the world,” he said Sunday night, “and then today I just felt like nothing could work out.”

Well, not Nothing.

A born showman, Lee had been playing in front of the stands all week, and when he arrived on the stage, which is the rowdy par-3 17th hole of the Stadium Course, Lee had a rabbit up his sleeve: a high soft fade, which touched down gently on the island green, caught the drop to the left of the hole and rolled to within five feet of the cup, drawing roars from the crowd.

“It’s hard to hold an audience when you’ve just done triple-bogey and double-bogie and you’re trying to keep your head up,” Lee said. “But just for a second you just have to stop and really look at the crowd and you’re here for a reason and you did it really well and yeah that was probably the most people I’ve ever seen on a hole , to 17, so it was pretty cool.”

Lee signed for a four-over-76 to take sixth place, nine behind Scheffler.

“I’m pretty proud of the result and I think it will take me a long way,” said Lee. “It could have been a lot worse. That’s for sure. It was’nt easy. That’s part of it.”

Alan Bastable

Golf.com Editor

As Editor-in-Chief of GOLF.com, Bastable is responsible for the editorial direction and voice of one of the game’s most respected and trafficked news and services sites. He carries many responsibilities – editing, writing, ideation, development, daydreaming about turning 80 one day – and feels privileged to work with such an insanely talented and hard-working group of writers, editors and producers. Before taking the reins at GOLF.com, he was a features editor at GOLF Magazine. A graduate of the University of Richmond and the Columbia School of Journalism, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and four children.