Jim Furyk’s 58 at the 2016 Travelers Championship almost didn’t count

Jim Furyk shot a record-breaking 58 at TPC River Highlands in the final round of the 2016 Travelers Championship and it almost didn’t count.

Jim Furyk has a pretty solid history of shooting low numbers. The 2003 U.S. Open champ once carded a 59, at the time just the sixth player in the history of the PGA TOUR to do so, in the second round of the 2013 BMW Championship but apparently decided that sharing a record wasn’t quite as good as having one all to yourself.

Jim Furyk came into the final round of the 2016 Travelers Championship 16 strokes behind leader Daniel Berger. He teed off in an early pairing at 8:41 a.m. alongside Miguel Angel Carballo with no chance to win the tournament. But as you do on the final day, you go out and you play your best to try and move up the leaderboard to get a little bigger check and Furyk did that and then some.

Furyk struck the ball well from the get-go. He hit his approach on the opening hole to about 15 feet but missed the birdie putt to settle for par. He wouldn’t miss many more that day. He made his 15-footer at the second for his first birdie of the day and then holed out a wedge at the third for an eagle before making another birdie at No. 4 after hitting a 4-iron out of a divot to about four feet.

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After a par at the fifth, Furyk just missed getting on the green at the par-5 sixth and rolled his first putt to about four feet to set up another birdie and then stuck a 9-iron to tap-in distance at the seventh to add another. He then dropped another 15-footer at No. 8 and once again stuck his second shot to about a foot on the ninth for his fourth consecutive birdie to go out in 8-under 27.

The turn certainly didn’t stop Furyk’s momentum as he hit an 8-iron to about 12 feet on No. 10 and converted the putt for birdie number seven on the day. He followed that up with another solid 9-iron to set up another birdie putt, which of course he holed, and finished his run of seven consecutive birdies by dropping a six-footer at the 12th, putting him at 11-under for the day.

He chose not to go for the green in two at the par-5 13th after his drive found a divot and would settle for a two-putt par. He hit his trusty 9-iron to approximately 10 feet on the 421-yard, par-4 14th but missed the birdie putt, one of only a few missed putts he had all day from that particular distance. Keep that in mind moving forward.

After a par at the 15th, Furyk hit a 20-foot birdie putt to get to 12-under for the day and only needed to par in to shoot 58. He did make his par at 17 and nearly carded another birdie at the last for a 57. He tapped in for a record-setting 58, pumped his fist and immediately embraced longtime caddie and friend, Fluff Cowan. He knew he had done something special but it was almost all for naught.

As it is on most tours around the world, players’ scores are kept by their playing partners. With Jim Furyk making so many birdies on the day, perhaps Miguel Angel Carballo just got used to writing them down and after Furyk missed his birdie opportunity on the 14th, Carballo went ahead and wrote down a “3” anyway. As you know, had Carballo not eventually caught his mistake and had Furyk not noticed the error and signed for a 57, he would have been immediately disqualified and his score would have been erased from the PGA TOUR record books. Take a look at this tweet that the PGA TOUR posted last year and you’ll clearly see that the “3” had been erased and replaced with the correct score of “4”.

It’s highly unlikely that Jim Furyk wouldn’t have caught the error before signing his scorecard — I mean, it’s not often that a 57 or 58 shows up on a scorecard anywhere in the world — but with emotions running that high after breaking the all-time PGA TOUR scoring record, you just never know. I guess had Carballo not fixed things, Furyk would have just been known as that one U.S. Open champion with the funky swing that once shot a 59. That just sounds awful, doesn’t it?

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