Arnold Palmer Invitational: Tyrrell Hatton Hangs on as Bay Hill Survivor

Bay Hill beat down all of the competitors who came to play at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, with the lone survivor being Tyrrell Hatton.

Tyrrell Hatton won the 2020 Arnold Palmer Invitational Sunday. That’s what the record book shows, anyway, and that’s also the way the winner’s check was made out.

But anybody who watched it knows that the real winner, for the second consecutive week, was the course itself.

The 69 players who had survived the tournament’s first two rounds needed an average of 75.06 strokes to get around Bay Hill Sunday. That’s not quite as bad as the 75.91 strokes they needed Saturday, but it resulted in a winning score of just four under par. Thanks in part to 15 mph winds and in part to the course’s natural difficulties, Bay Hill became an even tougher test than last weekend’s notoriously tough PGA National, which hosted the Honda.

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Nineteen players broke par during the Honda’s final round. At the Arnold Palmer Invitational this Sunday, only 10 did so. That’s less than 15 percent of a field of the world’s finest golf professionals. Five failed to break 80.

The natural outgrowth was a landscape littered with players who had a chance to overtake Tyrrell Hatton, the third-round leader, but who came up short. This required some effort on the parts of the challengers because Hatton hardly ran away and hid Sunday, recording a closing two-over 74.

That made Hatton the first player all season to win with a final-round score higher than 70. Until Sunday, the average closing round score by a tournament champion this season had been 67.6.

Eight other players could have won Sunday by producing just that average winning score. Not only did none do so, but few also came especially close. The average score of those eight plausible winners Sunday was 73.87, only fractionally better than Hatton. Only one of the eight, Bryson DeChambeau at 71, broke Bay Hill’s par of 72.

Tyrrell Hatton was gettable Sunday, and in the end, he was saved only by his iron game. A strength all week, he fell back on it when his driver buckled. Hatton hit only five of 14 fairways, and on the critical par 11th made the rookie mistake of driving into the lake up the left side. That hole saddled him with a double bogey and momentarily wiped out his two-shot advantage.

Other than that, for the most part, Hatton won by not screwing up. Carrying a two-stroke lead over Marc Leishman to the first tee, he bogeyed two of the first five holes but birdied the 195 yard 7th with iron to kick-in range. On the 8th, Leishman knocked his iron within a half dozen or so feet for a second (and a final birdie.)

Save for that stumble on the 11th, he spent the rest of the round trying to stay out of everybody else’s way while they self-destructed.

Marc Leishman began the day two strokes behind Hatton and gave him his best chase to the finish, ending up one shy. But Leishman managed nothing more impressive than a one-over 73, fighting driving problems of his own. Off the tee, Leishman spotted the field almost a half stroke Sunday,

Like Tyrrell Hatton, Leishman also drove a ball into one of Bay Hill’s omnipresent ponds, Leishman did it on the third hole and made six. That error threw him into day-long catch-up mode, which is not a mode that plays well at Bay Hill.

Sungjae Im might have won for a second straight week, but an unfortunate experience at the supposedly easy 13th hole finished him. Im arrived at that 353 yard par 4 only seconds after Hatton had taken that 6 at 11, throwing Hatton back into a tie for the lead with Im. He stared down a 110-yard wedge over yet another pond to a front pin placement…and rinsed it. That double bogey consigned Im to a closing 73 of his own and represented the two strokes by which he missed forcing Hatton into a playoff.

And then there was Rory McIlroy, the presumed winner given his status as the world’s No. 1 ranked player. Like Leishman, McIlroy began the day just two strokes behind Hatton. But Rory’s driver never bought into the hype. He hit just four of 14 fairways, and the constant aggravations that prompted led to double bogeys on the 6th and 9th.

Rory was out of it by the turn so his back nine score of 36 amounted to nothing more than a tie for fifth, four strokes out of the lead.

The 76 was McIlroy’s worst competitive round of the season by three strokes, and his worst since a first-round 79 at last summer’s British Open caused him to miss the cut.

Danny Lee and Harris English, both of whom started the day tied with Im and three behind Hatton, also could have contended. Bay Hill, an equal opportunity slaughterer, got them as well. Lee failed to birdie any of the first 15 holes, by which time he was three-over on the day and out of contention. He tied Mcilroy, defending champion Keith Mitchell and Joel Dahmen for fifth.

English suffered through a six-bogey round and a 76 that sent him back into a tie for ninth.

His winning score of 4-under made Hatton the first player to win a PGA Tour non-major that few strokes under par since Brandt Snedeker won the 2014 Quicken Loans at -4 in August of 2014. No player has won a non-major at less than -4 since Keegan Bradley took the 2011 Byron Nelson at 3-under par.