Crowded leaderboard set for battle on Sunday at Colonial Country Club

FORT WORTH, Texas — The scariest places at Colonial Country Club are right in front of every player at the Charles Schwab Challenge.

Because those frightful spots are the greens between them and the trophy presentation Sunday afternoon, they must be confronted. The champion will be the player who accurately predicts every variable, from the skip on approach shots to the crispening side-slopes to how far gravity will carry a downhill putt.

That person might be Adam Schenk, who shot 3-under 67 in a third round that averaged more than 71 strokes — one over par — for the field of 72.

Schenk, 31, is winless in six years of playing the PGA TOUR. He contended until the very end at the Valspar Championship, where he finished in second after drawing a horrible lie behind a tree late on the 72nd hole. He’s tied for the lead at Colonial at minus-10 and telling himself, over and over, that he can only control what he can control.

“If I do that well and catch a few breaks, hopefully I have a chance on the back nine,” he said.

That person might be Harry Hall. Hall is the 25-year-old TOUR rookie from England who endeared himself to the gallery at Colonial by wearing a flat cap, like Hogan did.

Hall shot rounds of 62-66 in his first appearance at the tournament. The golf fates had other plans for him Saturday. Hall opened with five straight pars. He double-bogeyed the par-4 sixth with an errant approach, then made the same score on the par-4 seventh, this time with an iron shot pulled into the muddy creek that spills to the Trinity River.

He looked frustrated and dejected. But Hall righted himself on the back, with birdies on the 12th and 17th.

He shot 72, good enough to tie Schenk and join him in the final group.

“I'm never going to stop fighting,” Hall said. “I'm always going to keep trying. Like I said yesterday, this game brings you new challenges every day, and I'm equipped to deal with them. And I think I showed that today, and I kept a lot of patience, and I kept to my game plan.”

Or that person just might be Harris English.

The 33-year-old from Georgia shot even-par 70 — three birdies, 12 pars, three bogeys, one of them on the last hole. He finished at 9-under, a shot behind Hall and Schenk, on a golf course where the greens will get no softer, no easier to manage or predict, for the final round. English said he’s had to adjust for the firmness with every new day.

“It just depends on the wind, but I'm going six, seven, eight paces short of the flag, which is hard to do when you have like a gap wedge or a pitching wedge to the green,” said English, a four-time winner on TOUR. “So you just kind of have to trust it that it's going to bounce that much and release.”

On Monday, Gil Hanse and his design firm will begin a highly anticipated renovation of Colonial, which opened in 1936 in the river bottoms just southwest of downtown and has changed little since. With the work so close at hand, there’s no reason for the grounds staff to worry about losing the greens. They’re going to be lost anyway, after all.

“When greens get that firm and things get spicy like that, it makes every golf course firm or really difficult,” English said.

One player lost ground. Another gained it. English went nowhere. Behind them, Justin Suh and Emiliano Grillo sits at minus-6, and four players are at minus-5.

“You're going to have make some birdie putts from 10 to 20 feet,” Schenk noted. “You're going to have to roll in a couple that you normally wouldn't.”

“I'm ready,” said Hall. “Just get on the green and make some putts.”

“You could tell kind of in the practice rounds that it would get firm this week,” English said of the greens at Colonial. “Given the fact they're going to tear them up after this tournament, I think they're going to let them go and let them bake out and see how hard it can play out here.”

He added: “I think even-par is going to be a good score tomorrow. I don't know if it's going to get it done, but it's going to be tough.”

And not just once, but 18 times.