How missing cut at U.S. Open sparked Will Zalatoris’ 64 at Travelers

CROMWELL, Conn. – Will Zalatoris spent six hours last Sunday battling the heat and his golf swing. The bulk of the Travelers Championship field was doing the same … but in the final round of the U.S. Open. Zalatoris was already at TPC River Highlands, 700 miles away. He missed the cut at Pinehurst No. 2, but he didn’t take the weekend off. There was work to do.

“I got out here Saturday night and then Sunday I had a basically all-day grind session just to try to figure out what was going on,” Zalatoris said Thursday at the Travelers Championship. “I got into some bad habits, figured out kind of what I needed to fix, and just kind of dug it out of the dirt.”

In Zalatoris’ ongoing recovery from microdiscectomy surgery, his swing got wayward. The ball had drifted too far back in Zalatoris’ stance, and he found himself digging too much at the ball, which inhibited his ability to curve it. With restrictions on how often and how much he could practice, there was never enough time to correct it. But any restrictions are now gone. His body feels nimble and the “grind session” on the range has his swing feeling fluid. Zalatoris shot 6-under 64 in the first round of the Travelers. He’s two back of Tom Kim (8-under).

Not one to normally look at old swing videos, Zalatoris reverted to the strategy after shooting 75-73 at the U.S. Open. He looked back at his swing from the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard and The Genesis Invitational, his best two showings of the year, and the fix became obvious quickly. It only took a few hours to engrain it fully.

“It's nothing special, it's just I got very off with my setup,” Zalatoris said. “Now I'm moving it way forward and trying to swing more around my body, which is basically what I tried to do coming back and the changes that I've been making with my surgery.”

Zalatoris specifically called out how he played the 12th hole in the first as an example of the changes. He mishit his driver off the tee, leaving himself an 8-iron into the green instead of a wedge. Prior to this week, he would have put the ball back in his stance and tried to carve a low-flighted shot to the front-left pin location. But, if he blocked the shot, it would’ve ended in the greenside bunker and likely led to a bogey. With his new swing feel, Zalatoris aimed at the center of the green and launched a towering shot. He blocked it slightly, but instead of ending in the bunker, it landed 11 feet from the hole, and Zalatoris made the putt for birdie.

“It's nice when I'm mishitting golf shots and they end up in the right places now. I think that's the big difference,” Zalatoris said.

The misses were relatively rare on Thursday. Zalatoris hit 10 fairways and 14 greens and his two bogeys were short-game mistakes. He three-putted the par-4 fourth green and played a poor pitch on the par-3 16th. The rest of the day was defined by fantastic tee-to-green play. He led the field in the statistic for Round 1. Six of his eight birdies came from within 10 feet, and seven came in a nine-hole stretch. Zalatoris birdied the seventh and eighth holes to make the turn in 2-under 33, then birdied 10, 12, 13, 14 and 15. His 11-foot birdie putt on the 12th was his longest holed putt of the day.

“Really the thing that's been holding me back over the last kind of month or two has been my iron play, which is obviously very uncharacteristic,” Zalatoris said.

Zalatoris hasn’t finished inside the top 40 since his T9 at the Masters in April. He finished T43 at the PGA Championship and shot 79 in the final round of the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday to finish T41. All the flaws in his swing were exposed at Pinehurst, which punished anyone who wasn’t sharp. Importantly, it was the wake-up call that Zalatoris needed to make a change.

“It was the best thing that could’ve happened,” he said.