Don’t let world-class professionals like Matt Wallace fool you. Golf is hard. A total mental grind. Making a birdie is routine for the best players in the game. Even going on a run of three or four birdies in a row isn’t totally out of the ordinary.
…But to birdie every. Single. Hole. On a set of nine holes? Never mind doing this at your home course with your pals in a relaxed environment. We’re talking about the concluding tournament of the DP World Tour season. High stakes. Elite golfers everywhere. And Matt Wallace goes out in Saturday’s third round and does THIS:
Other than some fleeting glimpses of the last few holes — most provided by Wallace himself — full highlights of his round aren’t widely available as of this writing. However, behold the yardage he had for each of his approach shots and his proximity to the hole on the last seven of those successful birdie attempts:
Wallace made only 21 feet, 11 inches of putts on his final seven holes. Let me throw out a stat to underscore how insane that is. Lucas Glover led the PGA Tour this past season with an average approach proximity of 32 feet, 7 inches.
So like yeah…the standard approach shot for the best iron player on the PGA Tour was still almost 12 feet further away from the total feet of putts Wallace made on his scintillating seven-hole closing stretch.
Look at some of the guys Wallace surged ahead of! This ain’t no scrub field!!
What else can you even say? Well, Wallace spoke about it afterwards and how the fact that he wasn’t in range to shoot a 59 — unless he eagled the par-5 18th hole from the bunker — helped him stay loose and remain in attack mode.
“At the end there, I didn’t even think that it was a 59. Honestly, I think that helped me a little bit. I played really nice down the stretch and I just wanted to keep getting one more and I managed to do that.”
It’s pretty rare for an achievement to stand alone regardless of what happens in a tournament. If Wallace doesn’t go on to close the deal on Sunday and win, though, pretty sure few golf fans will forget this day for quite a while. Pretty sure Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus never even did this at the highest level during a tournament. No shade to them at all. Just goes to show how absurdly hot Wallace got.
Matt Wallace’s round was straight up bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Bananas. No better way to cap this off than with Wallace’s stunned reaction to the stuff of legend that transpired in Dubai.
