Collin Morikawa is crazy like a fox at the Memorial, where he says he 'loves the place'
Collin Morikawa is crazy like a fox at the Memorial, where he says he 'loves the place'
DUBLIN, Ohio – Collin Morikawa always has been crazy about Muirfield Village Golf Club.
'This is probably the only golf course where I've stepped foot on it before I actually played and said, like, I love this place, no matter how I play, and it's kind of rare to find that,' he said.
Morikawa won here at the 2020 Workday Charity Open and has twice finished second at the Memorial, including last year. On Thursday, he birdied three holes in a four-hole stretch on the front nine and made six birdies in all en route to posting 5-under 67 in the first round, two off the pace set by Ben Griffin.
'I woke up today kind of not knowing how the swing was going to produce. I spent a couple hours on the range after the pro-am yesterday and was just trying to find something,' he explained. 'Yeah, kind of went to some old swing thoughts, and it's hard to filter through that, but did it on the range, and kind of was just able to go play golf. I got to trust myself that I'm playing good enough golf to go out there and win and that's what I did today.'
Asked if it was the same swing thought as a week ago, Morikawa shook his head from side to side. 'No, it's more of a swing thought that I had around Bay Hill. Shocker that I didn't stick with it,' he said of the site of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he finished second in March. 'Like I said yesterday, we're crazy. We think one thing's good, so then you just go away from that and try something new. But it's just, honestly it's just posture and making sure my posture's really good from the ground up and allowing my body to just go from there and swing it.'
Whatever the case, it worked. Morikawa topped the field in Strokes Gained: Tee to Green and ranked second in SG: Approach. He birdied both par 5s on the front nine at Nos. 5 and 7 and laced a mid-iron at the downhill, 214-yard par-3 8th to inside 5 feet. On the backside, he drilled a 22-foot birdie putt at No. 10 and sandwiched birdies at Nos. 14 and 16 around his lone bogey of the day, taking three putts from 57 feet. Still, it was a crazy good start, his third-lowest score in 18 career rounds at Jack's Place.
By Morikawa's own estimation, he's just flat out crazy, and it didn't take his new caddie, Joe Greiner, long to reach the same conclusion.
'He's already called me crazy a lot. And that's fine. Like, I think golfers are generally crazy. I know I am. I mean, you give me eight weeks off this off-season, you should hear about the amount of things I tried. Just, I mean I had seven different grips, different wraps on my grips, like I was going through it all,' Morikawa said. 'You just give me a little too much time and I just go down rabbit holes.'
The 28-year-old Morikawa's game has been better than most. He is ranked fourth in the world but the six-time Tour winner is winless since October 2023. So, the search to get across the finish line continues.
'I'm in a weird spot right now. I feel like I'm really close, but yet sometimes you don't know what you're searching for. I know it's something small and that's the click that I need to just play free,' he said. 'But it's hard to find that.'
Could Morikawa end his winless drought at the Memorial this week? Nothing crazy about that at all.
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