After opening with a 63, Nick Taylor went wire-to-wire to collect his 2nd PGA TOUR victory at Pebble Beach.
Team TaylorMade athlete and Canadian, Nick Taylor faced increasingly windy conditions, a hard-charging Phil Mickleson, and his own struggles in the back nine to come out on top at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
Taylor led by as many as five strokes heading into the back nine before bogeys on holes 11 and 12 followed by a double bogey on No. 14. Taylor, from Abbotsford, B.C., remained composed for birdies on Nos. 15 and 17 for a 2-under 70 round and a four-stroke win over Kevin Streelman, with Mickleson fading to five shots back with three bogeys on his back nine.
Taylor finished at -19 to win by 3 shots using his TP5 ball – TaylorMade’s 5-layer ball that Team TaylorMade athletes love because it performs so well in the wind.
Taylor added TaylorMade’s new “game improvement” SIM Max 4 iron which he added to his bag during testing in December at the company’s HQ in Carlsbad. It’s built at 2 iron length and has 21 degrees of loft. It was originally 19 degrees, but was going too far for the distance he wanted to hit it, so TaylorMade’s Tour team added more loft to it so that he can hit it “Rescue distance”, but controls the trajectory much better and hits it very straight.
For the second time of his career, Taylor has won a PGA Tour event and has set himself up for an exciting 2020 season. He’ll now join Adam Hadwin, Corey Conners and Mike Weir at the Masters, the most Canadians to ever play at Augusta. He also joins Hadwin and Conners as a potential member of Canada’s Olympic team at this summer’s Tokyo Games. Canada’s two highest-ranked male players in the world golf rankings will compete in the Olympics.
