PGA Championship 2017 scores: Kevin Kisner holds on to slim lead at Quail Hollow

A U.S. Open broke out on Saturday at the PGA Championship, where the best in the world were beat up at Quail Hollow. The heat and humidity were intense and the setup was borderline, with players grumbling about pin placements and pace of play. We’ve got an ... eclectic (?) leaderboard heading into Sunday in Charlotte. It won’t be the Spieth vs. Rory battle we all wanted, but there’s a mix of styles and stories inside the top 10. Some notes from Saturday at the PGA.

In an era when the game feels dominated by 20-something bombers, it’s a refreshing change of pace to have Kevin Kisner on top of the major championship leaderboard. Kisner didn’t come into his pro career with his TrackMan numbers dialed in and specialized fitness for hitting bombs off the tee. We’re trending toward a game with much less art, skill, and variety than we used to have, opting for primed young studs who try to hit it as far as possible and then figure the rest out later.

Kisner is the opposite of that. He’s loaded with talent and was a stud college player, but he had to grind for several years to figure out how his game and talent would work in the pros. It wasn’t immediately easy and he certainly isn’t some big hitter, ranking 127th on the PGA Tour in driving distance this year. But he’s got artistry, touch, and skill in multiple areas of his game. So far, that’s working at a Quail Hollow course we were told was going to be a bomber’s paradise.

The setup that might be mitigating some of the bombers’ advantages didn’t exactly receive rave reviews on Saturday afternoon.

Ian Baker-Finch, who is, um, not prone to negative comments and critiques, said on-air on CBS that “The greens are too fast for the undulations.”

“The pins are on knobs,” Jordan Spieth added. “Unless you are in a perfect location, your putt has to be absolutely perfect. You really only have half the hole to make a lot of putts because of where the pins are.”

Webb Simpson, who is a member here and lives on the course, said, “The setup has been too tough for a PGA, to be honest.”

When the member is grumbling a little bit, then you know the players and caddies are saying a lot more off the record and under their breath. These are new greens with Champions Dwarf Bermuda put in last year. New greens usually mean hard putting surfaces, with balls bouncing off them sometimes like they’re concrete. We’ve seen that several times this week up close and saw it again Saturday. When you know the greens are firm and dried out, you have to be careful with pin placements and that seemed to be the biggest gripe of the players on Saturday. It also led to some pretty boring par golf, with no one really making a charge on the leaderboard and the leading number staying static.

Whether it was the aforementioned challenging setup, the stifling heat and humidity, or just a confluence of slow players, the pace of play on Saturday at the PGA Championship was a complete abomination. It’s impossible to overstate it. The final pairing took almost three hours to play the front nine alone, and and 5.5 hours overall for 18 holes. That cannot happen.

It was not all them — there were nasty logjams early in the round, with multiple groups just hanging out in the heat on the par-3 6th tee box. That was an early slowdown, but that alone can’t cause a round that’s inching towards six hours. We watched Jason Day hustle to beat the horn and darkness on Friday night — he was running to a wide-open 18th hole because the group in front of him was more than a hole ahead in pace. I saw the same issue in Thursday’s round, as Jordan Spieth, Brooks Koepka, and Sergio Garcia got way out in front of the Day-DJ-Stenson trio. It was almost two holes at certain points.

Day is the common denominator here and an easy target, but he doesn’t solely expel the 5-hour, 40-minute round. Hideki Matsuyama is slow and deliberate, too, and the heat, threesomes instead of usual Saturday pairs, and greens all conspired to produce rounds that should have been at least an hour shorter.

While Kisner opened it up a bit at the end with a double bogey and bogey in his last three holes, there are still plenty of names with no shot. One of those is the pre-championship favorite Rory McIlroy, who had no illusions about some crazy Sunday charge.

McIlroy finished his post-round press conference with “Looking forward to 2018” when asked about getting to 100 percent health and recovery from his early-season rib injuries. While Rory may already be thinking about the Masters, don’t rule out the mega-low Sunday number that rockets him into the top 10 before this major is all done.

Perhaps the two biggest names in contention were the victims of late-round ejections that severely inhibit their chances on Sunday. Jason Day threw his PGA away on the difficult 18th, making a poor decision to try some crazy hero shot from the trees instead of just pitching out, wedging up, and taking his medicine with a bogey. The hero attempt ended up in some unplayable lie in the bushes and the final damage was a quadruple bogey 8 that led to a back-nine 41.

Day didn’t have his best stuff on Saturday, but he still had a chance with 18 more to play and with a leaderboard not exactly loaded with accomplished major winners.

While not as extreme as the Day snowman, Rickie Fowler didn’t exactly close with a heater to stay in contention. The Ricktator went bogey-double-bogey-bogey over his last three holes, throwing away four shots on the much-hyped “Green Mile” finishing stretch. At 5-under, he would have been just two off the lead and tied for fourth. Now he’s 1-under, six shots back, and will need to play ultra-aggressive on Sunday to pull off the chasedown. After the rough finish, he tweeted through it.

Fowler is one shot better than Day at this point, but both will need a miracle to leap all the names in front of them in the final round.

A full board is available at PGATour.com. The top 20: