All eyes were on Scottie Scheffler on Friday during the Genesis Invitational, as Riviera Country Club almost got the better of the world number one.
All of the players teeing off in Los Angeles have spoken about how difficult of a test the course has presented this week, and Scheffler was forced to birdie the final two holes just to make the weekend.
One player who wasn’t so lucky was Michael Kim. He finished the tournament four over par, the third-worst score of any player, which saw him miss the cut and send him home early.
After his second round, Kim took to social media to explain what he found so challenging about Riviera this week.
Michael Kim calls Riviera Greens ‘most difficult surfaces’ of his career
After weeks of bad weather in California, Riviera Country Club is extremely difficult this week. The course is incredibly soft, with balls embedding in the greens after tee shots, yet somehow it’s still rapid.
That means balls are spinning back and rolling for miles, and the poa grass makes for a difficult putting surface at the best of times. The combination of all of those things means Kim went ice cold with his putter over the two days.
He posted to X: “I salute those that were able to make putts out there today. These were some of the most difficult surfaces I’ve ever been on. The speed of the greens, the bumpiness, the slopes the pins were on. I was totally off with my putter and cost me a weekend”.
Even the world number one, Scheffler, who has been one of the best putters on the planet in recent years, couldn’t get to grips with these greens, so there’s no shame in it for Kim!
Michael Kim endures worst putting performance in six years
Kim is usually a reliable putter, but this week’s performance on the greens was horrendous by his usual high standards.
Over the two days at Riviera, Kim lost 3.17 strokes to the field, better than only Viktor Hovland and Maverick McNealy in the entire Genesis Invitational field.
You have to go all the way back to 2019 to find a worse putting performance from Kim. That happened at the Sanderson Farms Championship, where he lost 4.13 strokes to the field.
This event marks the end of the West Coast swing, so he won’t be facing putting surfaces like this again for much of the year, but Kim’s inability to handle the undulating greens doesn’t bode well for his chances at tournaments like The Masters.