Despite the big names of the PGA Tour playing at the WGC Match Play, there is still another PGA Tour event, the Corales Puntacana Championship, going on in the Dominican Republic.
On Friday, during the second round at Corales Golf Club, Tyler Duncan experienced a truly bizarre moment as he teed off on the 15th hole. The American, who currently sits in a tie for fourth going into the weekend, saw the head of his driver sail down the fairway, as it flew off leaving those in attendance rather bemused.
Although the driver head came off, Duncan’s golf ball still found the fairway and, after hitting an approach on to the green, he managed to hole the putt for birdie in a moment that has already been replayed thousands of times.
Following the birdie, the 33-year-old then parred the remaining three holes, with Duncan signing for a seven-under round of 65. Speaking about the incident, the American said: “I’ve never seen that or experienced that before. I didn’t know what happened, I didn’t even know it at first. I hit the shot and I felt something weird happen and then I had no idea where the ball was, never saw the ball flight.
“I kind of looked at those guys like, what happened, And then I look back and I catch the driver’s head dribbling off the grass into the sand over there. We looked for it for a little while and didn’t find it. We called for an official and they had a little search party over there to try to find it.”
Under the rules, Duncan could have repaired or replaced the driver due to the club being damaged in the normal course of play. However, the slight issue was that his backup driver was back in his hotel room, with an official unable to retrieve it before the round was completed.
“My backup driver was in the hotel room and they weren’t able to get into the room, so I played the last — I hit 3-wood off the tee the last few holes,” explained Duncan, who then spoke about his backup driver, adding “oddly enough, I used it (the new driver) in the pro-am last week because I got my driver out and saw there was a crack in it, so I had one of my buddies overnight a head from home that I ended up playing with last week and that’s the one that flew off today. So I’ll use the one that I used in the pro-am last week.”
Duncan, who had been using the older Titleist TSi model of driver, will now likely put the TSR in the bag for the weekend. He went on to say: “I feel pretty comfortable with it. I’ve been working on it since the west coast. It’s the new TSR model. I’ve been playing the old one and we’ve been working to get the new one right, and this one’s really good and I have a lot of trust in it. It’s just my other one was so good, there was no reason to change, so now it’s going to get a shot.”