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PGA pro Joaquin Niemann finished his final round on Sunday in a blistering one hour and 53 minutes.
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Niemann’s speed round was a cheeky attempt by the young Chilean to make some history on the course.
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At the end of his round, Niemann was on the receiving end of a $10,000 prank from the PGA Tour.
On Sunday at the Tour Championship, Chilean golfer Joaquin Niemann did something that few other golfers do on the course during a competitive round: run.
With an odd number of players remaining in the final round, Niemann played alone as the first man off the tee.
With a guaranteed $405,000 payday already secured for coming in 29th place at the Tour’s biggest money showdown of the season, Niemann decided to play Sunday’s round for speed rather than score.
Given he had no partner to slow him down, Niemann raced between shots, sometimes even jogging from green to tee to quicken his pace of play, hoping to break the record for the fastest round ever played in the Tour Championship.
Niemann broke the record by five minutes, but the fun wasn’t done when he walked off the 18th green.
Andy Pazder, the PGA Tour’s chief of tournaments and competition, waited for Niemann to arrive in the scoring area.
According to “Golf” magazine, Niemann’s caddie immediately sensed that something was serious.
“Come over here, we need to talk,” Pazder told Niemann. “Listen, Joaquin, as a professional, you’ve disrespected the game, you’ve disrespected the Tour Championship. This is not how professionals act, and [caddie Gary Matthews] you’ve been out here a long time and you should know that and here is a fine for $10,000.”
Niemann, who had just run through 18 holes of golf at a gallop, entertaining fans with a bit of light-hearted fun, was now stuck in a serious moment, right until Pazder cut the tension by revealing it was just a prank.
“I’m kidding,” Pazder said, to Niemann’s undoubtedly grateful relief.
But that wasn’t until Niemann was already furious.
“I look at him like, I was burning inside,” Neimann told “Golf.” “I was going to say something and he’s like, ‘All right, forgive me. Before you say something, I was just kidding.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I hate you.'”
Niemann and his caddie prepared for the sprint by carrying the bare minimum in their bag.
“He had three golf balls. He didn’t have the usual nine,” caddie Gary Matthews said, per Golf Channel. “He didn’t have a rain cover. He didn’t have any little instruments that we had. He only had one glove, five tees. It was really cool.”
As Niemann raced through the round, the broadcast tracked his progress against the previous course record set by Kevin Na in 2016.
Niemann finished his round in 1 hour, 53 minutes, breaking Kevin Na’s mark. Remarkably, Niemann shot two-over-par, with one double-bogey, one bogey, and one birdie dotting his scorecard of mostly pars.
Read the original article on Insider