Tom Kim holds lead as stacked Travelers Championship leaderboard readies for final round

CROMWELL – Sunday’s final round of the Travelers Championship is set up to be a shootout.With Tom Kim still in the lead at 18-under, Scottie Scheffler and Akshay Bhatia right on his tail and the course only getting softer with all of the rain it took during delays Friday and Saturday, the winning score will likely be in the 20s again.And there are a handful of players, five who are three shots back or less, still in contention for the $3.6 million winning share of the event’s $20 million purse.The first shape on Kim’s scorecard Saturday was a foreign one.The 22-year-old from South Korea suffered his only bogey through 54 holes on No. 4, which he had to three-putt. He responded with back-to-back birdies on the next two holes to tie Bhatia at the top of the leaderboard, just before the horn sounded to stop play at 3:30 p.m.Kim, looking for his fourth-career win on the PGA Tour and his first this season, came out of the delay and shot 3-under on the back nine to finish 54 holes at 18-under 192.“The greens were really soft (after the delay) and fairways were soft and there’s no wind, so obviously there were a lot of birdies out there, I’m sure a lot of guys did. I didn’t really look at leaderboards, but when you get soft conditions out there it’s definitely gettable and I feel like I executed well enough to have a good round today,” Kim said. “It’s a stacked leaderboard, out here a 5-, 6-shot lead is not safe at all. So I have to go out tomorrow and do the same game plan and execute.”The leaderboard certainly is stacked. Three Olympians are within three shots of the lead.One is world No. 1 Scheffler, the first golfer with five wins in a PGA Tour season since Justin Thomas in 2016-17. Scheffler shot 3-under on the front nine, got into trouble with a couple of bogeys on the back but closed his round with four birdies consecutive birdies to complete his second-straight 6-under 64 round.Scheffler was grouped with Bhatia on Saturday, and the two fed off one another. Bhatia also finished at 6-under 64 to tie his partner at 17-under for the tournament, each of them made similar highlights with birdie on the final two holes.“I was pretty nervous stepping on that first tee today playing with him,” Bhatia, 22, admitted. “For us to finish the way we did was really good because we were just trying to get done, and I think the pace that we played at and the shots we were hitting, it kind of added up to a nice score.”Said Scheffler: “Sometimes when you’re in pairs you can feed off each other the wrong or the right way. Today, especially at the end, we were feeding off each other what I would say in the right way. It’s always a good thing.”Xander Schauffele, the 2022 champion who exited two shots behind the lead at 16-under 194 despite the fatigue that he hasn’t been able to shake, shot his best round of the tournament so far at 6-under 64.Kim, Scheffler and Bhatia will be in the lead group in Sunday’s final round, which is set to begin at 6:50 a.m.“It really depends on the weather. I think I saw that the wind were goings to be up a little bit and depends if we get more rain overnight,” Scheffler said. “So there will be a bit, a few different factors going into it, but I’ll wake up tomorrow, see how the course is playing and go from there.”

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