Ryan Moore has suffered through a dismal season. He entered the week ranked 196th in FedEx Cup point standings, had missed three cuts in a row and isn’t even thinking about his long-shot chances of qualifying for the FedEx Cup playoffs, which start next week.
“I am just not even in the frame of,” he said. “I’m so far out of it, it doesn’t even matter at this point. I’m trying to do whatever I can this week. I’m just trying to gain some confidence going into next season.”
But Sedgefield Country Club, where he won the Wyndham Championship in 2009, is a happy hunting ground and he’s found some of that old magic in shooting rounds of 67-68 to share the 36-hole lead at 9-under 135 with Brandon Wu and Joohyung Kim.
“A day like today easily could have been even or so,” Moore said. “Instead, kept my momentum and ended up at 4 under.”
Moore attributes his struggles to an injury to the costovertebral joints, which connect the ribs to the vertebral column.
“It’s nothing I need surgery for, but it’s just a very tricky spot,” Moore said. “It’s where your rib joint like meets your spine. I kind of have some chronic deterioration in there and I basically just keep spraining it over and over and over again, which you can imagine doesn’t feel great twisting and swinging a golf club as hard as I can.”
“There is a course of action, there’s things I can do to kind of help it, I just haven’t,” he continued. “I need a good six, eight weeks off to kind of deal with it and I’ll just try to finish out the year and deal with it and then hopefully have some time coming up here to do it.”
Moore has a friend filling in as a caddie this week, the same pal who was on the bag when he finished T-2 at the 2021 John Deere Classic, his last top-10 finish.
“I’m about to make him start caddying for me permanently apparently,” Moore said. “We keep doing well together for whatever reason, at least on his random fill-in weeks, so it’s good.”
Wyndham Championship: PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ | Leaderboard