J.T. Poston turned a solid Sunday into a score he will not forget, making a 12 on the 13th hole at TPC River Highlands at the 2026 Travelers Championship. He stood 3 under when he reached the tee and finished the hole with a septuple bogey after a cascade of water balls, leaving the round and the leaderboard badly changed in a single stretch of play.
The 13th at TPC River Highlands is the lone par 5 on the back nine, and Poston’s round unraveled there in a way that was almost hard to process in real time. He drove the ball down the middle, then watched his second shot find a greenside bunker right of the green. From there, his bunker shot came up short and left him 59 feet away in a fairway cut. The next shot rolled through the green and down the slope on the left into the water, and after a penalty drop he kept trying to force the issue.
Poston said he was trying to play the shots because he felt he could pull them off. That choice only deepened the damage. He said his sixth shot, with a sand wedge, came up short and rolled back into the water. His eighth shot went there again. By the time he reached his 10th shot from the rough, he was 13 feet from the hole, missed the putt for 11, and tapped in an 8-inch putt for 12.
He said the bunker was the last place he should have been, and that the ball had ended up against the lip with little room to work. He also said he knew that if he flew the bunker shot on the green, it was going straight into the water because of where the ball sat. But he kept trying to make a golf shot rather than simply get out of trouble, saying later that if he had it to do over, he would have taken the safer route and played for 12 feet instead of chasing a difficult recovery.
The result was not just a bad hole. Poston said his score moved from 8 under to 1 over within about an hour, a swing that captures how fast a PGA Tour round can go wrong. He later finished the day with a 76 and ended up in 69th place in the 72-man field, a brutal outcome for a player who had won the 2026 Memorial Tournament before arriving in Cromwell, Conn. on Sunday. The unanswered question is not how the hole happened. It is whether anyone else will see a score that extreme on one hole and still walk away with the same belief Poston had: that the next shot was there to be made.
