Matt Fitzpatrick's Saturday media round at the RBC Heritage was supposed to be a standard third-round catch-up: a short walk through a six-under 65 that had put him in position to win from the final group. It became, briefly, a philosophical detour.
Asked whether he believed in momentum - the word commentators reach for most often when describing a run of birdies - Fitzpatrick reached back to a conversation with his long-time putting coach Phil Kenyon.
"It's funny," Fitzpatrick said. "I remember having a conversation with Phil Kenyon that effectively momentum doesn't actually exist. It's obviously psychological, isn't it? I think - I mean, I guess that is momentum when you're feeling good with the putter, when you're feeling good with the driver, with your irons, you make a birdie, you hit it close, you've got the next hole, you feel you've got the same number, you hit it to two, you're feeling comfortable. That's the momentum, isn't it?"
The statistical literature is on Kenyon's side. Empirical studies on so-called hot-hand effects in golf generally fail to find persistent round-to-round or hole-to-hole streaks beyond what chance would predict. The perception of momentum is real; the mechanism is looser than commentary would suggest.
What was interesting about Fitzpatrick's answer was that he then immediately described exactly what momentum feels like from inside a round that is moving. A birdie eases the next tee shot. A committed swing begets the next committed swing. A stroke that rolls pure lets the next lag putt sit closer to the hole. Whether that is momentum or simply the correct physical and mental state repeating itself, the player does not particularly care; the feeling itself is the thing that produces the next good shot.
"I feel like it can always change in one shot," Fitzpatrick said. "So you've got to be on the ball at all times. But yeah, there's definitely something in it."
The practical value of Fitzpatrick's framing is that it invites players to treat momentum as something that can be re-entered after a bad hole rather than something that, once lost, forfeits the rest of the day. The hot-hand myth, in its strongest form, produces the reverse: a single bogey is read as the start of a collapse, and the collapse often duly arrives.
Fitzpatrick spoke about his own front nine on Saturday in those exact terms. He had made early bogeys that he felt were the product of holes that punished modest misses rather than truly poor swings, and he had resisted the temptation to read them as foreshadowing.
"The bogeys that I made today, I didn't feel like I kind of hit it off the planet and I was scrambling and stuff," Fitzpatrick said. "I just felt that they were holes that I didn't really make my par on, and I felt like I was making good enough swings to make a turnaround on the back nine."
He did exactly that, including a chip-in at the 14th and another at the 15th that vaulted him up the leaderboard and set up the position from which he would go on to win the tournament in a playoff the following day. Whether what he felt over those two holes was momentum, confidence, or simply a well-calibrated swing producing its correct outcome, Fitzpatrick's answer suggests the distinction does not matter to him as long as he is willing to keep trusting the shot in front of him.
As for the courses on tour where that state arrives easily, Fitzpatrick could name only one besides Harbour Town.
"I really like Phoenix," he said. "Phoenix is probably a good one actually. I feel very comfortable there."
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*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/fitzpatrick-on-momentum-i-remember-being-told-it-doesnt-actually-exist-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
