Collin Morikawa closed the RBC Heritage with a 4-under 67 on Sunday, finishing T4 at 13-under and five shots behind winner Matt Fitzpatrick after a week he described as a grind. He said he was still swinging at 50% and, after the final round at Harbour Town Golf Links, planned to sit out the Zurich Classic of New Orleans to recover.
Morikawa did enough in the final round to underline how well he struck the ball despite the injury. He made six birdies and hit 14 greens in regulation on Sunday, and for the week he ranked second in Strokes Gained: Approach. The result was another strong finish in a stretch that has kept him near the top of leaderboards even while he is playing through uncertainty.
The back issue began one month earlier at THE PLAYERS Championship, and Morikawa said the injury happened on the course rather than in the gym. On Thursday at the RBC Heritage, he said he had “never been this scared in my life” to tee it up and added that he was not in pain but limited in the shots he could play. He later said he had to catch himself during the week because speed in his swing could bring on the sense that something might grab in his back.
That fear has been as much mental as physical. At the Masters last week, Morikawa said he did not feel pain but was running into a mental wall, even as he called the tournament “one of the best tournaments I could have asked for.” His T4 at Hilton Head followed a T7 at Augusta National and marked his fifth straight top-seven finish, excluding his withdrawal after one hole at THE PLAYERS.
The bigger picture is still promising for the two-time major champion. Morikawa won the season’s first Signature Event at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and the PGA TOUR now heads into back-to-back Signature Events in Miami and Charlotte, North Carolina, before the PGA Championship. He won that championship in 2020 and The Open Championship in 2021, but for now his schedule is unsettled. Morikawa said it is “unknown” beyond the Zurich absence and that he will go “week by week now,” with the added complication that he and his wife Katherine are expecting their first child later this spring.
For Morikawa, the next step is not a leap forward so much as a test of whether his body and swing can hold together in a more familiar setting. He said he wants to see how the back responds at home, away from tournament pressure, because that is where he believes he can find out how much golf he can really play.