Catalonia Reshuffle: Williams Seizes the Jacket as Jon Baker Slides to the Spoon
TEG 18 | Round 3 | 13/10/2025 | PGA Catalunya - Stadium
Round Stableford: AB 44 | DM 44 | GW 43 | JP 43 | JB 28
Round Gross: DM +12 | GW +13 | JP +21 | AB +28 | JB +28
There are courses that gently nudge a field into shape, and there are courses that grab it by the lapels and shake. PGA Catalunya’s Stadium layout — the Gallardo and Coles championship test in Girona, now on its sixth TEG visit and Catalonia’s fourth as a venue — belongs firmly in the latter category. It is, on its day, the kind of proper parkland examination at which a bunched leaderboard goes in one end and a sorted one comes out the other. And so it proved. Three races, three quite distinct stories, one venue doing the heavy lifting in a single afternoon.
Gregg Williams was the day’s quiet winner, and quiet is the operative word. After a workmanlike opener he simply went par-par-par-par from the 2nd through the 5th — twelve Stableford points in four holes, no fuss, no fireworks, just the metronomic accumulation that championship courses reward. The par at the 2nd was, unbeknown to anyone at the time, the moment the Green Jacket changed shoulders: Williams started the day two shots adrift of Jon Baker on Gross and walked off that green in front. He never gave the lead back. A double bogey 6 at the par-4 6th broke the streak, but by then the platform was poured and setting, and by sunset Williams sat eight clear of Mullin in the Gross race. From two behind to eight ahead, achieved largely by the radical tactic of avoiding mistakes.
Jon Baker, meanwhile, experienced the round in vertical section. He arrived as Green Jacket leader; he departed third in that race and dead last in the Spoon, which is a remarkable amount of weather to encounter inside eighteen holes. The wheels began wobbling at the par-4 2nd, where a triple-bogey 7 simultaneously donated the Jacket lead to Williams and shunted Jon to the bottom of the Spoon basement — two transactions, one hole. Worse followed at the par-4 4th, which yielded a quintuple-bogey 9, a number that requires no further editorialising. He patched things up briefly in the middle, but the closing stretch was a uniform horror show: double bogey 7 at the par-5 15th, double bogey 5 at the par-3 16th, double bogey 6 at the 17th and double bogey 6 at the 18th. Eight shots bled across four holes to finish; the kind of closing sequence one would, ideally, decline to discuss at the bar.
Alex Baker offered a round in three distinct acts, and you wouldn’t have wanted to interrupt any of them. Act One was the serene front: nothing much to report, the Trophy lead apparently secure in his hands. Act Two was the brutal middle — triple-bogey 7 at the 6th, double-bogey 7 at the par-5 7th, double-bogey 5 at the par-3 8th, double-bogey 6 at the 9th, and triple-bogey 7 at the par-4 10th. Twelve shots haemorrhaged in five holes, the sort of stretch where you start eyeing the next tee with the wariness of a man approaching an unexploded device. Act Three was the answer: 21 Stableford points across holes 11 to 16 — par, bogey, par, par, bogey, bogey — which on the Stadium Course counts as a small act of resurrection. Somehow, against all visual evidence, his Trophy advantage went up.
David Mullin was the most consistent man on the course, and his reward was the most consequential climb. Three pars to open for 9 points across holes 1-3; another tidy run through 8-10 (par, bogey, and a birdie at the par-4 10th) for ten more. No fireworks, no horrors — just the steady accumulation that, in a round like this one, was enough to vault him out of the Spoon basement and into runner-up in the Jacket race. While others were learning hard truths about themselves, Mullin was simply playing golf.
John Patterson had the round you have when everyone around you is having a moment. No headline beats, no entry in the disaster ledger, no entry in the brilliance ledger either — just a flat, faceless eighteen holes that, in the circumstances, did the job nicely. Second in the Trophy when he teed off, second in the Trophy when he holed out, and serenely undisturbed by anything happening at either extreme of the field.
Three races, three lead-related events to log. The Green Jacket changed hands at the 2nd hole and never went back, Williams’s two-shot deficit becoming an eight-shot cushion by sunset. The Wooden Spoon swapped occupants the same way — Mullin climbed out, Jon Baker fell in, and now sits 14 points adrift of safety. And in the Trophy, where the leaderboard might have looked the most stable on paper, Alex Baker’s margin over Patterson actually grew by one to twelve, with Williams’s strong day lifting him into third.
Trophy Standings: AB 131 | JP 119 | GW 116 | DM 111 | JB 97
Green Jacket Standings: GW +54 | DM +62 | JB +67 | JP +73 | AB +88