Ludvig Aberg’s players have been exposed to the mistakes they have been struggling with

Ludvig Aberg has a knack for making a game look easy. Like, indeed it’s easy. A big part of that is his swing, which has more firepower than an F1 car yet more than Yo-Yo Ma. But it’s also his moral: never too high, never too low. “He’s ridiculously laid back,” Rory McIlroy said Sunday as Aberg, the 54-hole leader in the Players Championship, planned his approach to the Golf Course.

Aberg’s gentleness, McIlroy added, “is a really good thing, especially in places like the Ryder Cup.” Those pressure-cooker settings include the majors and, of course, the Players Championship, where Pete Dye’s masterpiece can have the same effect on the world’s best golfers that a meat grinder does on a three-day-old ribeye. “It’s all about practice,” Aberg said Saturday evening of the Stadium Course’s many challenges. “You’ll be penalized if you don’t, which is a fun way to play golf.”

In three and a half rounds, Aberg did just that: he killed. A bogey-free 69 on Thursday. Six birds-two-Eagle 63 on Friday to take the lead by two. A what-me-worry 71 on Saturday to extend his lead to three. Another under-par round on Sunday could be enough to secure Aberg, 26, his third and biggest win on Tour.

Whatever the golf gods had in store for the Players on Sunday, Aberg would at least be thinking about what winning on such a grand stage might look and feel like, just like he used to in his college days at Texas Tech and in his early days as a pro. “We spend a lot of time practicing, playing, training, preparing, so why don’t we think about what it will mean to win?” Aberg said Saturday evening. “So naturally that’s what I’ll do tonight. But will anything change for me tomorrow? I don’t think so.”

On Aberg’s first nine holes Sunday, there was no reason to doubt that he wouldn’t keep going. The only real blip came on the par-4 3rd, where he dragged a 7-wood into the rough left fairway and made 5, giving up a stroke on the par-5 2nd. Still, after closing the front with five straight pars and making one at the 10th, Aberg was still in the lead.

Then came the par-5 11th.

After messing up his drive, Aberg didn’t have to think long about whether to attack the green guarded to the right by sand and water. Out came the 7-wood, and with it, something you don’t often see from Aberg: a momentary loss of tempo. Aberg football never stood a chance. It started well and stayed well. Splash. He escaped with a bogey, but swinging the fairway may have done more damage to his mind than it did to his scorecard.

That was clear on the next tee when Aberg hit another clunker: a hard pull into the water on the left side of the par-4 12th. The fire left Aberg, after falling, 181 yards from the foul, where he failed to hold the green. A chip and two putts later, he made it double – and, with Cameron Young and Matt Fitzpatrick selling the highlights ahead of him, effectively played his way out of contention. For a player, for 64 holes, who showed such power over his ball, it was a shocking turn of events.

Aberg’s diagnosis?

“I would think if I looked at those swings on the 11th, 12th, they might have been swinging,” he said after he carded a 4-over 76 that moved him to nine under and tied for 5th. “The takeaway came very quickly and the other one just kind of blew up from there. It’s something I should have known, now that I look back. But yeah, that’s the way it goes.”

Aberg also admitted that he pressed at 12, where, for a player of his height, he might have put out a smaller club. Was the aggressive club selection, an overcorrection for the gaffe on the 11th?

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “In my opinion, it was probably a really fast swing. I made it early, and all of a sudden it was my worst golf swing. It’s like meeting everything. That’s my learning on those two holes.”

We also learned something else about Aberg this week: for all his even-tempered and seemingly aloof demeanor, he’s impervious to nerves. Far from it. You are still young. It is still ripening. You still dial in all the features needed to win at the highest level of the game. He showed a lot of Sundays with two letter variations, and he represented Saturday evenings.

“Whenever I’m in a stressful situation, I have to slow down,” he said. “Because I’m so fast, I start talking so fast, I start breathing so fast, and I get, like, I work so slow. So I have to calm myself down, try to walk slow, talk slow, slow everything down, which is challenging.”

Some times are better than others.