Round of 59 Remains as Golf’s Mental Brick Wall

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — After Adam Hadwin broke the 60-stroke mark at the par-72 La Quinta Country Club in California last month, he likened the feat to running the mile in under four minutes.

“Nobody said it could be broken,” he said, “and then one person broke it, and now it’s a routine thing, right?”

The analogy fits, but not as neatly as a golfer’s glove. In the 63 years since Roger Bannister clocked a mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, more than 1,000 runners, including a handful of American high schoolers, have broken the four-minute mark. And while Hadwin’s 59 in the third round of the CareerBuilder Challenge was the second such score in a nine-day span, after Justin Thomas’s opening 59 at…