I've been watching golf tournaments since Sam Snead won his first of eight Greensboro Opens. (FDR was in office.) And I can remember the time when it was an upset if a player from another country won one of our tournaments. We seemed to have forgotten that we had imported the game ourselves. But that's beside the point.No American had won one of the major championships since Phil Mickelson took the Masters two years ago.
Well, Phil was one of the early casualties in the PGA Championship Sunday afternoon, and slowly other would-be challengers weeded themselves out. The cruel Atlanta Athletic Club course was taking its victims like a systematic execution. If I had to make a harried pronouncement at the moment, I'd willingly say that this PGA Championship had the most exhilirating golf tournament finish I have ever seen.
It wasn't the cast, for there were no Nicklauses or Palmers or Woods involved. In fact, most of the marquee names were missing from the board. But how about Dufner, Steele, Bradley, Hansen, Karlsson? Even David Toms got himself back in the fray for awhile. But the former champion finally fell among the other casualties.
Into the afternoon it raged on, this strange Jason Dufner fellow, an Auburn man who had never won on the PGA Tour, and Keegan Bradley, a skinny fellow who rather than hit a golf ball, assails it. This was a new breed, for the most part, coming on. Young Bradley had won the Byron Nelson tournament in Texas a few months ago, but was he equipped to win again? At this level?
They fought it down to the 18th hole, Bradley first, to be followed home by Dufner, who played with such seeming indifference. Bradley got home over the water and the wall of the treacherous 18th hole, and it was left to Dufner to hole out, and thus we had a playoff. That was enough for me. I needed no more, for these two had thrust upon us the most improbable playoff in the history of this 93-year-old American tradition.
Need more be said? This was no classic, it was just bringing the old game home at last -- with an American winner.
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