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It’s going to be a very merry Christmas and an extremely happy new year for Billy Hurley III, the former Naval Academy golfer who has finally achieved a lifelong dream to play full time on the PGA Tour.
Hurley, a native of Leesburg, Va., and a 2004 Navy graduate, earned his playing privileges on the tour by finishing 25th on the money list for the 2011 Nationwide Tour season, earning the very last spot available to punch his ticket to the Big Show. Only the top 25 Nationwide finishers get to play on the regular PGA Tour the following season.
Hurley accomplished that feat at the age of 29, and he will instantly become one of the more compelling stories among the rookie class of 2012. After all, how many of his colleagues teeing it up next year can boast of having spent two years on a Navy destroyer protecting oil platforms from terrorist attacks off the Iraq coast.
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Now that the Presidents Cup has ended, marking the last truly meaningful golf competition of the year, time for our annual end of season awards.
Player of Year: In a landslide, even if it took awhile to figure out, we’ll go with the flow and take Luke Donald, the No. 1 player in the world even if he’s never won a major championship. This season, he was one of six men to win twice on the PGA Tour, but just as impressive was his ability to finish in the top ten in 14 of his 19 starts, a Tiger-esque exhibition of consistency when Tiger used to be Tiger. Donald captured the money title on both the PGA and European tours, and clinched the U.S. earnings title with a bravura performance at Disney in the final stroke play event of the season, with six straight birdies at one point and a back nine 30 on Sunday. A slightly distant second would be Webb Simpson, also a two-time winner with several other close calls, not to mention a delightful demeanor on and off the course.
Female Player of Year: Taiwan’s Yani Tseng, who has all the right stuff to become the all-time greatest female player if she can keep up the same sort of pace she exhibited this year. She merely won seven times on the LPGA Tour, including two major championships, and 11 times worldwide. At age 22, she’s the youngest player ever to win five major championships and took her second straight Rolex Player of the Year award, only the eighth player in history to win the honor in back to back seasons.
Shot of Year: With $10 million and the FedEx Cup at stake, Billy Haas hit a wedge out of the water at the 17th hole to within three feet of the cup, somehow even managing to put enough spin on the ball to save his par on the second playoff hole of the Tour Championship he eventually won. A close second would be Charl Schwartzel’s holed out 75-foot chip on the first hole of the final round of The Masters, which ignited a round that also included a holed out shot from the fairway for eagle on the third hole that day.
Best Major: Let’s stick with Schwartzel’s victory at The Masters. In addition to those improbable hole outs, he closed the deal with four straight birdies on a day when eight different players held a share of the lead in the final round.
AP Golf Writer
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- The winning point for Tiger Woods. A perfect record for Jim Furyk.
And validation for U.S. captain Fred Couples.
The Americans won the Presidents Cup as a team, 19-15, avenging their worst loss ever in any cup competition 13 years ago on a Royal Melbourne course that lived up to its reputation as among the greatest tests in golf.
Yet even as they gathered around the gold trophy at the closing ceremony Sunday afternoon, all of them dressed in red shirts and blue blazers, it was hard to ignore the singular achievements.
Couples was criticized in some corners for picking Woods, who had fallen out of the top 50 for the first time in 15 years and had gone two years without winning.
By Doug Ferguson
AP Golf Writer
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Tiger Woods made the first move, reaching out to shake hands with his ex-caddie, that went a long way toward dousing the endless chatter over their acrimonious breakup.
Twelve holes later, as short a Presidents Cup match that has ever been played, Steve Williams had the last laugh.
In the 112 matches of various formats that Woods has played in his professional career, he never had a loss like this one. Playing again with Steve Stricker, an American tandem that was unbeatable two years ago, they didn't win a hole and didn't make a birdie in tying the Presidents Cup record for the worst loss ever, 7 and 6.
Adam Scott -- with Williams on his bag, kept his distance from Woods until they shook hands on the 12th green -- and K.J. Choi rarely missed a shot in piling up pars and more than enough birdies. The foursomes match ended with Scott rolling in a 25-foot birdie putt on the 11th, and stuffing his approach into 10 feet for Choi's birdie on their final hole.
"We were just slightly off," Woods said. "On a golf course like this, it doesn't take much."
That match was the biggest surprise on an opening day that featured a few unlikely twists at the end, with the Americans making two late rallies to halve matches and leaving Royal Melbourne with a 4-2 lead over the International team.
It was the third straight time the Americans have won the opening session.
The Woods-Williams pairing was the last to tee off, and the second match to finish. That's how big this blowout was.
"K.J. and I didn't get it out of position today, which is a good thing on this golf course," Scott said. "We both played very well. They got out of position a couple of times, and they didn't play their best. Yeah, a good win. Because they were a tough team last time, took a lot of points off us. So it was pleasing to get one up there."
The caddie squabble meant nothing to Scott, who has tried to stay out of the fray, even after Williams disparaged Woods with a racial comment while getting roasted at a caddies award dinner two weeks ago in Shanghai.
Woods didn't make too much of it, either.
"I put my hand out there to shake it, and life goes forward," he said. "There's some great things that Steve and I did, and that's how I look at it. I know he probably looks at it differently than I do, but hey -- life goes forward, and I'm very happy with what we've done in our career together."
Stricker was playing for the first time since Sept. 25 at the Tour Championship because of a neck injury that weakened his left arm. He hooked a tee shot on the par-5 second that kept them from a birdie, though neither of them played well. It was Woods who put them in a bunker on the fifth, and whose tee shot went through the fairway and into an unplayable lie in a bush, both leading to bogeys during a key stretch early in the round when fell 4 down.
The only other match in Presidents Cup history that lasted 12 holes was in Sunday singles in 1996, when David Frost beat Kenny Perry.
Woods and Stricker started their partnership by winning six straight matches, though the last two were big losses -- 6 and 5 against Lee Westwood and Luke Donald at the Ryder Cup last year in Wales, and the 7-and-6 loss to Scott and Choi.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that while the Americans staked themselves to the lead, their only loss -- and their weakest team -- was Woods and Stricker. Couples split them up for Friday's fourballs -- Woods with Johnson, Stricker with Kuchar, although that was the plan earlier in the week.
It will be the first time since the 2007 Presidents Cup at Royal Montreal that Woods has another partner besides Stricker.
CSNWashington.com
It began in the first round with a birdie for Tiger Woods, followed by back-to-back bogeys. Some cynics might view that as the perfect one-step-forward, two-steps-back metaphor to characterize his performance last week in finishing tied for 30th place at something called the Frys.com Open in Northern California.
Woods, of course, remains totally optimistic about “the process” he’s now going through in an attempt to regain his pre-scandal form and return to the mountain top of a sport he dominated for so many memorable years. Certainly, there were more than enough positive signs for him to believe it’s only a matter of time before he starts winning golf tournaments again.
His coach, Sean Foley, also had a message for anyone who believes Woods will remain yesterday’s news.
“I know he’s Tiger Woods,” he said, “but it’s about patience and perspective.”
After all, Woods has only played ten competitive rounds of golf since he finished fourth in The Masters last April before injuries to his knee and Achilles forced him to the sidelines for most of the 2011 season, by far the worst of his professional career.
But in four days at CordeValle, there clearly were some significant signs of life for a player who had slipped out of the top 50 in the world last week for the first time in 15 years. Best of all were three straight rounds of 68—the first time he’d done that since September of last year--after he flirted with making the cut following an opening round 73 on what he described as one of the worst putting rounds of his life.
Despite some wayward driving—usually to the left, his typical miss even in the good times—Woods had to be heartened by hitting 70 percent of the greens in regulation. And there was that one magical Tiger-esque flurry on his front nine Sunday, when he birdied four his first six holes on a day he started nine shots off the lead.
The good news last week, albeit on a fairly vulnerable course against a field that only included three players in the world top 50, was that Woods still knows how to make birdies. He had 19 of them over four days, along with ten bogeys and one double and and his seven-under 277 total was ten shots off the lead.
“I got better every day,” Woods said on Sunday. “Unfortunately, a couple of times I didn’t get the momentum going. I had a couple of chances to make putts, or hit a bad shot. I haven’t played much. That comes with competitive flow, understanding the situations and feeling. I haven’t really played a lot since the Masters…It’s getting there…I don’t know what the end is.”
One might expect that Woods would try to build on the past week as quickly as possible. But he won’t be playing his next “official” event until the Australian Open the week before the Presidents Cup in early November.
Woods had already scheduled his own mini invitational this week so he won’t be playing in the PGA Tour event at St. Simons this week, and the following week he said he’d prefer to spend time with his family instead of playing Disney, the final fall series tournament of the season.
Woods keeps talking about needing more repetitions of his still work-in-progress golf swing. But it’s one thing to get those “reps” by beating hundred of golf balls back home on the range and quite another making swings and putts under pressure in the crucible of any legitimate tournament against quality competition.
Going into the week, much was made about Woods posting a course record 62 on the Medalist course he now plays at home in South Florida. But that was a practice round with some of his pals. Maybe they were riding carts that day as well, which is hardly the same as coming down the stretch trying to catch a leader or hold off a charging foe.
The biggest difference in Woods tournament play these days may have been best summed up by Louis Oosterhuizen, the 2010 British Open champion and one of Woods’ playing partner in the first two rounds.
“The last time I played with him, in 2008, he made pars from everywhere,” Oosthuizen said. “Now, he makes bogeys easily.”
Then again, two of Woods friends and frequent practice partners played with him over the weekend and liked what they saw.
“He’s close,” said Arjun Atwal. “He just needs to keep competing and everything else will get sorted out. His misses are not off the map any more.”
“The biggest thing I saw (Sunday) is that he’s mentally back into it,” said Rod Pampling. “The last few events he’s played he just hasn’t looked like he’s into it. But today, especially early on, he was really focused in there. He’s hitting the big drives again. That’s when you know when he’s playing good, when he’s not hitting it hard but that thing is just out there. I think he looks good with the swing.”
But now, the wraps go on that swing again for another month, not to be seen very publicly until he tees it up again in Australia, where he was a somewhat controversial pick for the U.S. Presidents Cup team by Captain Fred Couples.
Still, another friend, Rocco Mediate, said he had no problem with Woods’ selection. “I would pick him for any Cup,” he said.
Stay tuned.
Leonard Shapiro’s latest book, Golf List Mania, is available on Amazon.com and at local bookstores.
