Bradley 5 back, 3 to play,
wins PGA on 1st try in major
JOHNS CREEK, Ga. – Out on Cape Cod, Aunt Pat must have been itching to get her hands on a bell about the size of the one in Big Ben. After all, the cowbell her mom used to ring off the back porch every time she won on the LPGA Tour is stuck in the World Golf Hall of Fame, and what’s a woman to do when a little snip of a nephew goes and wins the first major he ever played in?Well, there had to be some kind of major noise, with Keegan Bradley coming back from the brink of the abyss – a late triple bogey, no less – and somehow finding a way to scratch back those strokes, and then beating Jason Dufner in a playoff. Bradley, 25, nephew of Hall of Famer Pat Bradley, was the most unlikely of winners of the 93rd PGA Championship. He played his college golf at St. John’s – great basketball but not exactly a hot address in NCAA golf. And he was freshly up from the Nationwide Tour, having graduated with high finishes but no victories last year. And his maiden voyage on the PGA Tour this season, he won the HP Byron Nelson Championship, but in the Bridgestone Invitational last week, he was in contention until he came unraveled over the last six holes.
“I lost it completely,” Bradley said. But not this time.
Bradley staged one of the great comebacks in modern golf. He was down by five shots with three holes to play, and caught the faltering Jason Dufner, then beat him in a three-hole aggregate playoff by a shot.
It was an unlikely scenario, anyway. It’s usually the big names who challenge in the majors, but the big names were either gone or spinning their wheels, and that was Dufner, 34, who was still looking for that first win, that everyone was chasing.
Coming down the stretch in regulation, Bradley missed the green at the scary par-3 15th, chipped too strong out of a bad lie, and watched grimly as the ball scooted across the green and rolled into the water. He triple-bogeyed and was surely dead, now five behind Dufner, in the final pairing behind him.
“I under-reacted to the triple,” the lanky, smiling Bradley said. Then bracing himself, he birdied the par-4 16th from 25 feet and the par-3 17th from about 40. The crowning jewel to this stretch was a gutty par at the murderous par-4 18th for a 68 and an 8-under 272.
Meanwhile, back at the 15th – with the other contenders having fallen away, and Bradley having crashed to the triple bogey, the door was wide open to Dufner. And he promptly walked into the wall.
He was the only player in the first three rounds to have played the four tough finishing holes without a bogey. In fact, he’d played them in 3 under par. Then he bogeyed three in a row. He watered his tee shot at the par-3 15th, missed the green at the par-4 16th – “Probably the worst iron shot I hit all week” – and three-putted the par-3 17th.
“They are tough, tough holes,” he said, “and unfortunately, that was the deciding factor.”
A par at the 18th gave him a 69 and continued life in the playoff.
Bradley birdied the 16th with a 4-foot putt against Dufner’s bogey. Bradley led by two on his par at the 17th to Dufner’s three-putt bogey from about 50 feet. And at the 18th, both just cleared the water and sat almost side-by-side at the front left. Dufner, putting first, holed about a 20-footer for birdie, and Bradley two-putted from just under that for a 10-11 win.
“A lot of experience to be gained from that,” said Dufner, who had won twice on the Nationwide Tour, the second in 2006.
Bradley’s victory was the first U.S. win in a major since Phil Mickelson’s win in the 2010 Masters.
Denmark’s Anders Hansen, 40, a Dane living in Switzerland, finished third with a 66, missing the playoff by a shot after bogeying the 16th. Sweden’s Robert Karlsson bogeyed the last three holes for a 67 and tied for fourth at 275 with Scott Verplank (70) and 44-year-old David Toms (67), who won the 2001 PGA at AAC.
The PGA will bring a lot of warm memories for Bradley. For openers, the day he was 12 and standing up on a sleeting mountain in Vermont and deciding he’d had enough of ski racing. Another was his grandmother ringing that cowbell for Aunt Pat.
And if Aunt Pat wasn’t ringing a bell out on Cape Cod, she was ringing the cell phone in Bradley’s pocket.
“It’s been buzzing in there,” he said. “I’m 100 percent certain it’s from her.”
Return to Latest News archives