The Hottest Man on Tour?
Daniel Chopra edges Steve Stricker in extra holes at the Mercedes-Benz Championship -- his second victory in his last three starts
Daniel Chopra
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So there was no Tiger or Phil here (again). If your cast has characters, you can still put on a good show, and this one featured a trilingual Swedish Indian (or Indian Swede) with spiky blond hair who once hit a ball from atop the Great Wall of China and lives in Orlando.
Daniel Chopra does not yet command a marquee, but he is a quality player who has been hinting of late at something more substantial. More to the point, he was not assembled at the factory that stocks the PGA Tour.
When the mold is broken, the game is usually enhanced, and Chopra gave the Mercedes-Benz Championship on the Hawaiian island of Maui an interesting winner with a biography that meanders across continents and oceans. "The road is a very long one for some and easier and shorter for others," Chopra said, his own having been a roundabout through the outposts of tournament golf that eventually took him to the PGA Tour.
The 34-year-old beat Steve Stricker with a tap-in birdie on the fourth hole of a playoff dramatically spiced with balls hanging on lips and animated reactions. "It was no Tiger Woods and Ernie Els playoff," Stricker said, recalling the 2000 Mercedes duel between two heavyweights throwing knockout punches. "We were kind of throwing jabs, kind of feeling each other out and seeing who was going to make the first mistake."
A crescendo was reached when Chopra's eagle putt on the par-5 ninth (the fourth playoff hole) on the Plantation Course at Kapalua Resort teetered on the precipice of victory, on the uphill side of the hole, down grain, down wind, and still wouldn't fall. "Half the ball was hanging over the hole," he said. "I was positive, 100 percent, it had to go."
When Stricker's own short birdie attempt went astray, Chopra won anyway, ending a drama that for a time rendered Woods' and Mickelson's no-shows immaterial. Theirs, at any rate, weren't the most controversial absences of the week. PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem also opted not to make the trek to Maui for the season opener, to the dismay of at least a few players, Stephen Ames among them. "It's the opening of the year," Ames said. "This is important. I think he should be here. He's here at the end. Is this any different?"
A missing Finchem was perceived as contributing to the erosion of the prestige of an event once known as the Tournament of Champions. Its importance is relative, of course; to Chopra, it assumed the stature of a major. Consider his roots and you begin to understand why.
He was born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother and an Indian father. He spent the first seven years of his life in Sweden, then moved to India. "I love the fact I have two different heritages," he said. "I'm proud to be half and half."
Chopra speaks fluent Swedish, Hindi and English and can alternate among them in an instant. "When I was playing the European Tour and we'd play a practice round with Arjun [Atwal] or Jeev [Singh] and we'd have a Swedish guy playing in the same group, I'd speak Swedish to [one guy], Indian to another and English to my caddie," he said. "I remember we had some American guy playing with us, and he was like, 'What the hell just happened?' "
Chopra was 18 when he turned pro in 1992. Three years later he was in China for the Volvo China Open, when he took part in a photo shoot at the Great Wall of China. "I teed up a ball between the cracks and hit a 5-iron from the top," he said. It was the most memorable shot he hit while finding his way in the hinterlands of professional golf. Chopra also played in Australia and Europe before joining the Nationwide Tour in 2002 and finally graduating to the PGA Tour in 2004. He played 132 PGA Tour events before winning his first, at the Ginn sur Mer Classic at Tesoro late last year. His Mercedes triumph gives him two victories in his last three tournaments dating to the Ginn (with a runner-up in a playoff against Aaron Baddeley at the Australian Masters in between).
- Keywords:
- John Strege,
- Mercedes Championship,
- pga tour,
- daniel chopra,
- steve stricker,
- kapalua,
- tim finchem
