King Of The Subplot
Camilo Villegas outduels a starry threesome headed by Sergio Garcia and wins the Tour Championship
Villegas offset two bogeys and a front-nine double bogey with eight birdies Sunday.
He came. He parked his car. He conquered.
In the swooning, season-ending event that launched a thousand punch lines, on a week that felt less like the grand crescendo of the PGA Tour season than it did the last week of school, Vijay Singh voted "present" to win what he had already won, the FedEx Cup, while Camilo Villegas came from five shots behind to win everything else worth winning, which is to say, the Tour Championship. And, OK, maybe a leftover million or two here and there as he and Singh split the four FedEx Cup titles 50/50.
Coming, as it did, in the wake of the Ryder Cup, the Tour Championship looked, as Boo Weekley might have opined had he been there, like puttin' lipstick on a leatherback turtle. Golf had lurched from the inspired to the just plain tired. Thanks to Hurricane Ike, by the time the PGA Tour pulled its traveling circus into Atlanta, the city was on the verge of being entirely out of gas. Was there ever a more apt metaphor?
Let's see ... the probable Player of Year, Padraig Harrington, didn't qualify, and all the big winner had to do was not pull a hammy or have Boo keep his score and he would get his big, fat $9 million check, with another million going to his broker. The first champion wouldn't kiss the cup and, at first, the second one wouldn't even talk about it. If this second iteration of the FedEx Cup has revealed anything at all, it is that golf is, indeed, bigger than any single player. The season-ending dash for cash is shining proof that events of intrinsic value -- the British Open, the PGA Championship, the Ryder Cup -- survive splendidly, even in the absence of the greatest player who ever limped. It is the pedestrian, made-for-TV, computer-generated competitions that can exist only in reflected starlight. Now that this new era in golf has made two laps around the track under the caution flag, one simply can't escape wondering which suit in Ponte Vedra most closely resembles Gordon Jump who, following a disastrous promotion for his fictional radio station, WKRP in Cincinnati, uttered the famous phrase, "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." Let's pause for station identification, tweak you very much.
To the extent to which the day could be saved, it was managed in the way golf has always managed it, not with point systems flush with cash and arcane formulas but with fine players playing fine shots when what mattered most was winning and no computation was any more vexing than level fours.
Sunday at East Lake GC evolved into a taught, four-way scramble between three twentysomethings and a battle-scarred 38-year-old. It came down to Villegas, Anthony Kim (who wasn't himself on Saturday), Sergio Garcia (who wasn't himself on Sunday) and Phil Mickelson (who, some would say, hasn't been himself since Winged Foot).
Garcia was three shots clear of Kim and Mickelson and five up on Villegas going into the final round but hit just five of 14 fairways and shot a one-over 71, managing to steady himself sufficiently at the end to squeak into a playoff with Villegas he probably didn't deserve to be in and which he immediately lost by hitting his 4-iron tee shot on the par-3 18th short and right of the greenside bunker.
Mickelson was there or thereabouts most of the day and while he made some of his usual deft up-and-downs, he squandered too many chances on the greens, missing close-in birdies at the fifth, ninth, 12th and throwing in a costly three-putt at the 11th. Despite still not having full command of his golf swing, Kim actually led after 12 holes at seven under par. Tied by Villegas' massive 42-foot birdie putt on the 13th, Kim then missed the 14th fairway right, had to punch a low screamer underneath tree branches and through the green, chunked a pitch 45 feet short and made bogey. He followed that with a disappointing par on the easiest hole on the course, the par-5 15th, and never caught up.
