Role Reversal

In a head-to-head showdown with golf's top gun at the PGA Championship, it's Y.E. Yang who fist-pumps his way to history

the eagle has landed: Yang's dramatic hole-out for a 2 on the 301-yard 14th hole Sunday gave him a lead over Woods that he never relinquished.

By Jim Moriarty

Photos by J.D. Cuban

August 24, 2009

In China it's the Year of the Ox. In South Korea it's the Year of the Yang. And in golf it's the year of Who Moved My Cheese? When the first three major championships are won by a guy nicknamed The Duck, a golf pro who actually reads books and another one who Tweets, only a slow learner wouldn't bet the ranch on Y.E. Yang over Tiger Woods in that year's PGA Championship. Stand back people, we've passed into an alternate universe.

First, it was Angel Cabrera who wasn't supposed to beat Kenny Perry. Then, Lucas Glover wasn't supposed to beat Phil Mickelson. Nor was Stewart Cink supposed to beat Tom Watson. So at the PGA, on the Wobegone Links of Hazeltine National, where all the par 5s are strong, all the fairways handsome and all the golf pros above average, Tiger Woods, who is supposed to beat everybody, didn't. Quick, call rewrite.

Yong-Eun Yang delivered two of the finest golf shots of the year, one short and one long, in a five-hole stretch to snatch a 15th major championship straight from Tiger's toothless jaws. Such things are simply not done in polite company—at least never on any of the 14 previous occasions when Woods went into the final round of a major championship with a lead. Of course, those were the good old days when he holed putts. Woods' major titles, coupled with the fact that the 37-year-old Yang was the 110th-ranked player in the world who, until he won the Honda Classic in March, was aspiring to little more than keeping himself out of Q school, combined to give the impression that if this wasn't the biggest upset in the history of golf, it had a seat on the bus. To borrow a phrase from the world of politics, however, championship golf ain't beanbag. So, get over it.

By the time Yang and Woods reached the 13th tee on a windblown Sunday, they had managed to separate themselves from the field. Everyone was waiting for Yang to fade, but Woods wasn't playing well enough to give him a reason. They were six under par, and the next closest competitors were three under and all of them proved incapable of closing that gap coming home. At the 240-yard 13th Yang hit a utility club into the front-left bunker while Woods knocked his 3-iron to roughly 10 feet. Yang blasted out to eight feet and holed the putt while Woods missed to keep them both at six under. On the 301-yard 14th, they each hit driver. Woods found the bunker on the right while Yang was just short of it, 30 yards away. Woods' explosion shot stopped 10 feet short, and Yang pitched in with his 52-degree wedge for an eagle. Woods should send Yang a bill for fist-pump royalties. For the first time since Thursday morning, Tiger wasn't atop the PGA leader board.

The son of a farmer and once a sergeant in the South Korean Army, Yang was the only contender who ever wore a uniform or carried a weapon, so you had to figure the son of an American Special Forces officer probably had a pretty good idea all along he wasn't playing Mary Poppins. Woods just couldn't hole anything. He missed makable putts—and by that let's call them inside 15 feet—on the first, second, fourth (to three-putt), 10th, 12th, 13th, 15th and 17th. He took 33 putts in all. It was not his finest four hours. True, it's not like they were a bunch of three- or four-footers. He's not Vijay Singh, after all, but it was a bad day to have a bad day.

"I played well enough to win the championship," said Woods. "I did not putt well enough to win the championship." Truer words …

It was Yang who seemed more like Woods than Woods, striking a majestic 3-hybrid from 210 yards out of the first cut, arcing it high over a broad-leafed tree, to eight feet on the 18th green, resurrecting memories of both Shaun Micheel in the '03 PGA Championship at Oak Hill and Woods himself on that very hole seven years earlier. Woods followed by missing the green left, trying to hole his chip shot and finishing with a meaningless bogey to Yang's birdie. He was three shots behind the South Korean's winning total of eight-under 280 as Yang became the first Asian-born male to win a major golf championship. More fist pumps. More royalties.