9 Expensive Moments In Last Year's FedEx Cup Playoffs

By Luke Kerr-Dineen

August 19, 2013

Jason Bohn (+$38,000)

The 125th-ranked Jason Bohn missed the cut at the Wyndham Championship, but luckily for him, so did Jhonattan Vegas, the 126th-ranked player. That edged Bohn into the Barclays, where he withdrew after the first round, but still got $38,000 more than Vegas in bonus money. According to sportclips.com, that's enough to buy him an MVP treatment haircut at Sports Clips every two weeks for the next 75 years.

Sergio Garcia (-$400,000)

At the 2012 Barclays, Sergio Garcia had a slim lead going into the eighth hole at Bethpage Black, but went bogey-bogey-par-bogey en route to a T-3. Had Sergio played those four holes in even or one over, he would have finished alone in second and pocketed an extra $400,000. That sum would have been enough to cover Harvard's entire cost of attendance for four years (which Harvard calculates at $65,000 annually), and still have enough left to buy a $146,000 2013 Maserati Gran Turismo Convertible.

John Mallinger (-$150,000)

Sitting at 88th in the standings, John Mallinger was in solid shape to qualify for the Deutsche Bank Championship (the top 100 in points advance), even after he missed the cut at the Barclays. Jason Day, on the other hand, was 113th in the standings and way over par, until a final round 66 vaulted him into the top 25 for the tournament. With the help of others, he moved into Mallinger's old spot, who tumbled down to 101st in the rankings. That ended Mallinger's season, while Day went on to make another $150,000 including bonuses in his next two events. Mallinger could have been set for life in the snack department: At $2.98 a pack on WalMart's website, he missed out on more than 50,000 packs of Double Stuf Oreos, the equivalent of about 1.3 million cookies.

Charl Schwartzel (+$86,000)

Charl Schwartzel, who sat one spot out of the BMW Championship in 71st place, almost imploded when his temper tantrum led to a needless three-putt from two feet. But with the size of the field shrinking with each event of the playoffs (from 125 to 100 to 70 to 30) and the BMW cutoff point at 70, Schwartzel needed a birdie on 18 to play the next week. The 2011 Masters champ responded by sticking his approach shot to tap-in range. That birdie captured him nearly $3,000 more of the Deutsche Bank purse, plus $53,200 from his T-28 finish the next week, which got him $30,000 more in bonus money than if he had finished 71st in the standings. What can $86,000 get you? Well, at $10 per hour, try 8,600 hours of baby sitting -- the equivalent of 358 straight days.

Bryce Molder (+$300,000)

Two weeks before teeing it up at the BMW Championship, Bryce Molder was in 93rd place and had barely snuck into The Barclays. But a T-46 finish there helped him stumble into the Deutsche Bank, where he finished alone in ninth place to proceed a week further. With no cut at the BMW, Molder literally just had to show-up to make money -- and that's essentially what he did, finishing four spots ahead of last place. But no matter, because his little streak amounted to more than $300,000, which could buy a ticket into outer space via Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceflight. And the remaining $50,000 could be put to even better use: It could buy about 4,100 annual subscriptions to Golf Digest.

Ryan Moore (-$600,000)

Ryan Moore finished his Tour Championship with three consecutive bogeys en route to a T-3 finish at six under. If he had played those final holes in one over, the same way the player who finished one stroke ahead of him did, he would have taken home an extra $400,000, plus at least $200,000 more in bonuses, coming to a cool $300,000 per shot. Or, in the language of gasoline: coming to a cool 77,439 gallons of premium gasoline per shot (using AAA's national average price of $4.874 per gallon).

Nick Watney (-$500,000)

After winning the Barclays, the first playoff event of the 2012 FedEx Cup, Nick Watney was sitting pretty at third in the FedEx cup standings going into the Tour Championship. Watney didn't play well, while Tiger Woods' T-8 finish not only earned him more than $100,000 for the tournament, but meant he leapfrogged Watney into 3rd place in the final standings. The $500,000 extra in bonuses could have bought nearly 130,000 packets of Q-tips (or 80 million individual Q-tips, if you prefer that metric) from Target's website.

Rory McIlroy (-$8.2 million)

For Rory McIlroy, who led the standings going into the final week, he finished T-10, but was still bumped down to second after the Tour Championship, Snedeker's victory cost Rory__about $8.2 million__ -- that's three times more money than New York City's highest spending mayoral candidate, Christine Quinn, has spent campaigning so far, with enough leftover to buy about 174,000 Big Macs.

Brandt Snedeker (+$11.4 million)

And finally, a couple notes on the 2012 FedEx Cup champion, Brandt Snedeker, and his $10 million bonus: The Tour Championship was a good week for Snedeker. Aside from the satisfaction of beating the best golfers in the world on one of the biggest stages, Snedeker snagged $1.4 million at the Tour Championship, propelling him to first in the FedEx Cup standings, which earned him another $10 million -- in other words, more than the entire budget of Quentin Tarantino's classic "Pulp Fiction".

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