INCAgolf All you ever wanted to know about golf (well almost)

Feb. 26, 2012
By Helen Ross, PGATOUR.COM
MARANA, Ariz. — Golf is a game for most of us. We go to the club or the local muni to play 18 with our buddies on Saturday or Sunday, then retire to the 19th hole for some good-natured needling over our beverages of choice.
But for Hunter Mahan, the game is also a living. And sometimes that missed 4-footer for par or the occasional wayward drive that burrows deep into the rough can take on undue significance, so much so that a player’s sense of self-worth gets wrapped up in what happens on the golf course rather than in the measure of the man he is.

Mahan sensed that happening to him sometimes, and he decided that mindset was holding him back.

“If I wanted to be the player that I felt like I could be, I was going to have to change,” Mahan explained. “I had to take it easy on myself, basically not try so hard. I didn’t want to have my identity stuck with my golf score. They needed to be separated, and I needed to play golf because I enjoyed it and accept the result and move on and not get attached to it.

Mahan took a big step toward being that player on Sunday at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club in the shadow of the Tortolita Mountains when he mowed down the No. 2 player in the world, Rory McIlroy, and won the World Golf Championships-Accenture Match Play Championship.

http://www.worldgolfchampionships.com/2012/tournaments/r470/02/26/ross-mahan/index.html

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — Bill Haas, the 2011 FedEx Cup Champion and Tour Championship winner, is not an underdog or an overachiever or any of those other adjectives used to describe people who win when they aren’t supposed to. He’s not like Jeremy Lin, the current poster boy of overachieving athletes. No coach overlooked Haas as he was coming up through the ranks of junior golf and at Wake Forest.

As a son of Jay Haas, a nine-time PGA Tour winner, he was supposed to make it. But on Sunday at the Northern Trust Open, he must have felt like the odd man out in the three-way playoff with Phil Mickelson and Keegan Bradley. It was Phil’s tournament to win and if he didn’t win then everybody wanted his protégé, Bradley, to walk away with the trophy.

Starting the day only two shots back of Mickelson and Bradley, Haas was clearly in contention, but before he took the outright lead for the first time at the 17th hole, his name had barely been mentioned as the possible winner of the tournament.

Bill Haas clinched his fourth PGA Tour victory Sunday at the Northern Trust Open. Of American players in their 20s, only Dustin Johnson with five owns more wins.
That he got into a playoff by only shooting a 2-under 69 to get to 7-under par proves that all you have to do on a tough golf course is hang around par. Haas didn’t really do anything spectacular on Sunday until he made a 43-foot putt on the second playoff hole to beat Mickelson and Bradley. For most of the day, he struggled with his driving. But as he showed at the Tour Championship, he has a penchant for making remarkable recoveries.

“I don’t say this in a negative way, but everybody is cheering for Phil. He just won this last week, he’s the man, and if I’m at home, I’m cheering for Phil,” Haas said. “Everybody is saying, ‘Go Phil, go Phil.’ Keegan has a big fan base. I’m not saying like fans did anything wrong. I just was somewhat under the radar, I guess.

“I wasn’t in the final group with them. They both birdie 18, they certainly had the fans on their side, which if that’s the way it is, that’s fine, flying under the radar. It was unexpected for me and for the fans maybe the way it ended up.”

The Northern Trust Open was a departure from the past three weeks on the PGA Tour, when a player squandered a big lead on the final day. This week was a tightly bunched leaderboard, where par was a good score. Haas might not have been the one expected to win, but he was the last man standing on Sunday afternoon.

Hopefully, 2012 will produce more tournaments like the Northern Trust Open and winners like Haas. Riviera wasn’t tricked up or unfair. It was a great test of golf that produced a proven winner. The USGA should consider bringing the U.S. Open here in the future. I’m sure Bill Haas wouldn’t mind.

Sunday (Red) Storm
Keegan Bradley accomplished everything on Sunday at the Northern Trust Open, except for winning. That 27-foot birdie putt he made on the 72nd hole to join Phil Mickelson and Bill Haas in a playoff was as clutch as you’ll ever see on the PGA Tour. Sure, the 25-year-old 2011 PGA Championship winner was sometimes excruciatingly fidgety and slow in his final round, but he held it together in front of his idol.

http://espn.go.com/golf/story/_/id/7591874/odd-man-bill-haas-rolls-riviera-northern-trust-open-win

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – Neither a six-shot deficit at the start of the final round nor playing alongside Tiger Woods troubled a focused Phil Mickelson.

By Jason O. Watson, US Presswire
Phil Mickelson celebrates after making eagle on the sixth hole during the final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.
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By Jason O. Watson, US Presswire
Phil Mickelson celebrates after making eagle on the sixth hole during the final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.

In the penultimate group, in front of massive galleries tracking the duo around one of golf’s most iconic venues, Mickelson stomped his playing partner and calmly and coolly raced by everyone else to win the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am on a damp, soggy Sunday hard by the Pacific Ocean.
RESULTS: Pebble Beach National Pro-Am leaderboard
PHOTOS: Top pictures from Pebble Beach
BLOG: How Sunday’s final round unfolded
In winning the event for the fourth time, Mickelson fired on all cylinders to shoot a blistering 8-under-par 64 under overcast skies to finish at 17-under 269 to beat overnight leader Charlie Wi by two shots.
“It feels just amazing,” said Mickelson, who also won here in 1998, 2005 and 2007. “I felt my game was right there at the start of the year but I came out and just shot some horrendous scores. … I finally played like I thought I was going to play like this year.”
Mickelson, who didn’t have a 5 on his scorecard and made six birdies and an eagle in his bogey-free round, became the ninth player in history with at least 40 wins on the PGA Tour, breaking his tie with Tom Watson and Cary Middlecoff, who each won 39 times. Mickelson beat Woods by 11 shots in the final round.
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Woods, who started the day in third and was looking to win on Tour for the first time since the 2009 BMW Championship, looked lethargic throughout, didn’t look anything like his old self during a three-hole bogey stretch mid-round, and fell all the way down into a tie for 15th with a 75.
“I didn’t hit it as bad as the score would indicate but I just putted horrible,” said Woods, who missed five putts inside 5 feet and made just two birdies. “Anything I tried to do wasn’t working. As a result, I made too many mistakes on the greens.”
In as many weeks, Wi became the third player looking for his first Tour win to lose a big 54-hole lead. Starting the day three in front, Wi four-putted the first green from 35 feet but fought back to salvage a 72.
Mickelson had been puzzled by a poor start this season in which he missed one cut and finished in ties for 26th and 49th. He was getting so exasperated that he flew in coach Butch Harmon for an emergency session on the range last week at the Waste Management Phoenix Open. He kept wondering when his good play away from the PGA Tour would take hold.
He also was looking to end a drought that had stretched to 16 winless Tour starts and a mark of 1-for-36 since his win in the 2010 Masters.
So much for those doubts.
“This has been a really big week for me for a number of reasons, but it does give me a lot of confidence in my game because I’ve known that I’ve been practicing well; that I physically feel terrific, that I’m able to practice hard, work hard and yet when I get off the course, I wasn’t shooting the scores,” said Mickelson, who jumps to No. 11 in the world rankings and has earned a Tour win in each of his last nine seasons, the longest active streak. “You have to perform on the course and I haven’t been doing that, and so it gave me some doubt, and this week erases doubt.”

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/golf/pga/story/2012-02-12/phil-mickelson-crushes-tiger-woods-and-wins-pebble-beach/53063454/1

By Helen Ross, PGATOUR.COM Chief of Correspondents
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Even Kyle Stanley admitted he didn’t expect redemption to come as quickly as it did.

Seven days ago, the 24-year-old had let the Farmers Insurance Open title slip out of his clutches. He led by five at the start of the final round and was still up by three when he came to the 18th hole at Torrey Pines in pursuit of what seemed sure to be his first PGA TOUR win.

But Stanley watched forlornly that afternoon as his third shot at the par 5 was sucked off the green. A three-putt later, he had posted an 8 and was off to a playoff that Brandt Snedeker, who had been in the media center watching the disaster on TV, won on the second extra hole.

Stanley’s brave face but bitter tears that evening had said it all.

On the very next Sunday, this time at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, Spencer Levin was poised for a similar coronation. He led by six at the start of the final round and was seemingly doing everything right. Kyle Stanley trailed by eight, just as Snedeker had the previous week.

This time, though, in a dramatic reversal of fortunes, Stanley emerged as the winner — firing a brilliant 65 on a warm and welcoming afternoon at TPC Scottsdale to take the one-stroke victory.

“I think the biggest challenge was seeing if I could put last week behind me,” Stanley said simply. “I think I did.”

Levin, on the other hand, was cast in Stanley’s role as he shot a 75 that included a double bogey on the par-5 15th hole, the third-easiest on the course. After an adventure in the cactus and a 5-iron that fell short in the water, he surrendered sole possession of the lead and was never able to catch up.

As disappointed as the shell-shocked Levin was, he understood the magnitude of what Stanley accomplished in the span of the last 168 hours. And he’d like nothing better than to have the same opportunity this week at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.

“That’s pretty awesome from what happened last week to come back and win the very next week,” the disappointed but surprisingly composed Levin said. “That shows he’s a hell of a player obviously. But I guess it shows that you can recover from it. I think I will. I feel like I am getting better, like I keep saying. It was a weird feeling today. I’ve never had a lead like that.”

http://www.pgatour.com/2012/tournaments/r003/02/05/ross-sunday/index.