At approximately 3:30 p.m. last Sunday, all was well with the world of professional golf. The Senior PGA Championship, the granddaddy of the senior majors, was being played out at Valhalla Country Club in Louisville, the site of two former PGA Championships as well as the 2008 Ryder Cup matches.
Hale Irwin was near the top of the leaderboard. Irwin is now in his mid-60s and his best days are long behind him, but he can still sometimes put it together for a stretch of four rounds and compete with the best. His golfing resume is as good as it gets with three U.S. Open titles, 20 PGA Tour victories, 45 senior wins, which include seven senior major championships, and a spot in the World Golf Hall of Fame. When Tiger Woods recently stated that golfers nowadays are much better athletes than the golfers of the past, he obviously was glossing over linksters such as Hale Irwin. Irwin not only won the NCAA individual golf championship in 1967 while attending the University of Colorado, but he was also an All-Big Eight strong safety on the school”s football team.
Alas, Irwin faltered over the final nine holes and ultimately fell out of contention. David Eger was the next golfer in the field to take charge. Turning in a low score of the day of 5-under-par 67, Eger posted a 72-hole aggregate total of 10-under-par.
Eger is one of those guys who represent what is good about the senior tour as well as what is bad about it. A journeyman professional who had just one top-10 finish in a four-year career on the fringes of the tour, Eger got himself reinstated as an amateur golfer in the mid-1980s. From 1982 through 2001, Eger worked in golf tournament administration, first for the PGA Tour and then later with the USGA.
It was during that time that Eger played serious amateur golf, capturing the 1988 U.S. Mid-Amateur, winning the North and South Amateur at Pinehurst in 1991, and competing on the American side on three Walker Cup teams. Eger decided to dedicate his time to senior golf once he turned 50 years of age and turned professional once again. He has won four times on the Champions Tour between 2003 and 2011.
The good thing about Eger and the senior tour is that you have a very talented golfer who has gotten better with age and now has an opportunity to showcase his talents among the over-50 set. The bad news is that David Eger is no Hale Iriwn, or, for that matter, is no Larry Nelson or Mark O”Meara or Nick Price. The appeal of the senior tour is all about that walk down memory lane. Fans of the game aren”t shelling out ticket money to come watch David Eger play golf.
To the rescue of the Senior PGA Championship this past Sunday came Tom Watson, owner of eight grand slam titles, winner of 69 professional events, a Hall of Famer, and the world”s top player from the end of the Nicklaus era to the start of the European invasion led by Seve Ballesteros and Nick Faldo. Watson was also one of the most admired golfers of his time, highly respected on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Watson played three solid rounds of golf at Valhalla, and after 54 holes he was just outside the lead following rounds of 70, 70 and 68. He would add another 70 on Sunday and find himself tied with Eger at the conclusion of play. The Watson-Eger sudden-death playoff would commence on Valhalla”s 18th hole, a reachable par-5 that has a feast-or-famine mentality about it, shades of Tiger Woods and Bobby May in 2000.
Eger”s tee shot was just above the left fairway bunkers, meaning that he had to lay up with his second shot. His third shot stopped 12 feet right of the hole and he had a good look at birdie. Meanwhile, Watson dissected the fairway with his tee shot and went for the green in two with a hybrid club. Instead of getting to the green for an eagle putt, it came up inches short, hit some mounding in front of the green, and bounded sideways left into an enormous sand bunker. It appeared to be an unfair break for Watson, but then again, when you”re a five-time British Open champ, you know how to handle the nuances of bad bounces, bad breaks and ground hooks.
Watson went into the bunker and exploded the ball to within three feet of the cup for birdie. He watched Eger barely miss the 12-footer for birdie and then tap in for par. All Watson had to do was make the 3-footer to win the Senior PGA. Watson put down the ball, removed the mark, addressed it, and knocked in the short but testy putt for the win. The whole thing took about 10 seconds. It was just like the birdie at Turnberry that beat Nicklaus at the 1977 British Open by one stroke on the final green.
For the legion of golf fans who follow the exploits of Tom Watson, the win at Valhalla was just the right medicine to make up for his failure to win the British Open in 2009. It was just about two years ago that Watson failed to get up and down from behind the final green at Turnberry, resulting in a tie atop the leaderboard with Stewart Cink and subsequent loss in a four-hole playoff. This time around as a 61-year-old, Watson won the game”s oldest senior prize and did so at a historical venue. Tiger Woods beat Bobby May at Valhalla and now Tom Watson did something similar to win the PGA Senior.
And so, for at least one Sunday afternoon, one of the game”s greats came through on a national stage to win. Meanwhile, the PGA Tour was playing just outside Dallas at a tournament named for the man who mentored Watson during the early stages of his career, namely Byron Nelson. The Byron Nelson Classic has fallen on tough times since Lord Byron passed away almost five years ago, and many of the game”s big names skip it to focus on the Memorial and United States Open. The winner of the Nelson, Keegan Bradley, is a rookie who is best known as the nephew of LPGA Hall of Famer Pat Bradley. He beat out Ryan Palmer, who has won three times on tour during the last eight seasons. There were zero past major champions among the top 25. Just journeyman.
It was just another week on the PGA Tour during the year of the journeyman. However, all was well on the senior tour as Tom Watson showed that, for the time being, his talent remains endless as he accumulated another senior major title.
