Posts tagged Johnson Wagner
Mark Wilson Wins Again, Confuses Golf Fans
04 weeks ago
by Chris Chaney
in Golf
AP
Mark Wilson did it again on Sunday with his win at the Humana Challenge in partnership with the Clinton Foundation.
“It” meaning baffling casual golf fans into wondering whom exactly Mark Wilson is.
With three tournaments under our belts in the 2012 golf season, most of your run-of-the-mill golf fans are just wiping the eye boogers off of their collective golfing goggles.
However, if you have been paying attention over the past calendar year, January through March is when Mark Wilson makes his cash.
The win at the Humana was his fifth since the start of the 2011 season, but this one was a little different from the others.
Wilson had to fight off some blustery conditions in La Quinta, Calif. which caused the suspension of play on Saturday, forcing a marathon finish to beat the setting sun on Sunday.
The Humana Challenge, which is taking over for the Bob Hope Classic, spans a traditional four-day tournament, but is played on three different courses (PGA West – Nicklaus Course, PGA West – Palmer Private Course and La Quinta Country Club) with the Palmer Private set as the final-round backdrop.
The Palmer Private was good to Wilson on Friday when the Wisconsin-native shot a 10-under par 62 and he hoped for a repeat performance on Sunday, but it didn’t start out as he had hoped.
“It feels good, obviously, to be here with the trophy,” Wilson said. “The day went not as planned. I guess it really never does. But last time I came out here (to Palmer Private), I shot 62, so of course I had those images in mind. I made a bad swing on the third hole, and then felt like I hit a lot of good shots.”
Those good shots weren’t immediately rewarded as Wilson saw his three-stroke lead evaporate before his eyes.
Robert Garrigus, playing alongside Wilson and Zach Johnson, put the most pressure on the eventual champ tying him through nine holes.
Wilson was able to get things going in the right direction on the 11th hole as he stuck his approach shot and tapped in the birdie putt. He followed that with another birdie on 12 holing out from the bunker, but Garrigus was sticking right with him, evening it up with a second birdie on the incoming nine on the 14th.
“Birdieing 11, I played that hole really smart. Then holing the bunker shot on 12 really gave me the momentum to go in the right direction, “Wilson said afterwards.
Both parred the 15th hole and swapped biridies on the 16th to enter the final two holes tied at 23-under. Garrigus dropped at shot at 17 to get back to 22-under, but his length allowed him to reach the par-5 18th in two, giving him an eagle putt for the outright lead as Wilson lined up a 10-foot birdie try.
“I felt like Robert and I really had a good time, and Zach for that matter. But Robert and I were kind of going back and forth. We enjoyed that. Both making the putts on 16, and then, yeah, it just came down to 18,” Wilson said.
Garrigus didn’t have the same steady week that Wilson did. As he and his caddie sat in the fairway six-over through eight holes on Thursday, Garrigus figured he might as well get aggressive and make some birdies if he wanted to even make a check, much less have a chance to win the tournament.
“‘I’m like, Can you believe we actually have a shot to win this thing if I make this eagle putt?” Garrigus recounted of his conversation with his caddie, Brandt Henley. “It was exciting and that’s what we live for. And I got a lot of guts, and I don’t like to lay down very easily. We had so much fun this week.”
Garrigus made a run at the eagle putt that came over a ridge in the green and burned the left edge of the hole. The only problem was Garrigus was so set on making the putt, that he rolled it a good eight feet past the hole.
Wilson stood over his 10-footer for birdie and the win with one thing in mind: “I didn’t want to give him a chance to make that putt to tie me.”
With darkness setting in, Wilson got over his putt and tried to read the green, but got some help from his caddie.
“When I got over that putt and read it, it just looked like it should be faster over that hill,” Wilson explained. “The darkness had a little something to do with it. Then Chris (Jones), my caddie, read that one perfectly, said it was going to break about an inch to the right and I started outside the hole, which I wasn’t totally trying to do, but it took that inch break at the very end.”
Although Garrigus would go on to miss his putt for birdie, which ended up costing him $186,467 as he fell into a three-way tie for second place with John Mallinger and Johnson Wagner, instead finishing as solo runner-up.
As it turns out, Wilson won his first tournament of 2012, cashing him a winners check of $1.008 million and moved him up to world No. 40.
Wilson took home the inaugural Bob Hope Memorial Trophy for his effort and will not be in the field for this week’s Farmers Insurance Open.
Stricker, Wagner Sweep the Hawaii Swing
01 month ago
by Chris Chaney
in Golf
As most of the country gets ready to deal with a late-arriving winter, the PGA Tour kicked off its 2012 season in beautiful Hawaii with back-to-back tournaments in the Aloha State, the Hyundai Tournament of Champions at Kapalua and the Sony Open at Waialae.
Perennial good-guy Steve Stricker took home the hardware at the Tour’s season-opening event, the Tournament of Champions on Maui, which is reserved only for the previous season’s winners meaning that the Wisconsin native punched his ticket to get back to Kapalua this time next year.
The win didn’t come as easily as it may have seemed going into Monday’s final round. Stricker held a five-stroke lead, but saw that margin shrink to one through just six holes.
The 44-year-old veteran saw his usually steady putter betray him early in the round. Couple that with some shoddy course management and Stricker was clawing for his proverbial life.
Stricker gathered himself over the next few holes, saying in his post-round presser that if someone were to tell him that he would have a lead going into the back nine on Monday (the tournament started on Friday), he would have taken it.
“I had just made two dumb plays,” Stricker said of his early-hole mishaps. But then walking down 7, I said, all right, we’re still all right. “I mean, if I would have told myself early in the week, if I have a two-shot lead going down the 7th hole in the last round, I would take it. So I kind of tried to reverse it a little bit and make myself feel good.”
Stricker turned that calming down into back-to-back birdies on 8 and 9. He made three more birdies on the way in to shoot a final-round 69, good enough to win by three shots over Scotland’s Martin Laird.
The win signified Stricker’s 12th of his career. That’s all fine and good, but if you take a closer look, Stricker’s last few years are really impressive.
He’s won nine of those 12 times in his 40s and eight times in his last 50 starts, dating back to the 2009 Crowne Plaza Invitational.
Fast forward a few days and Johnson Wagner was lifting the second of the two tournament trophies given out in Hawaii, this time on the Big Island at the Sony Open.
Wagner captured his third-career win with rounds of 68-66-66-67 to best a group of players two shots back.
Not exactly a household name, Wagner took getting ready for 2012 seriously during the short PGA Tour offseason, working with a trainer and growing a solid mustache.
Perhaps, the biggest talking point of Wagner’s weekend, his new lip hugger was born out of pure laziness and continued through spite.
“I was with my wife’s family in Richmond for Thanksgiving and I just didn’t shave the entire week,” said Johnson, who now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and calls Quail Hollow his home course. “When I got home, I thought, I’ve never had facial hair. So I thought it was too much growth to just let it go to waste. I shaved everything but the mustache, and it kind of went from there. My wife really hated it at the beginning, which made me want to grow it even more.
“And then actually I played in a little tournament the first of December down in Naples and saw Carl Pettersson and George McNeill, and they were both just like, ‘You’ve got to keep it until Hawai’i. We have to see this thing in a month.’ So I had a lot of motivation to keep it…I kind of made a deal with myself in December that if I was to get into the Masters, then I was going to keep the mustache for at least this year. I kind of kept telling people and everybody said, ‘Oh, is it a Movember mustache? Well, it’s December time to shave it.’
“I said, ‘Look, this is not a one-month mustache. This is potentially a ten-year mustache.’ So I think it’s going to be around for a while. Now if the summer heat gets to me, I may shave it off. But I’m going to try to make it as long as I can.”
So, there you have it, the ‘stache stays.
