Quicken Loans National: Memorable moments

This is when we all learned what the term “derecho” means. Derechos are long-lived wind storms, and we certainly don’t have to remind you that they are associated with quasi-linear convective systems. Uh, anyway, one of these bad boys blew through Washington D.C. on the Friday night of the AT&T National, toppling trees and leaving more than a million homes without power. Tournament staff worked through the night to get Congressional in playing condition for Round 3, but for safety reasons, fans were not allowed on the property. Oh, yes, and Tiger Woods won, beating Bo Van Pelt by two shots.

When Anthony Kim defeated Fredrik Jacobson by two strokes in the AT&T National for his second Tour win, he became the first American under 25 to win twice in one year since Tiger Woods in 2000. Before the year was over he would rise to as high as No. 6 in the world rankings and be part of a U.S. Ryder Cup win, defeating Sergio Garcia, 5 and 4, in the first Sunday singles match.

The short version is that Fred Couples birdied the second extra hole to win a five-man playoff. But that leaves out so much detail. For instance, the final group – Couples, Scott Simpson and T.C. Chen – took more than five hours to play the final round, shooting 77, 76 and 77, respectively. They finished more than an hour behind the next-to-last group. The other two playoff participants – Dr. Gil Morgan and Barry Jaeckel – finished several hours earlier. They had so much time to kill that Jaeckel killed some of it in the clubhouse bar.

Hunter Mahan finished second, but it was the duel between Tiger Woods and Anthony Kim that captured the imagination. Kim, the defending champion and considered one of the best young players – if not THE best – in the game, took a one-shot lead over Woods on the opening hole on Sunday. Woods recovered and ultimately beat his playing partner, 67 to 71. Mahan jumped up into second with a final-round 62.

Yes, truth is indeed stranger than fiction. One of the most obscure facts of Greg Norman’s career is that he defeated Larry Mize in a playoff. It happened in the 1986 Kemper Open, it took the Shark six holes to do it and it earned him his second Kemper Open win. Less than a year later the two would meet in another playoff, at Augusta, Ga., and we all know how that one turned out.

No wild celebration photos from this one. No fist pumps, no high-fives. As good as he felt about getting his second career win, Justin Leonard felt bad for Mark Wiebe, who missed 2-foot par putts on the 71st and 72nd holes to finish one shot behind. But Leonard did close with 67. “I’m not going to put an asterisk on this tournament because of what happened on the last hole,” Leonard said. “I went out five shots back and won the golf tournament and played good golf all the way.”

Remember Greg Norman holing a long putt on the 72nd hole to get into a playoff with Fuzzy Zoeller at the 1984 U.S. Open? Just a week before, Norman had claimed his first PGA Tour win, beating Mark O’Meara by five shots in the Kemper Open. Norman went on to win 20 times on the PGA Tour, but the ’84 U.S. Open wasn’t one of his victories. Zoeller beat him in their 18-hole playoff, 67 to 75.

Steve Stricker was a 29-year-old, third-year PGA Tour pro when he broke through for his first win in the 1996 Kemper Open. He beat Mark O’Meara,Grant Waite, Scott Hoch, and Brad Faxon by three shots.

Here’s the golf equivalent of the age-old question, “If a tree falls in the forest but nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” “If a tournament holds its final round – final round EVER - without fans, does anybody care?” Because of rain delays, the 2006 edition of the Washington D.C.-area PGA Tour stop – the Booz Allen Classic – finished on a Tuesday. Ben Curtis had a seven-shot lead when he returned for his final two holes. He finished bogey-bogey for his first win since the 2003 Open Championship. The tournament was dropped from the PGA Tour schedule in 2007, but the nation’s capital got a new Tour stop – now called the Quicken Loans National – to replace The International, which was canceled in February 2007.

Washington Redskins quarterback Mark Rypien, the reigning Super Bowl MVP, was given a sponsor’s exemption into the tournament. Rypien was a 1-handicap and had won the 1990 NBC Celebrity Golf Classic, but a regular PGA Tour event proved too much for him. He shot 80-91 and missed the cut by 28 shots.