This week’s PGA Tour stop is the Valspar Championship. We look back at 10 of the event’s most memorable moments.
Much was expected of Jordan Spieth going into 2015, thanks to the way he had finished 2014. In November he closed with a course-record 63 to win the Australian Open by six shots. The following week he defied jet lag to go wire-to-wire in winning the Hero World Challenge in Florida with a tournament-record score of 26 under par. Combine those performances with his T-2 finish in the Masters and making the U.S. Ryder Cup team, and about the only thing Spieth didn’t do in 2014 was win an official PGA Tour event. He took care of that in March 2015, winning the Valspar Championship on the third hole of a playoff with Patrick Reed and Sean O’Hair.
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Vijay Singh was the recently crowned No. 1 player in the world, having stopped Tiger Woods’ streak of 264 weeks at the top of the rankings, when he cruised to a five-shot win over Tommy Armour III and Jesper Parnevik in the Chrysler Championship. With the win, his ninth of the year, he became the first player to top $10 million in a single season’s earnings. The nine victories tied Tiger Woods for the most in one year since Sam Snead won 11 times in 1950.
Luke Donald attained the No. 1 ranking in May 2011 when he won the BMW PGA Championship. He went on to lead the U.S. and European PGA Tours’ money lists, the first player to do so. In early 2012, however, Rory McIlroy was inching up the rankings, and Donald fell to No. 2 when he skipped the Honda Classic and McIlroy won it. Two weeks later, Donald reclaimed the top spot by winning the Transitions Championship, as the PGA Tour’s Tampa Bay-area stop was then known. A final-round 66 got him into a playoff with Robert Garrigus, Sang-Moon Bae and Jim Furyk, which he won with a 6-foot birdie putt on the first extra hole.
In 2010 Jim Furyk was a 13-time winner on the PGA Tour, a former U.S. Open champion and a six-time member of the U.S. Ryder Cup team. But he hadn’t won an official event since 2007. The 2010 Transitions Championship turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. Furyk took a three-shot lead into the final round, shot 69 and held off K.J. Choi to win by one, denying Choi a third win in this event. The finish wasn’t pretty, as Furyk closed with an ugly bogey, featuring a second shot that nearly hit Choi. “I thought it was a moon passing by,” Choi joked afterward. “Right in front of me.”
Retief Goosen knew all about the dangers of short putts on slick greens. He had been 22 inches from winning a U.S. Open in 2001 at Southern Hills, but he missed, winding up in an 18-hole playoff with Mark Brooks which, fortunately for Goosen, he won. In the 2009 Transitions Championship Goosen needed two putts from 25 feet to win. The first one slid 5 feet past the cup, but he nailed the second one to win in Tampa for the second time. Goosen’s final putt slammed the door on Charles Howell III, the Augusta native who needed a win to qualify for the Masters, and Brett Quigley, who was 0-for-341 in his PGA Tour career.
Mark Calcavecchia was ready to leave town on the Friday of the 2007 PODS Championship. Having shot a first-round 75, he figured there was no way he would make it to the weekend. But he made the cut with a second-round 67, tied for the lead with a course-record equaling third-round 62, then hung on with a final-round 70 that was good for a one-shot win. The finish wasn’t pretty, as both Calcavecchia and co-runner-up Heath Slocum missed par putts on the final hole. But in the end, at age 46, Calcavecchia had his 13th and – we’ll go out on a limb here - final PGA Tour win.
Retief Goosen was in the middle of what would become a five-year streak of winning at least one event a year when he won the Chrysler Championship. Played in November, the Chrysler was the final full-field event on the PGA Tour schedule. Goosen’s three-shot victory over Vijay Singh prevented Singh from clinching the money title (Singh went on to win it anyway). Goosen, who had already won the 2001 U.S. Open, went on to win the 2004 Open title as well.
In 2008 Sean O’Hair was one of the most recognizable names on the PGA Tour, but that was because of his contentious relationship with his father. On the course, O’Hair had won once – the 2005 John Deere Classic – but had not been able to follow up with another win. He had made a run at the 2007 Players Championship, reaching the 71st tee two shots behind leader Phil Mickelson, but an aggressive tee shot on the island-green par-3 resulted in a quadruple bogey and a fall down the leaderboard. In 2008 at the PODS Championship, O’Hair finally got win No. 2, edging a pack of six runners-up by two strokes.
When you’re the last full-field event of the PGA Tour season, you end up with a lot more “winners” than just the man who finishes first. That was K.J. Choi, who not only won the Tour’s Tampa Bay stop for the second time, he also qualified for the Tour Championship. Other “winners” included Paul Goydos, who avoided having to go back to Q-School by finishing T-2 and leaping from 160th on the money list to 97th; Ernie Els, who finished with two improbable par saves to keep himself in the top 30 on the money list and thus ensure his spot in the Tour Championship, and Troy Matteson and Vaughn Taylor, who finished inside the top 40 on the money list and earned spots in the 2007 Masters.
When terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on Tuesday, Sept. 11, the PGA Tour was in the Tampa Bay area preparing for the Tampa Bay Classic. It, like most events across the country, was canceled.