LA QUINTA – Mischief on Sunday? Nah.
Sepp Straka boatraced his closest competitors for most of the back nine at the Pete Dye Stadium Course at PGA West Sunday afternoon in the closing round of The American Express. With a relatively comfortable lead, he could even afford two bogeys on the final three holes – his first of the 72-hole tournament – before closing it out with a two-putt for his third career PGA Tour victory.
This was a day when two-putt greens were comfortable and desirable. Straka entered Sunday with a four-shot lead, and he used three birdies on the front nine to go 26-under but still led veteran Charley Hoffman by just three shots midway through the round … before Hoffman, going for his second career victory in the desert, found the water twice on 13, a par-3, and took a triple-bogey 6.
To accentuate his pursuers’ task, Straka birdied 13 to go 27 under. And while the pecking order behind him on the leaderboard changed, the result wasn’t going to. Justin Thomas, with a 6-under 66, finished second at 23-under, with Justin Lower and Jason Day next at 22-under. Day had a number of putts slide just past the hole, or else he might have put up more of a challenge.
And if you need the definition of a boatrace, as it applies to the leader keeping the field at arm’s length, here it is.
“Every time you made a birdie or you are thinking about making a birdie he would do the exact same thing, and that’s kind of what you need to do to win tournaments,” Day said. “Especially when you have a decent sizable lead that he had going into today, you just got to keep pushing and making sure that you give yourself enough break like he did, where he could make a couple of bogeys down the stretch and still get away with it pretty easily.
“It would have been nice to be able to get a little bit closer, just to try to get him thinking about it a little bit more.”
Straka, a former University of Georgia star who was born in Austria and moved to Valdosta, Ga., with his family at age 14, used a different playbook to win his third tour event in 169 starts than he had in his first two triumphs.
In each of those, he came from behind on the final day. At the Honda Classic in February 2022, he was 5 shots behind Daniel Berger going into the last round and won by a shot over Shane Lowry with a final round 66. The following July, he trailed Brendon Todd by four shots after three rounds of the John Deere, and won by two shots with a final day 62.
“It’s a very different feeling, I would say,” he said Sunday. “I just had nerves a lot earlier. If you play your way into contention then those nerves start kicking in. But yeah, I loved (Georgia football coach) Kirby Smart’s quote about being the hunter and not the hunted, regardless of where you are in the game, in the tournament. And yeah, I kind of felt that way. I was kind of just trying to stay aggressive to my spots. My targets were pretty conservative, but I was trying to take aggressive swings to it. And yeah, I did that really well today.”
Maybe having played golf for a Southeastern Conference program has hidden advantages beyond a links education, i.e. drawing on the experience of coaches well acquainted with big-time pressure and big-time rewards. Interestingly, runner-up Thomas – an Alabama alumnus – had a close-up view a year ago, tying for third when Crimson Tide golfer Nick Dunlap won this tournament as an amateur and turned pro shortly afterward.
(Yeah, we know. It just means … well, you know how the SEC’s marketing slogan goes.)
Straka’s lead going into Sunday’s round might have had its roots in Friday’s second round. Straka posted a 64 on the Stadium Course that day, which moved him a shot behind co-leaders Hoffman and Rico Hoey. He took control Saturday with another 64 at La Quinta.
“I kept hitting my spots and I kept giving myself birdie looks and made a lot of those birdie looks” on Friday, Straka said. “I putted really well that day, struck it really well that day, and any time you can have your low round of the tournament be at the Stadium it’s a good thing, it means you’ve done something right that day. That was definitely the biggest round of the week for me.”
Winning, however the method, breeds confidence and provides something to fall back on. That mental edge, however slight, can make a difference on this hyper-competitive tour.
“I think I probably felt that my best was good enough before,” Straka said. “I just didn’t put my best together for four rounds a lot. Yeah, when I did it there at the Honda, it definitely gave me the belief, but I feel like I already had that belief that if I played my best I could win. It’s easy to feel that way when you’re playing well, (but) when you’re not playing well it seems like it’s so far away. So just trying to manage those highs and lows I think is really key as a golfer, because the highs are really high and the lows are really low, so try to stay even keel throughout all of that is pretty important, I think.”
Straka had the day’s biggest triumph, but Kris Ventura had his own moment earlier in the day, with a hole-in-one on the par-3, 208-yard 13th hole. Ventura, who has spent most of his time the past couple of seasons on the Korn Ferry Tour, is a former Oklahoma State player who was born in Puebla, Mexico but represents Norway, and played for that country in the Paris Olympics last summer.
(And no, we’re not going to break out any Ace Ventura one-liners …)
jalexander@scng.com