Tour Rookie Keegan Bradley Wins The PGA Championship In Three-Hole Playoff

For the second year in a row, the PGA Championship came down to a playoff. This time, the winner was rookie Keegan Bradley, who was five strokes behind then-leader Jason Dufner with three holes to play. Bradley birdied the first hole in the three-hole playoff, then made par on the second and third to clinch the Wanamaker Trophy in his first ever major tournament.

Bradley birdied 16 and made an unbelievable putt on 17 to force a playoff with the collapsing Dufner, who bogeyed 15, 16 and 17 to let Bradley in the door. Bradley just happened to blast through it.

This is Bradley’s first year on tour, and he’d already won the Byron Nelson tournament earlier in the season. Now with two victories including a major, in his first season, it’s fair to say he’s someone to be reckoned with moving forward.

Entering Thursday at the PGA Championship, all the talk was about noted golf enthusiast Tiger Woods’ first major tournament since the Master’s in April. And rightfully so. Nobody drives the dialogue quite like Tiger when he’s on the golf course, where he belongs

Other notable stories were Rory McIlroy and his wrist injury, Steve Stricker’s record-tying 63 in the first round, and, eventually Tiger Woods’ complete implosion, missing the cut by mile.

Once the weekend came around, though, the storylines finally began to shift to who would actually win this thing, or rather, who could take home the Wanamaker Trophy. Every player who rose to the top of the leaderboard — Stricker, Brendan Steele, Shaun Micheel — fell from that perch more spectacularly than they climbed to it.

Dufner had missed the cut in his previous four tournaments. What’s more, he had never won a tournament in his entire time on the PGA Tour. It didn’t matter.

As his competitors rose and fell, Dufner stayed consistent atop the leaderboard, failing to record a single bogey in the first 14 holes. Meanwhile, his top challenger, Bradley, had triple-bogeyed 15 to give Dufner a five-stroke lead going into the final four holes.

Those final four holes had been the bane of every golfer in Jones Creek, Ga. There’s water on all of them, the greens were lightning fast, and the wind was unpredictable. None of that had seemed to phase Dufner, who had been the picture of calmness, rarely wavering from his poker face.

Then, on his tee shot at the par-3 15, he hit water. Though he managed to save the hole with just a bogey, he would bogey the next two holes while Bradley was mounting his resounding comeback.