March is one of the most exciting months in all of sports. While most sport fans will be filling out NCAA bracket sheets for their office pool, the PGA Tour is reviving up for the first major of the season. This week’s Tampa Bay Championship marked another first-time winner on tour and showed that next month’s Masters field will be one of the strongest in years.
Bunker Rake: Another first-time winner in Kevin Streelman
Just in case you were too busy with your NCAA Bracketology over the weekend, here’s the golf news you may have missed.
Sam Greenwood
Kevin Streelman finally breaks through - The 34-year old Chicago native took more than a decade to win his first PGA Tour event, but he did so in style over the weekend. His two-shot victory over Boo Weekley could not have come at a better time. Confidence is everything when it comes to major championships and Streelman can use all the gusto he can muster heading to Augusta. His only appearance at The Masters was in 2011 and failed to make the cut.
This is not to say Streelman hasn’t had some success in majors before. He has placed in three of the last four US Open Championships, including an impressive early-round run in the 2012 event.
Hey, remember Justin Leonard? - The long-time PGA Tour veteran caused a bit of a stir in Tampa this week after leading the pack heading into Sunday’s final round. The 13-time winner on tour and 19-year journeyman -- and quite possibly the flattest golf swing ever -- settled for a fourth-place finish after only managing an even-par final round. Still, for PGA-loyalists like myself, it was a nice flash of the past to see Leonard in contention this week.
Down goes Yani! Down goes Yani! - In perhaps the most surprising golf story of the weekend, women’s golf has a new Rolex world No.1 in American Stacey Lewis.
A position long-held by Yani Tseng -- 109 weeks, to be exact -- Lewis becomes the first American to hold the world’s top ranking in... well, a really long time. It took battling back from a four-stroke deficit (thanks to a costly caddy error earlier in the week) on Sunday to win the RR Donnelley Founders Cup and earn her new seat atop women golf’s mountain.
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