It’s not often you see a player cough up a 5-shot lead with a horrendous 78 on the weekend and still win a PGA Tour event. But there was Jason Dufner, with the sun down in Columbus, pouring in a bomb of a par-saving putt to clinch The Memorial Tournament, his fifth career win on the PGA Tour. Dufner looked nothing like the mess from the third round, getting back to the form of the first two days, when he set a 36-hole scoring mark at Jack Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village.
Memorial Tournament results 2017: Jason Dufner wins late at Muirfield Village
The Duf gets back in the winner’s circle, closing with a fantastic Sunday 68 just a day after one of the worst rounds of his career.
A Duf triumph will be a popular win in the locker room, on golf twitter, and generally across the golf world. As soon as the par-saving putt dropped on the 18th, his friend Rickie Fowler and the closest chaser to getting in his way of a win, was there to give him a big high-five. Dufner, who rarely reacts to any shot, whether spectacular or poor, gave an almost Tiger Woods-esque fist-pump after it went down.
If you didn’t watch anything after Friday night, you’d never know what kind of roller coaster this was for the Duf. He went from five up to four down to then clawing his way back through a crowded leaderboard and back to a two-shot lead before mother nature made her annual intervention at Muirfield Village.
It had been a perfect weather week with everything staying on schedule at an event notorious for always catching crappy breaks with the weather. But two different delays late in the final round made a Sunday finish seem unlikely. The Tour did find a short clearing just after 8 p.m. ET and with only six players left to finish, they raced them out there to get in a resolution with Jack looking on at the 18th green.
The win comes just a few days after Dufner made a rare media appearance on the No Laying up podcast. He doesn’t talk to the press often, but this was a candid and lengthy interview in which Duf admitted he didn’t know if he could win anymore on the PGA Tour prior to his victory last year at the Bob Hope. He said he’d struggled to find motivation after his PGA Championship win, and it showed with a lengthy wander in the wilderness (Duf went in to a bunch of different areas about how he defines success and how he’d improve the Tour — it’s worth listening to, especially in light of this win just a few days later). Now he’s got his second win in as many years and it comes at one of the most prestigious events on the entire schedule.
Here are your results from The Memorial:
Place | Player | Score | Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3 | Round 4 | Total | Payout |
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