PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. – The scariest putt in golf is somewhere between three and four feet.
Short enough that you expect to make it.
Long enough that maybe you don’t.
I imagine it’s going to be harder to hit a five-footer with 5,000 people watching from the hill in front of you.
Harder when they just gasp in horror at what you just did.
Even harder when one of those people is Rory McIlroy, who happens to be one stroke behind you.
And harder when the other is Tiger Woods, your childhood hero, watching from a spot next to the clubhouse, 50 yards and 500 miles away, waiting to shake your hand, as long as you can somehow get your ball to the bottom of that hole.
It gets harder when you’re about to win your first PGA Tour event, something you’ve dreamed of all your life, something you know you can do but you also know isn’t guaranteed.
And it’s even harder to know that missing wouldn’t just mean passing up an opportunity – it would mean forfeiting a six-stroke lead, crashing on the final turn and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It gets harder when the pressure hasn’t slowly built up, but instead, after three rounds and fifteen holes of low stress and plenty of birdies, it arrives like a freight train, with a dwindling lead, a growing crowd, decibels, nerves and a heart rate rising by the minute.
And it becomes even more difficult when you can no longer feel your hands.
SUNDAY BRINGS THE MOST GLORIOUS WEATHER in Los Angeles history, ranking first with 80 percent of all days in LA history, 70 degrees and a sunny, deep blue, cloudless sky to match the deep blue ocean just visible from the balcony of the Riviera Country Club’s iconic clubhouse.
That set the stage for the final round of the Genesis Invitational, which felt like it could have gone either way. Jacob Bridgeman started the day with a six-shot lead over Rory McIlroy and more than seven over the rest of the gang after playing three rounds of virtually flawless golf. Bridgeman had been very good and stable since last season, but he had never won on Sunday. Would he succumb to the pressure, explode and give in to the pursuers? Or would he keep his foot on the accelerator and keep running, away from the rest of the field? Those felt like the two options.
Instead, much of the day passed in the uncomfortable space between.
There are few better golfing environments than the iconic old-school cool Riviera, although early tee times and an LA crowd living up to its reputation for ‘arriving in the fourth inning’ led to a somewhat subdued start.
Fans were rooting for McIlroy and wanted to force him into a comeback, but they were also quietly supporting Bridgeman, an impressive unknown without an ounce of villain in him. Bridgeman matched McIlroy’s birdie on No. 1 and kept his lead at six. He birdied the third to make it seven. Even that was greeted with light applause. McIlroy’s early birdie attempts slipped by and did little to fire up the crowd. Hollywood seemed unimpressed by this particular bit of anticlimax.
(One star among them: Ben Affleck, who walked the entire front nine on the ropes with his son and tried several times to frame the perfect iPhone photo of a McIlroy tee shot. The stars, they’re just like us!)
Bridgeman was formed in the heat of competitive golf, growing up first in South Carolina, then at Clemson and more recently on the game’s top circuit. He has been on a steady upward trend. He has made it clear that success is not just his own success.
When he first started working with his swing coach Scott Hamilton, he had some work to do. “I wasn’t hitting the ball straight, I wasn’t hitting it high and I didn’t have much control over my irons,” he said.
When he chose his first choice caddy, GW Cable, there was only one problem: he had to take a pay cut to join Bridgeman on the Korn Ferry Tour.
“He took a chance on me and luckily we only spent a year there and I think he’s pretty happy with his gamble,” Bridgeman said.
Last season he made $4.4 million on the court. He played for a $4 million winner’s check on Sunday. Good pressure to have.
But just because he’s been good doesn’t mean it would be easy. As the day progressed, Bridgeman had the rest of the field doing the same. He bogeyed 4. He bogeyed 7. He hit the middle of the greens, he scared the hole and just missed the putts he had been seeing fall the first three days.
McIlroy finally made some semblance of a push early on the back nine. Birdie at 11 cut the lead to five before a highlight hole-out birdie from the bunker at 12 fired up the crowd for the first time all day.
Further along, several other contenders made their presence felt. Aldrich Potgieter reached 15 under with an eagle on 11. Adam Scott played stunning golf, piling up eight birdies and zero bogeys to put the clubhouse lead at 16 under. And then, just as Bridgeman was in trouble, Kurt Kitayama made his seventh and eighth birdies of the day in the group ahead of him, finishing 17 under par.
Bridgeman wobbled a wayward tee shot at No. 16 and threw his iron into the front right bunker, an inescapable prison.
“It was honestly easy until I was about 16 years old, and then it got really hard,” Bridgeman said after the round. His caddy, looking at his lie, didn’t hesitate. He had to aim well and play for bogey. His long par putt wandered past the hole; he negotiated a nerve-wracking bogey attempt. The lead was suddenly one.
Things only got tougher at the par-5 17th, where Bridgeman’s second shot sailed right and found a bunker, leaving him with no good options. He did well to play a sensible shot.
“Especially around the green, that was the first time I had to play defense,” he said.
It was around this time that Bridgeman lost feeling in his hands.
“I didn’t really feel very nervous until I had a five-footer for bogey on 16; it was vague,” he said. “I hit a really good putt and luckily it went in, and from then on I was really nervous. I couldn’t even feel my hands on the last few greens, I just hit the putt hoping it would go somewhere near the hole.”
But on full withdrawals, Bridgeman said, he still felt good.
“I felt like I was kind of in robot mode and on autopilot. I could just swing the club and it would do exactly what it was supposed to do,” he said. A jealous feeling.
That’s what he did on No. 18, sending the driver up the left-center fairway off the tee and playing a towering approach right at the hole, 20 feet short, straight up.
And then he left it five feet short.
The crowd groaned. They mumbled. Suddenly, another tantalizing possibility was in play: a miss would mean a three-way playoff between Bridgeman, Kitayama and McIlroy, whose dramatic birdie putt had trickled over the front just moments earlier.
Bridgeman is good friends with Chris Gotterup, a rising star on the Tour and recent multiple winner. He said he watched the WM Phoenix Open, where Gotterup banked in a winning birdie putt with aggressive speed.
“We were like, what were you doing? You hit your putt so hard it would go almost five feet through the hole. He said, ‘I have no idea, I couldn’t feel my hands.’
“I thought he was a bit crazy until I got to this moment and then I thought, yeah, I understand what you’re talking about now, Chris. I had no idea what to do.”
It’s hard to make a five-footer, and it’s even harder when you feel that part of the crowd around you is suddenly hoping that you will too.
Difficult for you or me.
But, as he and we suddenly realized, easier for Jacob Bridgeman.
“The hole is really white and on 18 it looked quite big for some reason,” he said. He had read his sentence – hit it right in the middle – and he knew what he could control.
“I just hoped the ball would roll where it was supposed to roll.”
Usually nothing good can happen to a ten-and-a-half-footer. It is a multiple choice test with two options: help or disaster. But this time redemption lay within. The ball rolled as it should. Bridgeman’s triumph was official. He plunged into the winner’s vortex; his wife greeted him on the putting green, he drifted through his CBS interview, he climbed the stairs, shook Woods’ hand and didn’t process what he said.
“This is much, much better than I ever dreamed,” he said.
He also offered an admission.
“I’m glad it’s done now.”
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
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