Matt Kuchar on the left of the 18th hole at Sedgefield Country Club on Sunday.
CBS
Matt Kuchar managed a mediocre par at the end.
However, the path to his four shots will be remembered and talked about for a long time. After all, his path on the 508-yard par-4 18th hole at Sedgefield Country Club during the final round of the PGA Tour’s Wyndham Championship on Sunday went like this:
– A tee shot was fired at around 8:15 p.m. ET as three fellow pros prepared to play their second shot from the fairway further ahead; one of the players was the tournament leader;
– A tee shot went left into the adjacent 10th hole;
– An umpire gave the option of continuing play until nightfall in Greensboro, North Carolina, or stopping play and resuming it Monday morning. Interestingly, no dark horn was sounded.
– The decision to take a break even though Kuchar was not looking to win; he was not competing to make the Tour’s postseason (the Wyndham is the final event of the Tour’s regular season); and his playing partners in the tournament’s final group, Chad Ramey and Max Greyserman, had elected to continue playing, with Greyserman one stroke behind the leader at the start of the hole;
– Endless thoughts from various observers questioning Kuchar’s move;
— An 8 a.m. return on Monday morning in which Kuchar hit the driving range, hit the practice green, hit an umpire who was assisting him because of a temporary immovable obstruction as he was returning to his ball, hit in front of the green after receiving relief, hit on the green and made a putt for his four.
Kuchar then spoke to the group of reporters who remained, and one question seemed particularly pressing to him.
Why?
Kuchar seemed to have anticipated this. A reporter had started the post-round meeting with a question about Kuchar’s score, but the longtime pro launched into a long explanation instead. Most telling, however, was a later question about whether Kuchar would have done anything differently.
He said he didn’t do that.
“I just hope it doesn’t cause too many problems,” Kuchar said.
Aside from forcing various officials and staff to return just for him, that was unlikely. So what was Kuchar’s reasoning? He repeated an explanation he gave to Golf Channel’s Todd Lewis on Sunday – he did not know that eventual winner Aaron Rai, the player who was one stroke ahead of Greyserman, had birdied the 18th hole in the group ahead of him to take a two-stroke lead, and he believed Greyserman would also quit, knowing what was at stake. Kuchar said he thought he was “making it easy” for his playing partner by quitting himself, although it was unclear whether he had personally mentioned this to Greyserman.
Kuchar said that had he been on the fairway after his tee shot on the 18th hole, he probably would have tried to play, but he had also watched Greyserman take four putts on the 16th hole – and wondered if the darkness there had played a role in that fall. (Of course, if Kuchar had hit the 18th fairway, where the trio of Rai, Billy Horschel and Cameron Young were standing, a whole new set of problems would have arisen.)
Matt Kuchar stops his round in a bizarre way on the 72nd hole, turning the result of the tour event on its head
Nick Piastowski
“I didn’t realize Aaron Rai made a birdie on the last hole, so I’m on the 10th hole trying to figure out what I’m going to do,” Kuchar said Monday morning. “I’m assuming there’s no way Max is going to have a chance to win a tournament. I thought Max definitely had a chance to win, and I thought there’s no way you’re going to make that shot in that situation; you come back 100 percent in the morning.”
“So I said, well, Max is going to stop, I’m going to stop, I’m going to make it easier for him somehow. And when I came back in the morning, I would never have made that (relief) drop last night, I would never have thought to ask for it. I knew I was in a terrible situation, I was praying I would make bogey from where I was. To come away with par, almost birdie, is a huge bonus.
“Again, it’s annoying – nobody wants to be the guy who shows up today, one person, one hole. Not even one hole, half a hole to putt.
“So I apologize to the tournament and to everyone who had to be here. I know it’s bad, I know the consequences, I know it’s bad. Of course I apologize for forcing everyone to be here.”
The tee shot was also strange.
Why did he so obviously strike so quickly if he was going to decide to quit soon? Kuchar said there is a “rule of thumb.”
“The general rule of thumb – I don’t know if you know this – the general rule of thumb in playing is that you try to make a tee shot if you can make a tee shot,” he said. “If you have a reasonable approach, you hit it, you putt in the morning. You mark it, you wait when you have an important putt.”
Did Kuchar see the players on the fairway when he hit?
“Obviously I wasn’t hitting to hit, I was hitting to push,” he said. “I thought — I was on the tee, there was a guy in pink walking on the green. I assumed it was Billy Horschel. There was a guy in pink walking on the back of the green, I assumed they were up there already, but they weren’t.”
With his par, Kuchar tied for 12th with 10 ties and earned a paycheck for $144,965. Before his second shot on Monday, several other scenarios were possible. Had he hit an eagle — unlikely despite the relief — he would have moved up to 6th place, earning him $305,137.50. Had he made a birdie, he would have moved up to 7th place with 6 ties and $240,950 — and a bogey would have put Kuchar in 21st place with 7 ties and $83,232. None of that would have put him in the Tour’s postseason, though — Kuchar wouldn’t have been able to earn enough points on Monday to get into a top-70 cutoff.
Kuchar will now sit out. He was the only player to reach the playoffs in every season since the FedEx Cup was introduced in 2007.
However, I still have one question:
Had he seen any reactions to the twelve-hour ordeal in a hole?
In a way, yes.
“Luckily, I avoid that kind of stuff,” he said. “I got a call from my agent saying, ‘Hey, you’re making quite a stir.’ That’s the little I heard.”
“I’m grateful not to be part of this social media thing.”
