Wyndham Championship

Wyndham Championship

Wyndham Championship
Greensboro, North Carolina
Winner: J.T. Poston

J.T. Poston remembers having to make a couple of 10-footers to save par. Looked at another way, it means that in winning the Wyndham Championship, his first PGA Tour victory, 10 feet was the closest he came to making a bogey in the 72 holes. He was the first since Lee Trevino in 1974 to go bogey-free in a win.

Which raised a question for Poston: Which was more memorable — shooting 62 and getting his first win or going 72 holes without a bogey? “Gosh,” he said. “I’d say probably the 62 on Sunday is definitely up there. I mean, bogey-free’s great. The golf course was easy enough to where if you hit fairways, you could attack some pins, and my iron play was really solid all week … and today I finally made some putts and was able to get that low one in there.”

Poston, 26, in his third year on the tour, trailed by three strokes in each of the first three rounds, shooting 65-65-66 on the par-70 Sedgefield course. And he had to work his way to the top in the final round as well. Koreans Byeong Hun An and Sungjae Im tied for the first-round lead on 62s. Im would backslide with a 67 in the second round. Webb Simpson, the 2011 Wyndham champion, moved up with a 65. Canada’s Adam Svensson crashed the picture with a 61 in the second round. He got to nine under through the 13th. “I thought I would be a little more nervous than I was,” he said.

But he stalled out there, shot 61 and was two behind. (A 70 in the third round thwarted him.) Jordan Spieth had a promising first round, two behind on a 64 after coolly dropping a 21-footer for bogey on the last hole. Then his miseries returned. He was cut in the third round on a 77 made up of three double bogeys and a single. And An, after tying for the opening lead, went chasing his first win with the solo lead through the second and third rounds on 65-66.

But Poston would outrun him and Simpson. From three behind, he opened his move in the final round with a birdie from three feet at No. 2, then eagled the par-five fifth from 13. Still bogey-free, he birdied Nos. 8, 10 and 13 from two, 12 and two feet, then finally took the lead at the par-five 15th with a classic birdie — his approach into a greenside bunker 42 feet from the flag, a blast out to six feet, then one cool putt for a four, a 62, and a 22-under 258 total, beating Simpson (65) by a stroke.

Said Simpson, after his 64-65-65-65: “I was too far back, unless I did something crazy.” An made only two bogeys for the tournament, both in his closing 67, and finished third, two behind Poston. “I just ran out of juice,” he said. And said Poston: “I haven’t had that many bogey-free rounds this year. To do four in a row and finish it off with a 62 is pretty awesome.”