Your Favorite Golf Tournament of 2009?

As we get closer and closer towards the end of the year 2009, it’s time to start reflecting on that year that was in professional golf. While we’ve had plenty to talk about off the course as of late, today, we turn our attention to the things that happened on the course.

There were a lot of good golf tournaments played this season. It was the comeback season so-to-speak, as Tiger Woods made his return from injury, and put himself back in the fray in some of the biggest golfing tournaments in the world. But while he didn’t capture a major championship this season, that doesn’t mean that this year’s majors weren’t eventful.

It wasn’t just the majors though. There were plenty of great tournaments played, but which one of them stood out above the rest? In my opinion, there’s only one that could even come close to being the 2009 Golf Tournament of the Year. And that’s the British Open.

The British Open had what no other golf tournament had this season. It has the nostalgia factor. Sure, older players play on the PGA Tour week in and week out, but none of them could match the story that Tom Watson almost wrote at Turnberry earlier this season. Whether you were a hardcore golf fan or not, you were hooked. When Watson took the early lead, some shrugged it off as a one or two day thing. But when Watson had the lead on Sunday, golf fans knew that they could witness an ending like no other. And even though we didn’t get that ending, we still got one of the best golf tournaments I’ve seen in quite some time.

And throughout all this mention of the British Open, we’ve yet to talk about the eventual winner, Stewart Cink. It may always be that we only remember this British Open for Watson’s heartbreak on the final hole, but there’s one guy that will remember it for something else. Cink will remember it for the fact that he won his first major championship, and it helped catapult him into the discussion among the game’s best.

I watched a whole lot of golf in 2009, but as we wind down the year, there was not another golf tournament that touched me the way that four-day stretch did at Turnberry. It had the making of a Hollywood movie, and though we were denied the ending that most of us wanted, we still got a happy finish, as Watson proved that this is truly a game for a lifetime, and Cink won his first major in the process.

So now I turn to you. What was your favorite golf tournament of 2009?