The PGA Tour Top 10 Most Dominant Performances of 2019
By Bill Felber
A review of the year’s individual player-performance highlights across the PGA Tour.
The calendar 2019 golfing year is approaching its conclusion. Only two full-field PGA Tour events remain, the Mayakoba next week and the RSM one week later at Sea Island, Ga.
The year will be capped, fittingly by the Playing of the President’s Cup in December at Royal Melbourne.
It’s been a year of memorable performances, some by stars and some by newcomers. Tiger Woods’s historic victory at Augusta National will stick with us for years. But so will Nate Lashley’s emotional victory in Detroit.
That win justified an emotional 15-year journey through golfing’s hick towns to bring to fruition the dreams of his parents. They and his girlfriend had all been killed in a plane crash while returning from a college tournament in which Lashley had played.
Among the year’s most memorable performances, one had to find a place for Brooks Koepka’s victory at the PGA, his fourth major championship. For most of the week, Koepka looked like a cinch to win, maybe by a record margin. Then, on Sunday’s back nine, he looked like a cinch to choke away the title.
Koepka might have claimed a second major at the U.S. Open in June, but he could never quite run down Gary Woodland, an increasingly frequent contender who finally stepped up to front-rank status with his three-stroke victory over Koepka at Pebble Beach.
The major season was capped by another emotional finish, the first Open Championship win by an Irishman in more than a half-century, and coming on an Irish course for the first time in about as long.
Here’s a recap of the 10 most dominant performances on tour during the 2019 calendar year. The measuring stick is standard deviation, the measure of every player’s dominance over the field against which he was competing. All individual medal play events are included except for the Tour Championship itself at East Lake, where the scoring included a handicapping system.