Best of the Decade: The Best Golf Shots of the 2010’s
By Bill Felber
4. Victor Dubuisson, 19th hole, Dove Mountain, 2014 WGC Match Play
Only a person who has actually tried to play a shot out of a desert lie strewn with jumping cholla cactus can understand the peril that faced Victor Dubuisson on the 19th hole of his 36-hole final with Jason Day in the 2014 WGC Match Play.
Cholla is a plant with self-expression, and that expression comes out in dozens of razor-like barbs coating every inch of the plant. For that reason, to spray a ball out of a cholla lie is to literally take your short-term well-being into your own hands, the risk being not merely to miss the shot but to disable yourself in doing so.
Send one of those bard-laden pieces flying into your pant leg, your arm or your face and you’ll not only lose the hole, but you’ll also be incapacitated.
That’s the risk Dubuisson confronted at Dove Mountain, when – after tying Day through the regulation 18 — he drilled his approach over the green and into a cholla bed on the first playoff hole. Under normal conditions, the sensible thing to do would have been to take an unplayable lie. But since Day was on the green that would have effectively concede the match, so Dubuisson took what amounted to a blind stab at the ball … and rolled it within three feet of the cup.
He walked away with a par that extended the match…and the drama. On the next hole, Dubuisson did almost exactly the same thing on the second playoff hole. This time he hacked it out from rocks and twigs to within eight feet of the cup and rolled that putt in as well while Day and an astonished gallery watched unbelievingly.
Jason Day eventually won the title on the fifth playoff hole. Dubuisson may not have emerged with the trophy or the winner’s check, but there was no doubt who delivered the most spectacular golf shots.