Cam Davis gets that elusive first PGA Tour victory in a playoff

Sunday afternoon at the Rocket Mortgage – as it seems to do virtually every week – PGA Tour pros gave us a concise lesson on how hard it is to actually win an event on the game’s premier tour.

Not make some money. Not contend. Those things are comparatively easy. But win. On Tour. That’s brutally hard.

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Last week Kramer Hickok battled through a full 72-hole grind followed by eight excruciating playoff holes in search of that first career victory, only to have Harris English yank the rug out from under him on that last playoff hole.

If that lesson wasn’t clear enough, eight players charged through the final nine holes Sunday with a chance at a victory which, for five of them, would have been their first. This time the outcome required five playoff holes before Australian Cam Davis, one of the five, finally got that initial victory.

You can get a pretty good appreciation for the difficulty, on any given week, of actually winning on Tour by looking at the career records of that coterie of contenders.

Set aside Bubba Watson, a two-time Major champion whose popularity, familiarity and success all skew the reality. Focus on Davis, Troy Merritt, Joaquin Niemann, Alex Noren, Hank Lebioda, Brandon Hagy and Mark Anderson. They finished in a bunch among the top eight.

These seven players are not rookies, Monday qualifers or wannabees who exist on sponsor exemptions. Entering the Rocket Mortgage, they had competed in a combined 766 PGA Tour events…that’s more than 100 career starts on average per player. They had combined to win nearly $37 million. In fact every one of them was, statistically, a tour millionaire.

Yet they had only three victories: two by Merritt and one by Niemann, only one of those in the past three seasons.

More desperately, those 766 starts had produced just 19 top three finishes, Merritt leading the way with eight.

Lebioda was seeking his first victory in 62 career starts, Hagy his first in 91, and Anderson his first in 97. Noren had teed it up 107 times on Tour without a victory. The Davis victory came in his 70th attempt.

I’ll run the averages for you: 109.4 career starts, 0.43 trophies prior to Sunday. That’s a winning percentage of 0.39 percent for the group.

Their failures on this particular Sunday, as is always the case on Tour, were excruciating. Lebioda missed the playoff by one shot when he reached the 577 yard par 5 17th in two, then three-jacked from 38 feet. He left a tentative eagle putt eight feet short and could not convert it.

He still had a chance to get in on 18, but left another putt, this time 14 of feet, three feet short. Never up…you know the rest.

Noren, too, fell out of it at 17. He drilled his second shot through the green, leaving a 27-yard pitch from heavy rough down a steep slope. The ball rolled 14 feet past the cup and Noren’s bold try for a save rolled three feet by. His seven-footer at 18 came up a foot short.

Hagy, who began the day well off the tournament pace, made a brave back nine run that included birdies at 14, 16 and 17. By then, though, it was too late; he finished two strokes back.

Then there was Davis, the eventual champion, whose journey to that honor was the most spectacular of all. He began the day at minus-13 just one stroke behind the third-round co-leaders, Merritt and Niemann.

But an uninspired even par 36 front nine left him trailing Merritt by five strokes, with Niemann, Lebioda and Kevin Kisner also ahead of him.

Then, appropriately for the Fourth of July the Australian exploded. He holed a 21-foot birdie putt at the 12th to get his run started, holed an eight-footer for birdie at the 13th, then reached the par 5 14th in two and two-putted for a third straight birdie.

He was 16-under and within striking distance. A bogey at the par 4 16th might have been a fatal setback, but Davis overcame that with a little matter of a hole-out bunker shot for eagle at the par 5 17th. That brought him to 17-under, and a dead-center six-foot birdie putt at 18 leveled him with Merritt and Niemann.

Either could have eliminated Davis with a birdie of their own at 18, but both missed plausible putts. Niemann went out of the playoff with a bogey on the first extra hole, but Davis missed a succession of closeout birdie opportunities over the course of the next hour.

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Then at the par 3 15th, the fifth playoff hole, Merritt pulled his tee shot into long grass short of the green, pitched out six feet short and missed his par putt. Davis, safely on the green, two-putted for his winning par.

Finally, 70 events and five playoff holes into his PGA Tour career, Davis had what Anderson, Hagy, Lebioda, Noren, Hickok and hundreds more certified PGA Tour pros still covet…an actual victory.

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