PGA Championship: Keegan Bradley beats Jason Dufner in three-hole playoff

JOHNS CREEK, GA. — Standing on the 15th tee Sunday evening at Atlanta Athletic Club, Jason Dufner could see the PGA Championship all but being handed to him. Down below, in the group ahead on the mammoth 259-yard par 3, Keegan Bradley was making a mess — a ball in the rough, a chip in the pond, a triple bogey. When Dufner watched Bradley walk away, he held a five-shot lead over Bradley. He had but four holes to play.

“No lead is safe,” Bradley said.

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Keegan Bradley outlasted Jason Dufner in a three-hole playoff Sunday to win the PGA Championship. (August 14)

Really? To that point, Dufner hadn’t so much indicated that he had a pulse. He pulled a 5-wood from his bag, waggled it at his ball — eight times, as is his custom — and swung. Thus began a 100-minute period that not only shook a sleepy major championship right out of its slumber, but produced the summer’s most scintillating golf — whether the contenders were obscure or famous, no-names or stars.

The short version is this: Bradley, a 25-year-old PGA Tour rookie and former all-state skier from Vermont playing the first major of his career, won the PGA Championship in a three-hole playoff over Dufner, a playoff that seemed unimaginable an hour before it started. The long version? Enough folks probably clicked off their televisions that it’s worth retelling, though it might take a while.

“I can’t believe it,” Bradley said.

Nor can most anyone. Start with the abridged version: Bradley followed his disastrous triple with two steely birdies, and he reached the clubhouse after 72 holes of regulation at 8-under-par 272. And Dufner — who had owned the punishing final four holes of the Highlands Course all week — gave the tournament away.

He bogeyed 15 when he hit that 5-wood into the water. He bogeyed 16 when his approach found a greenside bunker. He bogeyed 17 when he three-putted from perhaps 35 feet. And though he forced a playoff with a par at the last, he fell victim to Bradley’s opening birdie in the playoff, his own missed six-footer there, and then another three-putt at 17. He lost by one.

“I’m so new to this situation, as far as trying to win majors,” said Dufner, a 34-year-old journeyman who has never won on the PGA Tour. “I probably don’t appreciate it as much as I might soon.”

So here is Bradley, thin enough that when he turns to the side and sticks out his tongue, he looks like a zipper. He is the nephew of LPGA Hall of Famer Pat Bradley, a graduate of St. John’s — not exactly a golfing powerhouse — and once a winner on the PGA Tour. He chose golf over ski racing as a teenager because, frankly, it was warmer. Now, he is a major champion, the first to win in his first major since Ben Curtis at the 2003 British Open, just the second to do so in 98 years.

“It seems like a dream,” he said. “I’m afraid that I’m going to wake up here in the next five minutes and it’s not going to be real.”

Here, too, is the current state of golf, after the 108th-ranked player in the world outdueled the 80th in a riveting playoff: The past 13 majors have produced 13 different champions. Of those, 10 took a major for the first time.