Vegas doubles down for win
Gamble pays off in playoff, Venezuelan hopes repeat inspires troubled homeland
For Jhonattan Vegas, it was a bold decision: Ensconced in a playoff with Charley Hoffman to decide the champion of the RBC Canadian Open on Sunday, Vegas was preparing to take his second shot from a fairway bunker on Glen Abbey Golf Club’s 18th hole.
The sand trap’s lip loomed high and menacing only a few feet away. The flag flapped 181 yards in the distance. The prudent play was a layup with a high-lofted wedge. Plunking a lower-lofted club into the dark-brown sod of the lip, after all, spelled disaster.
But perhaps it was silly to believe a man who goes by the sobriquet Johnny Vegas would make the safe play.
Vegas, true to his name, gambled. And the gamble paid off — by an inch or so. History probably won’t remember that Vegas’s 8-iron glanced off the top of the lip — averting disaster by the height of a golf ball — and carried to the green, setting up a relatively easy chip and an ensuing tap-in birdie.
But history will not forget that Vegas won his second straight Canadian Open with that shot, this after Hoffman failed to hole his greenside bunker attempt for birdie.
“I just said, stay aggressive. That’s my personality,” Vegas said. “I knew that I could pull the shot off. No doubt ever crossed my mind. I got a little bit lucky, to be honest, that it clipped the lip and it went to the green . . . A little bit of luck, and you need that to win.”
It was an impressive do-over on the 18th hole for the 32-year-old Venezuelan, who shot a final-round 65 despite stumbling down the stretch in regulation. Vegas, who began the day three shots back of Hoffman’s 54-hole lead, looked the likely winner the first time he stepped on the 18th tee Sunday.
Carrying a one-shot lead, Vegas hit a 388-yard drive — his longest of the year on the PGA Tour — that rolled into the deep rough beside the green-fronting pond. His approach bounced over the green. His chip for eagle went way long.
He missed a birdie putt that could have made him a difficult-to-assail leader in the clubhouse.
Instead, Vegas’s par meant Hoffman had an eagle putt to win outright on the 18th. Hoffman’s putt barely missed. So the playoff ensued. And Vegas, who a year ago used a Sunday 64 to come from behind and win, was soon enough hoisting the trophy at Glen Abbey, which will host the tournament again next year.
“I’m going to be one of the biggest voices to keep this course open,” Vegas said with a laugh, alluding to the course owner’s plan to eventually redevelop the site into residential housing.
For Vegas, Sunday wasn’t all trophies and giggles. As he was en route to his win, his country’s president Nicolas Maduro was holding a sham election condemned by the international community as a stepping stone to dictatorship. In a place where poverty and violence are on the rise, soldiers have been breaking up pro-democracy rallies.
“It’s always on my mind. I have family that live there. It’s my country of birth. It hurts. It hurts a lot,” Vegas said. “To see the country the way it is, to see a government that treats people that way when they don’t deserve it just to remain in power — all the suffering my family and friends are having right now is just not fair. I got up early this morning, even got on Twitter to see what’s happening. It makes me a little bit angry, obviously. But it’s something I use as motivation to raise a voice against the government we’re having right now. “Maybe by me winning and the exposure of me getting here can inspire other people in my country to revolt against the government. Obviously we need a change. Hopefully by making this a little more public we can get something positive going for the country.”
Vegas is an unlikely PGA Tour player. The son of a former caddie — and his mother and father, not to mention his wife and daughter, were in attendance on Sunday — he grew up playing on a nine-hole course that served oil workers (a course that was among many later closed by Maduro’s leftist predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who denounced golf as a “bourgeois game”). As a teenager he moved to the U.S. to learn under a pro and learn English, eventually ending up with a scholarship at the University of Texas before an apprenticeship in golf’s minor leagues.
Sunday marked Vegas’s third win on tour; he also won the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic back in 2011. It was marked by long-odds moments. Hoffman had a Vegas-esque run-in with a bunker lip on the 17th hole, his approach to the green ramping up the grass berm and somehow continuing its trip to the green, ending up 10 feet from the hole.
And Hoffman drew chuckles from playing partner Kevin Chappell on the 12th hole when, with his ball having found an unfavourable lie in a bunker, Hoffman successfully argued he deserved a drop because his stance had his back foot abutting the bunker’s concrete lining.
Chappell was heard on the TV broadcast chastising Hoffman for his “(bleep)-eating grin,” inferring he’d knowingly and happily exploited the rules for a clean lie. Hoffman shrugged: “Rules, man.” Perhaps the golf gods got their revenge when Hoffman, even with his newer, cleaner lie, botched the ensuing shot, which ended up short of the green in the rough.
More than one professional appeared to be affected by Sunday’s pressure — both negatively and positively. Witness Chappell, who came into the final round trailing Hoffman by a stroke, and who bogeyed No. 2 after he whiffed — yes, swung and missed — while attempting to punch out onto the fairway from a tangle of trees. Chappell plummeted to a tie for eighth after his 71. And witness Ian Poulter, who after an injury-plagued 2016 has lately been rediscovering the form that once had him ranked as high as No. 5 in the world. Poulter, who has defined his career by performing well in the cauldron of the Ryder Cup, shot a marvellous 64 to finish third, one shot off the lead at 20 under par.
But nobody performed as coolly as Vegas, who played to win and, for the second straight year, won.
“Obviously when I heard the ball clip (the bunker lip), I knew it was probably going to go in the water, because I didn’t know how hard I hit it,” Vegas said. “The ball could have gone anywhere from there. Like I said, a little bit of luck. Sometimes you have to be aggressive. And sometimes when you’re that aggressive, things go your way.”