DECHAMBEAU MAKES IT BACK-TO-BACK WINS
NORTON, Mass. – You could forgive Abraham Ancer if he didn’t sleep well Sunday night. The PGA Tour rookie and 54-hole leader at the Dell Technologies Championship had history working against him. Seven of the last eight winners at this event came from behind in the final round to claim victory, and six won after starting the last round two or more shots back.
Ancer also had Bryson DeChambeau, the winner of last week’s Northern Trust, working against him. DeChambeau came into Monday’s final round playing well and with a legitimate chance to be the first player since Vijay Singh in 2008 to win each of the first two FedExCup Playoffs events.
Maybe Ancer knew all that, and maybe he didn’t. Either way, those stats need to updated because after making three consecutive birdies at Nos. 7-9 Monday, DeChambeau pulled away from the field and held on down the stretch to win at TPC Boston.
Finishing at 16 under 268, DeChambeau shot 67 to beat England’s Justin Rose (68) by two shots and Australia’s Cameron Smith (69) by three.
“I’m playing golf at the highest level and winning at the highest level,” DeChambeau said.
With his second win in the FedExCup Playoffs, DeChambeau is guaranteed to be ranked No. 1 on the points list heading into The Tour Championship in Atlanta. Any player ranked in the top five on the points list who wins The Tour Championship also will win the overall FedExCup title and the $10 million prize.
DeChambeau is morphing into one of golf ’s elites. Entering the Playoffs, he had two PGA Tour wins — the 2017 John Deere Classic and the 2018 Memorial — and many fans knew him more as the guy who plays irons that are all the same length, who used a compass to help determine where the holes are in yardage books and who turns putts into quizzes in Euclidean geometry.
Now he has four wins, has shown he can hoist the hardware starting with a big lead or coming from behind and has won over $7.8 million this season.
“When I got to a four-shot lead, after
11, I think, I said, all right, this is now kind of like last week,” DeChambeau said. “Let’s keep the focus, keep executing the right shots and hit it into the middle of the greens and making great strokes on putts. Hopefully, they go in; if they don’t, just tap it in.”
Rose’s birdies at 17 and 18 came too late to put real pressure. Smith applied some: On 16 he hit his tee shot on the
190-yard par-3 to 12 feet and made the birdie putt to reach 14 under and pull within a shot of DeChambeau.
But playing the 15th hole, DeChambeau responded by hitting a 309-yard tee shot and 102-yard wedge shot that stopped 8 feet from the hole. He drained the birdie putt, and when Smith made a bogey on the par-5 18th, DeChambeau could par his way to a win.