In baseball, closers stop rallies and save games. In golf, they
stop rallies and save themselves from the pain Payne Stewart
suffered at the U.S. Open. Never known as a safe bet on
Sundays—he was nicknamed Avis early in his career—Stewart let
a four-stroke lead slip away in the last round at the Olympic
Club. He lost in the bottom of the ninth to Lee Janzen, one of
golf's dominant closers.
Statistics show just how good a money player Janzen is. SI took
all Tour players with a minimum of 10 top three finishes and
divided their wins by their top threes to come up with a stat
we'll call Closing Average. Janzen's CA going in was .467,
seventh among active pros and better than that of any of the top
10 players on the leader board at Olympic. Clearly, the numbers
were against Stewart on Sunday. Despite his nine victories,
including the 1989 PGA and the '91 U.S. Open, Stewart's career
CA is a mere .184. The chart below shows the best and worst
closers on the PGA Tour, with Janzen near the top and Stewart
close to the bottom.
Thanks to his talent down the stretch, Janzen
had a blast at the Open.
(John Biever)
|
Jeff Maggert made a run at the Open leaders last week, but as
you would expect from his .050 CA, he fell short and tied for
seventh. It was Maggert's seventh top 10 finish in a major, but
he has yet to win one. The Tour's alltime record for futility,
however, belongs to Fred Hawkins. Between 1947 and '65, Hawkins
had 19 seconds, 12 thirds and just one win, at the 1956 Oklahoma
City Open, for a CA of .031.
At the other end of the spectrum stands Phil Mickelson, whose
career CA is .600. That's double the Tour average of .300 and
far above the career numbers of Arnold Palmer (.480), Ben Hogan
(.453) and Jack Nicklaus (.432). "When you're in contention on
Sunday, there's only one thought you can have: Get the job
done," Mickelson says of the closer mentality. "It's a reckless,
do-whatever-it-takes approach, totally different from what you
need in the first three rounds. Before Sunday you're just being
patient, playing for position. In the last round, though, it's
go for broke. You absolutely have to look at the leader board.
You need to know where you stand, and if somebody makes a birdie
run, you've got to catch him."
|
|
|
