By John Strege
The game never really owes anyone, though Ernie Els would be forgiven had he thought Pebble Beach was indebted to him. Once more, he left the Monterey Peninsula in disappointment.

For the record, Jim Furyk won the PURE Insurance Championship with a birdie on the first playoff hole, the iconic 18th at Pebble Beach, on Sunday, defeating Jerry Kelly for his second PGA Tour Champions victory in his only two starts.

Furyk, who turned 50 in May, joins Arnold Palmer and Bruce Fleisher as the only players to win their first two senior starts.

“I feel very fortunate,” Furyk said. “It means a lot. When I won at [the] Ally [Championship], I hadn’t won in over five years. It’s why we play the game, it’s why you work so hard, it’s to have this feeling.

“I feel honoured to be mentioned with AP. I look at the hard work I put in a lot of this year, through our break. I wasn’t really seeing a lot of results on the PGA Tour, but kind of kept plugging away, working hard and now I’ve seen some results out here.”

Furyk has not fully committed to playing the senior tour, unlike Els, who has played nine senior events this year, winning once and finishing in the top 10 in seven of them.

But he let this one slip away. The 36-hole leader and still tied for the lead going to the par-5 18th, Els made a mess of the hole, ultimately missing a three-foot par putt to join the playoff.

“I just missed the putt,” Els said. “Kind of misread it. You know, I battled hard, I didn’t quite have my swing.”

Adding, he might have noted, to his history of disappointment at Pebble Beach. Twenty years ago, Els played well enough to win a U.S. Open, only to have been steamrollered by Tiger Woods, who won by 15 shots. Els tied for second. Ten years later, Els finished third in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and last year he missed the cut in the Open there.

Els and Furyk were tied for the lead for most of the back nine, with Kelly joining the tie with an 18th-hole birdie to get to 12-under par 276. Kelly had the best round of the day, a seven-under 65.

Furyk, playing behind Kelly, shot a five-under 67, but was unable to make a birdie after the sixth hole. Els, in the group following Furyk, shot a 70.

On the playoff hole, Furyk hit an excellent third shot, his ball spinning back to four feet below the hole. After Kelly missed his own birdie attempt, Furyk holed his.

The post Jim Furyk wins in a playoff, while Ernie Els’ Pebble Beach disappointments mount appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Strege
Kirk Triplett has frequented Pebble Beach over the years, and he also has frequented the top of the leader board in the annual PGA Tour Champions event there.

Triplett on Sunday won the PURE Insurance Championship, as it is now called, by holing a 10-foot birdie putt to defeat Billy Andrade on the first playoff hole, the iconic 18th at Pebble Beach Golf Links.

It was Triplett’s third victory in the tournament, the first two coming 2012 and 2013 when it was known as the Nature Valley First Tee Open at Pebble Beach.

“I’ve been coming here a long time,” said Triplett, a West Coast native who grew up in Pullman, Wash., and played collegiately at the University of Nevada in Reno. “I’ve played probably 60 professional golf tournaments here. I come here in the winter for the Pebble Beach Invitational. I’ve played the U.S. Open. I’ve played the First Tee events, the AT&T. I just enjoy this kind of golf. It’s a beautiful place. I like restaurants, staying here at the hotel. And the course gets better every year.”

Triplett, 57, entered the final round tied for fifth and was playing well ahead of the final group of Andrade and Steve Flesch. He shot a five-under-par 67 to complete 54 holes in nine-under 206.

But he still trailed Andrade by two. Then Andrade bogeyed the par-5 14th hole and the par-4 16th to fall one behind Triplett. He rebounded with a birdie at the par-5 18th hole to force a playoff.

Andrade laid up with his second shot at the 18th in the playoff, then left his third 15 feet below the hole. Triplett, from 57 yards, hit his third shot to 10 feet left of the hole. After Andrade left his birdie attempt short, Triplett, one of the tour’s best putters, holed his left-to-right putt in the heart.

The victory was his second of the season and eighth of his PGA Tour Champions career.

Flesch, the 36-hole leader, shot a 75 and tied for ninth.

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By John Strege
Sixty is not the new 50, but neither is it necessarily a number associated with decline, as Bernhard Langer has proved once more.

Langer, who turned 60 a month ago, added a fifth victory on Sunday to what is shaping up as his best season since joining the PGA Tour Champions in 2007.

On a sunny, warm day at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, Langer won the PURE Insurance Championship by three shots over Jerry Kelly, a 50-year-old, by virtue of two wins in his last three starts, capable of posing a threat to his domination.

“I’m just very blessed to be playing at this level at my age and going to places like Pebble Beach,” Langer said. “It doesn’t get a whole lot better.”

Meanwhile, Langer and his First Tee partner Justin Potwora won the team portion of the event.

The victory was the 34th of Langer’s senior career and it marked the third time he has had five wins in a PGA Tour Champions season. Yet in 2010 he won five of 23 events and in 2014 won five of 21 events.

In 2017, he’s won five of his 18 starts and still has four starts left in pursuit of a fourth straight Charles Schwab Cup title and fifth overall.

The $300,000 he earned for this win increase his yearly earnings to $2,973,835, more than a half-million dollars than his closest chaser, Scott McCarron.

Langer was tied with Kelly when he birdied the 13th, 14th and 15th holes to open a three-stroke lead en route to a closing five-under par 67 and a a 54-hole total of 17-under 198. He made 23 birdies, the most in tournament history

Kelly, meanwhile, closed with a 67, his 14th consecutive round in the 60s on the PGA Tour Champions, eclipsing Hale Irwin’s senior record of 13, set in 1999.

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