By Dave Shedloski
Of course he thought of the putt that clinched the biggest victory of his career.

And of course he thought of his previous success in this state, when he was still trying to find his footing on the PGA Tour.

And of course he forgot about his failed bid just a week earlier and remembered just enough about his last victory more than seven years ago, about how to think and execute and breathe – and it was hard to breathe – coming down the stretch with a chance to win.

And of course he teared up after he steadied his trembling hands, sank a two-foot par putt, and hugged his wife and children and his long-time caddie.

With déjà vu washing over him on a windy and dry afternoon, David Toms won the 39th U.S. Senior Open Sunday at The Broadmoor with a combination of punctilious ball-striking, patience and putting – the very things he did so well in a solid PGA Tour career accented by his 2001 PGA Championship victory.

“My emotions are all over the place,” said the Louisiana native, who won for the first time since the 2011 Crowne Plaza Invitational at Colonial, the last of his 13 tour titles. “It was just so hard. When you haven’t done it in a while, it’s pretty brutal. And I’m just glad I got it done.”

Toms, 51, emerged from a day-long scuffle with the intransigent East Course and a handful of determined adversaries – midway through the back nine he was part of a five-man logjam at the top – to become the eighth player to make the Senior Open his first victory on the Champions Tour. And he did it with a series of clutch shots down the stretch, none more important than the 16-footer for birdie at the par-3 16th that gave him the lead and the 20-foot par putt at the intimidating par-4 17th that helped preserve it.

When he two-putted the 72nd hole for par, Toms had completed an even-par 70 and one-stroke victory over Miguel Angel Jimenez, Tim Petrovic and Jerry Kelly, who had led after each of the first three rounds. His 3-under 277 total was worth $720,000 and a berth in the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.

By all accounts, it was also worth the wait, considering his glistening eyes in the immediate aftermath and again later at the trophy presentation.

He had reason to be emotional. The week started when his caddie, Scott Gneiser, was rushed to the hospital Thursday morning with chest pains, forcing his son Carter, a sophomore golfer at LSU, to be pressed into service. Paired with fellow PGA champions Davis Love III and Vijay Singh, Toms was uneasy about the situation, to say the least.

“I go up to them before the round, and I’m apologizing. ‘If he gets in your way just yell at him, whatever, he can take it,’” Toms said. “Every time I hit it in the bunker, I never wanted to hit it in the bunker because I didn’t want to see what he was going to … the rake job and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t want to be the bad person there. So that’s the way it started.”

On Friday afternoon, Toms found himself three over par and slipping out of contention. Carter set him straight, the son switching roles as it were, with his dad. “He said to me, ‘You’re going to make bogeys in a U.S. Open.’ It sounded like something I would say to him,” Toms said. “He did an unbelievable job. He really kept me in there.”

Toms salvaged a 71. When Gneiser returned on Saturday, he was able to post a bogey-free 66, setting himself up for a second date in the final pairing in as many weeks, this time with Kelly, whose one-stroke lead left Toms in the identical situation he faced the week prior at the American Family Insurance Championship in Wisconsin when he trailed Esteban Toledo by one shot.

Winner of the 1999 International in nearby Castle Pines, Colo., Toms struck the ball pure amid swirling winds, but he struggled with his distance control, hitting just eight of 18 greens in regulation. Time and again he managed to salvage pars thanks to just 26 putts on the day. He never held the outright lead until the 16th hole, when he rammed in only his second birdie of the afternoon and reacted with an uncharacteristic fist pump.

More characteristic – and familiar – was his uncanny par save on the following hole. Fighting nerves, his drove into the left fairway bunker on the 532-yard par-4, forcing him to lay up. A so-so approach relegated him to a left-curling downhill 20-footer. Three feet from the cup it looked so good that Kelly raised his putter in the air watching from behind.

“It always comes down to those putts,” said Kelly, who closed with a 72 after fighting a cold all week. “You end up, he makes birdie on 16. And let me tell you, that par putt on 17, that I had a front row seat, that was pretty solid. That was nice. Did you guys see that I rose my putter? That was just a pure putt, and that’s … he’s a major champion already. And now he’s got his first win out here.”

Toms is a major champion because on the 72nd hole at Atlanta Athletic Club, after being forced to lay up, he put his third shot on the green and sank a 12-foot par putt to beat Phil Mickelson by a stroke. Different circumstances yet the congruency was undeniable.

“Oh, yeah, I thought of that as soon as he hit out of the bunker,” Gneiser said. “And I had a good feeling about it, just as I did then [in Atlanta]. You know, he just was so smooth and steady all day. It was only a matter of time.”

Toms was channeling the thought. “As far as the comparison to the PGA Championship, that was the first thing that popped into my mind after I had to hit the shot out of the bunker,” he admitted. “I was in the middle of the fairway, I’m still in good shape. It’s normally a par-5, just like 18 at the Athletic Club was. So I need to go make a birdie.”

Which he did. To top things off, Toms sensed one final rush of recall standing over his 15-footer for birdie on the final hole.

“I thought a lot about the International this week, winning at Castle Pines. I thought of my son, who played there on Wednesday, so I kind of thought about that a lot,” he said. “In fact, what I thought about over the last putt that I had on 18 was that year that I won the International, I had to two-putt to win, and I had a downhill right-to-left breaking putt just like I had here. And I actually made it that year. And I thought I had made this one. … So you can tell that I was always trying to draw on something positive from the past.”

And, of course, as they say, past is prologue. It was for David Toms, who reached inside himself for the player he once was and reanimated himself.

And of course there was satisfaction. “It’s been a while since I’ve made putts that I really had to make to win a golf tournament, no doubt about that,” he said.

“And I’m so happy. Until you’re able to do it, you have doubts.”

Which he now can forget.

The post David Toms leans on memories to guide him to U.S. Senior Open victory appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Strege
The last man standing in this battle with a singular opponent, the brutal East Course at the Broadmoor, was David Toms, who made the U.S. Senior Open his maiden PGA Tour Champions victory on Sunday.

Toms, 51, birdied the 16th hole to take the lead, made a difficult par save at 17, and a two-putt par at 18 to win by one over Jerry Kelly, Miguel Angel Jimenez and Tim Petrovic.

Kelly, who led after each of the first three rounds, bogeyed the 11th and 12th holes and was unable to make another birdie to counter Toms’ 16th hole birdie.

Toms, who won the PGA Championship in 2001, had played 34 PGA Tour Champions events without winning before prevailing in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Sunday. He closed with an even-par 70 and finished at three-under par 277.

“First of all, it’s been a long time, obviously, the last time I held a trophy,” he said. “To do it in a USGA event is even more special. I didn’t really have the patience for U.S. Open searly in my career. I get better at it as my career went on. Never won one, but I got close. To finally have one, just means my patience is probably where it needs to be, finally.”

Six players either held or shared the lead on the back nine — Toms, Paul Goydos, Brandt Jobe, Petrovic, Miguel Angel Jimenez and Kelly. Goydos took the solo lead when he rammed home a 25-foot birdie putt at 15, but he bogeyed 17 and 18 to end in a tie for fifth, two back.

Toms, a deft putter even on the extremely tricky greens at the Broadmoor, hit only eight greens in regulation, yet rescued himself with his short game and won with his putter. He made an 18-foot birdie putt at 16 to secure the lead, then another 18-footer, this one a downhiller at 17 to save par.

The post David Toms rallies to win the U.S. Senior Open by one on a treacherous Broadmoor course appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Strege
Laughter is the best medicine, so they say. Dottie Pepper, at least, was laughing, though nervously so, in the wake of her memorable close encounter of the weird kind.

A decade ago, during the third round of the U.S. Senior Open on the East Course at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo., Pepper, in her role as an on-course reporter for NBC, came face to face—close enough, anyway—with a black bear.

“Kid,” NBC’s resident raconteur and comedian Roger Maltbie said during a commercial break when the threat had passed, “you picked the wrong day to wear white.”

Bada boom.

The U.S. Senior Open returns to The Broadmoor this week, and though Pepper won’t be there, her story is worth revisiting, given that the black bear was the most memorable part of the championship.

We say this with no disrespect intended for the winner, Eduardo Romero, also known as El Gato, the Cat. Hey, in the food chain, a bear is higher than a cat.

The Broadmoor sits at the base of Cheyenne Mountain (home of NORAD, incidentally), and wildlife abounds—deer, mountain lions, foxes, snakes and, yes, bears.

“We’d been told that they were around,” Pepper said from her home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on Tuesday. “It was discussed in the production meeting and we were kind of told what not to do, like, ‘don’t run.’

“I heard throughout the week they had been making their presence known in the compound. A mom and a couple of her cubs were in the dumpster every morning. We knew that. It was drought conditions, and they were coming further down the mountains to get food.

“Obviously, we know they’re out there. We were hearing while on the air that there was a bear seen over by [hole] No. 11 or 12.”

Pepper wanted more assurance that it was not in her vicinity.

“Guys, tell me again, where’s that bear?” she asked those in the production trailer.

“Oh, don’t worry, Dottie, it’s going in the opposite direction.” The opposite direction of whom?

Pepper was on the left side of the 13th fairway when the bear came charging over a rise and straight toward her.

“I look up, and thank God we were in commercial break,” she said. “Here he comes full tilt, and he’s coming right at me. ‘It’s the bear! It’s the bear!’ He was making a deadbeat for me.”

She dropped her yardage book and tentatively began to run. “Then I remembered, you’re not supposed to run,” she said.

The bear eventually passed by and then through the fans on the left-hand side of the fairway—“they split like the Red Sea,” she said—and eventually made its way through the West Course and back into the wilderness.

“It scared me, but also made me realize his fur is kind of moving with him. It was so perfectly shiny, sort of like black, but you didn’t know if it was black, purple or green. It was so big, so fast and so beautiful.

“Everyone else was laughing their tails off, and I had this nervous laugh. Gary [Koch, another NBC broadcaster] said that it could have been really bad. It hit me that night when that clip opened on [ESPN’s] SportsCenter, how big he was. I could have died. It might have seemed funny at the time, but I didn’t sleep well that night.”

Pepper has a photo of the bear closing on her hanging on a wall in her home, as does Bernhard Langer, who was in the 13th fairway and was a nearby witness to the harrowing scene.

Anyone familiar with Pepper’s playing career would likely recall how fierce a competitor she was. I noted in my story for Golf World that week, “the bear might rue the day were it to have tangled with the famously feisty Pepper.”

Thankfully for Pepper, and the bear, we’ll never know.

The post Dottie Pepper recalls her harrowing encounter with a black bear at the 2008 U.S. Senior Open at the Broadmoor appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.