Manuel Elvira is standing in the middle of the 18th fairway at Wentworth.
He is 30 years old and he has never won a professional tournament. He is tied for the lead of the BMW PGA Championship with one hole to play.
His tee shot, an iron, is exactly where it needed to be. He has just over 250 yards left on a par five, with the grandstand waiting at the far end.
Birdie wins it. Par means a playoff.
At this moment, nothing has gone wrong.
Before we get to what he does next, it is worth knowing where the number he is chasing came from.
Seventeen under
J.J. Spaun was playing Wentworth for the first time. He arrived with something to prove.
A couple of weeks earlier, he had been left off the US Presidents Cup team. He did not pretend otherwise. “Being left off the Presidents Cup team a couple weeks ago was very disappointing,” he said. “I played with a huge chip on my shoulder.”
For most of Sunday, it did not show on the scorecard. He did not birdie the 12th. He missed a short chance on the 13th. The last leaderboard he remembered seeing had Aaron Rai at 16 under with holes to play, and Spaun reckoned the winning number would end up at 17 or 18 under.
So he went after it. “I just started freewheeling it, trying to hit it as close as I can,” he said.
He picked out the par-three 14th as the turn. He birdied it. He holed good putts on 15 and 16. He had another chance on 17 and, in his words, didn’t hit a good putt. Then he birdied the 18th.
| Hole | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Par | 3 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 |
| Spaun | 2 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 4 |
Four birdies in five holes. A closing 67, and 17 under in the clubhouse.
He said afterwards that he had known all day he needed to be patient, because of how Wentworth finishes. The 17th and 18th are both par fives. You can play them eagle, eagle. You can just as easily play them bogey, bogey.
He did not back into this championship. He went and got it, on the stretch that punishes exactly that kind of aggression. Then he posted his number and went to wait.
The man still out there
Elvira had shared the lead going into Sunday, and he played the final round in the last group. At the 10th he holed a 25-footer for birdie to draw level again.
Then the 17th. His second shot there was blind. He could not see it land, but he saw the line, and the applause kept going, which told him most of what he needed to know. When he reached the green the ball was about nine feet from the hole.
He holed it. Eagle. Seventeen under, level with Spaun.
He was not hanging on. He had just eagled the 71st hole.
Which brings us back to the 18th fairway.
The 72nd hole
He decided to lay up. There was nothing wrong with the decision. Put it at a comfortable number, wedge it close, and give yourself a putt to win.
The lay-up drifted left.
It found a fairway bunker, and not a kind one. He was left about 110 yards from the flag, out of the sand, with the championship riding on the next swing. He later called it “the toughest shot” he could have left himself.
From the fairway bunker
- BirdieHe wins the championship
- ParPlayoff with Spaun
- Bogey or worseSpaun is champion
He played it. The ball came out hot, flew the green and finished long, off the grandstand behind it.
That meant free relief and a drop in the designated drop zone. It was not a friendly place to be. He was short-sided, with a bunker between him and the flag.
He needed a soft chip over the sand.
It came up short. Into the bunker.
Now he had to hole a bunker shot to make par. He played a very good one. It ran by and stopped about four feet away.
Four feet for bogey.
He missed it.
He tapped in for a seven. A double bogey, from the middle of the fairway, tied for the lead.
What it cost
The double bogey dropped Elvira from a share of the lead into a share of second at 15 under, two behind, alongside Rory McIlroy, Adam Scott and Aaron Rai.
Spaun took home $1,530,000. Elvira’s share of second was $596,250. A bogey would have given him second on his own, worth $990,000, so the four-footer alone was worth $393,750.
There was one more thing tangled up in it, and it is stranger than the money.
His brother was watching
Nacho Elvira is a three-time winner on the DP World Tour, and he had been playing the championship himself. On Sunday he was out on the course watching his younger brother. Manuel noticed him around the 16th green. “I could see them in the crowd, my girlfriend, my manager, my brother, and it was amazing to have their support,” he said.
Here is the unusual part. The DP World Tour gives PGA Tour cards to the top ten players on the season’s Race to Dubai who are not already PGA Tour members. Going into Wentworth, the man in tenth, holding the last of those cards, was Nacho.
A win in a Rolex Series event carries a huge haul of points. It would have sent Manuel sharply up that list, towards the card places, and every player who climbs above Nacho moves him closer to the wrong side of the line.
There is nothing to suggest either brother was thinking about any of that. Nacho was there to watch Manuel try to win. Afterwards, the two of them walked off together.
What he said
A man in his position could be forgiven for saying very little. Elvira said a good deal, and most of it was generous.
He was clear about where it went wrong. He called the lay-up “the wrong shot”, one that “left myself the toughest shot in the fairway bunker, and wasn’t able to pull it off.”
He was just as clear about the rest of it. “It’s been a great week and I’m really glad for it,” he said. “I’ve played some of the best golf probably of my life. I was in contention and I wasn’t really that nervous.”
Before the round, he said, he had told himself to breathe and enjoy it, and to remember what it was.
“They can’t take it away from you, playing on the last group on Sunday at Wentworth.”Manuel Elvira
They can’t. He also climbed 50 places on the Race to Dubai, to 33rd.
The champion
None of this takes anything from Spaun. He is the first player to win the BMW PGA on debut since Byeong Hun An in 2015, and only the third American to win it, after Arnold Palmer and Billy Horschel. He is the second in three years.
He came to a course he had never played in competition, in a week when he had every reason to feel hard done by, and won it by going and getting it. The Presidents Cup starts at Medinah on Thursday without him. He said he had wanted to show he deserved to be there.
There was also a guest in the gallery. The Spauns have fallen for England, the Cotswolds in particular, where they go in December. They are fans of Clarkson’s Farm and have been to Jeremy Clarkson’s farm shop and his pub, The Farmer’s Dog, without ever catching him. During the week, his wife Melody told him a special guest would be following him. He eventually found her in the crowd, holding a Jeremy Clarkson face mask.
“Jeremy was there in spirit,” Spaun said, “and I think he brought me good fortune.”
Five holes and one
One player birdied four of his last five holes. Another eagled the 71st and reached the 72nd tied for the lead. A few minutes later, there was a champion.
Four birdies in five holes can change a career.
So can one lay-up.
Sources: DP World Tour, Golf Monthly, GOLF.com, Golf Digest, The Irish Times, Sky Sports, Golf Channel and the players’ post-round interviews. Illustrations by Green Read.