One more putt.
Easy! Especially Sunday, when Bernhard Langer had been making all the putts. A 50-footer on 2 at Phoenix Country Club. A 20-footer on 3. A 15-footer on 4. A 25-footer on 9. A 20-footer on 13. He couldn’t miss. He ascended into the lead during the final round of the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, the season-ending event for the PGA Tour Champions, the 50-and-over bunch tour.
But golf, as we well know, is fickle. It’s a bit like a roulette wheel, in that whatever success you found on previous holes won’t necessarily reappear on the ones upcoming. Langer may know this better than most. He’s been successful — two-time Masters winner, more Champions victories than anyone — and he’s been around a while. Over his 67 years, the list of things he hasn’t experienced is shorter than a gimme.
Interestingly, one item not checked off had been a Charles Schwab victory, and he was rolling Sunday until golf did its thing. On 17, he got questionably aggressive on a ball near a tree, he struck it, and he coughed up all of a two-stroke advantage after a bogey. On 18, a par-5, Langer hooked a tee shot left, punched through some trees, then pitched on to 30 feet. He needed that to drop, and a Steven Alker miss, to win — and continue an impressive streak. Langer had won 17-straight years on the Champions circuit, but, after missing a stretch earlier this year due to a torn left Achilles, he’d been shut out in his 18th campaign.
You hope to continue these types of things. You want to win. Seemingly, he knew where he stood.
Terry Holt, his longtime caddie, appeared to understand too.
He quieted the talk now around his pro with three words.
They’re at the top of this article.
“I said to him when we were over the putt: One more putt,” Holt said, in an interview with the Champions’ social-media team.
“I mean, he’s putted the lights out of it this week, one of his best-ever putting weeks. Ran the tables all week on the greens. And I just said one more putt.
“And he did it.”
Did he.
On 18, his left-to-right 30-footer touched the lower left side of the hole and fell. Langer dropped his broomstick putter. He raised his arms. He flung his visor. He slapped his hands. He saluted the crowd. Seconds later, Alker missed, and Langer was your winner. More celebration.
“Every year, he astounds me, amazes me,” Holt told the Champions social-media team. “Every year, he digs deeper and deeper. What a cool thing to keep the streak of 18 successive winning seasons going in the final event with the final putt.
“That’s entertainment, folks.”
That’s something, no doubt. Afterward, though, Langer admitted he was uncertain about the putt. He said he felt he picked the right line, but wondered about the speed. “It did just perfectly what it needed to do and disappeared,” Langer told reporters. “Then all hell broke loose kind of emotionally, so it was pretty wild, yeah.” He also believed the win answered the near-constant question to him.
“People say why am I still playing,” Langer said. “Well, this is why, because I enjoy the adrenaline, I enjoy being in the hunt and I still feel like I can win and be there on the leaderboard. I’ve just proven that again, becoming the oldest winner again and again out here. It’s been great to compete against these guys. Like you said, it never gets old.”
One more putt, indeed.
“Terry, my caddie, after we hit the wedge back here, says, ‘Well, it’s one more putt,’” Langer said during an interview on Golf Channel.
“He’s a prophet, I guess.”
