PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — The scariest putt in golf is somewhere between three and four feet.
Short enough that you expect to make it.
Long enough that you might not.
It gets tougher, I’d imagine, to hit a three-and-a-half footer with 5,000 people watching from the hillside in front of you.
Tougher when they’ve just gasped in horror at what you’ve just done.
Tougher still when one of those people is Rory McIlroy, who just so happens to be one stroke behind you.
And tougher when another is Tiger Woods, your childhood hero, looking on from a perch beside the clubhouse, 50 yards and 500 miles away, waiting to shake your hand as long as you can somehow get your ball to the bottom of that hole.
It gets tougher when you’re on the brink of winning your first PGA Tour event, something you’ve dreamt of your entire life, something you know you can do but also know isn’t guaranteed.
And tougher knowing that missing wouldn’t just mean letting an opportunity slip by — it would mean blowing a six-stroke lead, crashing on the final turn, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It gets tougher when the pressure hasn’t slowly mounted, but instead, after three rounds and 15 holes of low stress and many birdies, it hits like a freight train, with a shrinking lead, a growing crowd, decibels, nerves and heart rate rising by the minute.
And it gets tougher when you can’t feel your hands.
SUNDAY BROUGHT THE MOST GLORIOUS WEATHER in the history of Los Angeles, tied for first with 80 percent of all days in L.A. history, 70 degrees and sunny, deep blue cloudless sky matching the deep blue ocean just visible from the balcony of Riviera Country Club’s iconic clubhouse.
That was the setting for the final round of the Genesis Invitational, which felt like it could go one of two directions. Jacob Bridgeman began the day with a six-shot lead over Rory McIlroy and seven-plus over the rest of the gang, having played nearly flawless golf through three rounds. Bridgeman has been very good and very steady since last season, but entering Sunday he’d never won. Would he succumb to the pressure, blow up and yield to the chase pack? Or would he keep his foot on the gas and continue speeding away from the rest of the field? Those felt like the two options.
Instead, much of the day settled in the awkward in-between.
There are few better golf settings than the iconic old-school cool of Riviera, though early tee times plus an L.A. crowd living up to its get-there-in-the-fourth-inning reputation led to a slightly muted early stretch.
Fans were pulling for McIlroy, wanting to will him into a comeback, but they were quietly supportive of Bridgeman, too, an impressive unknown without an ounce of villain in him. Bridgeman matched McIlroy’s birdie at No. 1 to keep his lead at six. He birdied the third to stretch it to seven. Even that was greeted with light applause. McIlroy’s early birdie tries slid by, doing little to ignite the crowd. Hollywood seemed unimpressed with this particular bit of anticlimax.
(One star among them: Ben Affleck, who walked the entire front nine inside the ropes with his son and tried multiple times to frame up the perfect iPhone photo of a McIlroy tee shot. The stars, they’re just like us!)
Bridgeman has been forged in the fires of competitive golf, first growing up in South Carolina, then at Clemson and more recently on the game’s top circuit. He’s been on a steady upward trajectory. He’s made it clear that success isn’t all his own.
When he first started working with his swing coach Scott Hamilton, he had some work to do. “I didn’t hit the ball straight, didn’t hit it high, didn’t have a lot of control with my irons,” he said.
When he settled on his first-choice caddie, G.W. Cable, there was just one problem: he’d have to take a pay cut to join Bridgeman on the Korn Ferry Tour.
“He took a gamble on me and luckily we only spent one year down there and I think he’s pretty pleased with his gamble,” Bridgeman said.
He earned $4.4 million on the course last season. He was playing for a $4 million winner’s check on Sunday. Good pressure to have.
But just because he’s been good doesn’t mean it’d be easy. As the day lingered, Bridgeman let the rest of the field do the same. He bogeyed 4. He bogeyed 7. He hit the middles of greens, he scared the hole, just missing putts that he’d watched fall the first three days.
McIlroy finally made some semblance of a push early on the back nine. Birdie at 11 cut the lead to five before a highlight-reel hole-out birdie from the bunker at 12 electrified the crowd for the first time all day.
Up ahead, several other contenders made their presence felt. Aldrich Potgieter got to 15 under with an eagle at 11. Adam Scott played stunning golf, stacking eight birdies and zero bogeys to post the clubhouse lead at 16 under. And then, just as Bridgeman found himself in a spot of bother, Kurt Kitayama made his seventh and eighth birdies of the day in the group ahead to post 17 under par.
Bridgeman wobbled with a wayward tee shot at No. 16, dumping his iron into the front right bunker, an inescapable jail.
“It was honestly easy until I got to about 16 and then it got really hard,” Bridgeman said post-round. His caddie, looking at his lie, didn’t hesitate. He had to aim right and play for bogey. His lengthy par putt wandered past the hole; he negotiated in a nervy try for bogey. The lead was suddenly one.
Things only got tougher at the par-5 17th, where Bridgeman’s second shot sailed right and found a bunker, leaving him with no good options. He did well to play a sensible shot.
“Definitely around the green, that was the first time that I had to play defense,” he said.
It was around this time that Bridgeman lost feeling in his hands.
“I didn’t really feel really crazy nervous until I had a five-footer for bogey on 16; that one was sketchy,” he said. “I hit a really good putt and luckily it went in, and then I was really nervous from there on out. I couldn’t even feel my hands on the last couple greens, I just hit the putt hoping it would get somewhere near the hole.”
But on full shots, Bridgeman said, he still felt okay.
“I felt like I was just kind of in robot mode and autopilot, I could just swing the club and it would do exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. An envious feeling.
That’s what he did on No. 18, sending driver up the left-center fairway off the tee and playing a towering approach right at the hole, 20 feet short, straight uphill.
And then he left it three and a half feet short.
The crowd groaned. They murmured. Suddenly, a tantalizing possibility was back in play: a miss would mean a three-way playoff between Bridgeman, Kitayama and McIlroy, whose dramatic birdie putt had dripped over the front edge just moments before.
Bridgeman is good friends with Chris Gotterup, a rising star on Tour and a recent multiple-time winner. He recounted watching the WM Phoenix Open, where Gotterup poured in a winning birdie putt with aggressive speed.
“We were like, what were you doing? You hit your putt so hard, it was going to go four feet by the hole. He said, ‘I have no idea, I couldn’t feel my hands.’
“I thought he was kind of crazy until I got to this moment and then I was like, yep, I understand what you’re talking about now, Chris. I had no idea what to do.”
It’s tough to make a three-and-a-half footer, and it’s tougher if you can sense that some portion of the crowd around is suddenly hoping that you will.
Tough for you or me.
But, as he and we suddenly realized, easier for Jacob Bridgeman.
“The hole’s really white and it looked pretty big for whatever reason on 18,” he said. He had his read — hit it at the middle of the middle — and he knew what he could control.
“I was just hoping that the ball would roll where it was supposed to roll.”
Most of the time, nothing good can happen with a three-and-a-half-footer. It’s a multiple-choice test with two options: Relief or disaster. This time, though, salvation lay within. The ball rolled as it was supposed to. Bridgeman’s triumph was official. He plunged into the winner’s whirlpool; his wife greeted him on the green, he floated through his CBS interview, he climbed the stairs, shook Woods’ hand, didn’t process whatever he said.
“This is way, way better than I’ve ever dreamt it,” he said.
He also offered an admission.
“I’m glad it’s done now.”
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
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