Geoff Ogilvy slam-dunked a chip shot en route to winning the CA Championship in Miami on Monday.
Tiger Woods got a favourable ricochet off a tree on the way to winning the 2000 PGA Championship.
Hale Irwin's tee shot on the final hole of the 1984 Bing Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach (now the AT&T National Pro-Am) was headed for the ocean before it hit a rock and caromed back to the fairway, from where he birdied the hole. He went on to beat Canada's Jim Nelford in a playoff.
Then there was the break Roger Maltbie got. His ball whacked a gallery post and stayed in play during a playoff for the 1976 Memorial Tournament in Dublin, Ohio, which he went on to win.
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You have to be good to win in pro golf, but you also have to be good and lucky sometimes.
As gifted as Ogilvy is — he won the 2006 U.S. Open — the Australian wasn't looking good after chunking a pitch shot from the left greenside rough on the par-three 13th hole Monday during the rain-delayed last round of the WGC-CA Championship at Doral. His lead was dwindling and he was making mistakes.
Ogilvy was in the rough, about 25 feet from the hole. His chip shot had too much velocity, but it did have location. The ball hit the middle of the flagstick and fell into the hole.
Ogilvy made an improbable par, and later said he thought the ball would have rolled 15 feet past the hole had it not slammed into the flagstick.
"The first chip was horrible," Ogilvy said. "The second one wasn't great. It came out a bit hot, but it was very lucky to go in. It was probably not that lucky to hit the flag, but it was very lucky to go in.
"You quite often see guys hit chips like that that slam into the pin and stop a foot away or something. That's quite a common occurrence, but for it to go in is pretty fortunate."
Ogilvy holed out a longer chip shot on the 17th hole on the last day of the U.S. Open he won. That one also was moving quickly.
Ogilvy then hit a difficult long pitch shot from in front of the last green, picking it cleanly off the tight turf at the Winged Foot Golf Club in White Plains, N.Y. He left himself a six-footer for par, and made the putt.
But he hadn't yet won the U.S. Open. He soon was the recipient of a really big break when Phil Mickelson, leading by a shot, botched the last hole and made double-bogey. Ogilvy had won his first major championship.
"Whenever you watch people win golf tournaments, you often see something like that happen to the guy who wins somewhere along the way," Ogilvy said Monday of his lucky and good, and good and lucky, chip shot at Doral. "It happens quite regularly, and so you can't help but think, well, last time I won a big golf tournament I did that on the 17th hole [at Winged Foot].
"Maybe there's symmetry, I don't know. It was a flash. I didn't think about it for very long, but I'm sure it came into my head for a minute."
Even the very best need luck on their side.
Woods was in a duel with Bob May at the 2000 PGA Championship. Woods took a one-shot lead to the last hole of their three-hole playoff. His drive sailed left into a sycamore tree, caromed onto a cart path and then bounced high in the air where it seemed to linger a while. The ball finished in a decent lie. Woods parred the hole and won. Woods knew he had got a lucky break.
He didn't get those breaks at Doral, not that he was complaining. It's just that he didn't get what 2007 Open champion Padraig Harrington referred to as the sort of "signal" that suggests a win is in the cards.
"I heard Geoff bladed one in the hole for par," Woods said of Ogilvy's chip shot. "That's what you need to have happen. Those are the things that have happened to me, and things weren't going that way this week."
In golf, as in everything, it's important to be good, or great. But some luck also helps.
Ogilvy had some luck. Its intervention on the 13th hole was by no means the only reason he won. But it was a contributing factor. When a golfer wins, it often is.
rube@sympatico.ca
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