Nick Taylor chips the impossible 72nd hole to win the Sony Open

One of the greatest features of sports is that they are driven by a commanding sense of destiny.

The competition can be intense and the opportunities can be many, but when we’ve reached the bottom, we usually feel like we got the result we deserved. In golf, all that remains to be learned by sunrise on Sunday morning is the path from point A (the opening shots) to point B (winner’s circle).

But there is no person in the golf world, and probably no person in the spiritual world, who would have predicted it Nick Taylor would win the Sony Open by the time he reached the 72nd freeway in Waialae. It wasn’t just that Taylor was trailing by two shots on the final hole, with the leaders still behind him. Not only that he had made back-to-back bogeys on the 69th and 70th holes to fall into that position. Not only was he seconds away from overcooking his approach on the 72nd hole to the back bumper of the green, leaving a dismal 60 feet down a ridge just to get to a playoff. It was that Taylor himself he didn’t think he had a chance.

“It was a tough day,” he admitted later. “I was 1-over 7 and I wasn’t really thinking about winning.”

But then the great pendulum of fate swung from behind the 72nd green at Waialae, and suddenly Taylor was watching his ball roll down the ridge with perfect pace and line, tracking ever closer to the hole. And then, just as suddenly, it fell in and Nick Taylor was no longer two strokes off the lead. He was the leader in the club, related to Echavarria. And Spaun and Jaeger were in trouble behind him.

The sequence arrived in an instant and was most noticeable NBC broadcastwhich had effectively shifted its focus FAR by Taylor to keep maximum attention on the three players with the best chance of winning the tournament. The start of Taylor’s chip barely flashed over the TV screen, and then he was at the bottom of the hole and the NBC crew was expressing their solemn shock at the possibility that Taylor could now make a playoff.

The two golfers each birdied the first playoff hole. But then, after he bogeyed the 18th hole for the second time, it looked like a finish was near. Taylor had timed his approach well this time, leaving 40 yards on the pin, while Echavarria had hit a high hybrid in the 40 the legs.

But Taylor wouldn’t go away. He hit a perfect chip shot to 3 feet, moving the pressure back to Echavarria, who dropped his putt off the back end.

It was Echavarria’s turn again, and this time, the birdie putt missed, leaving Taylor with a 3-footer to win the title. Taylor hit his ball straight to the bottom of the hole. The tour is over. victory.

As the weight of the moment washed over him, so did the depth of his shock. For the third time in the last three years – the first being his equally dramatic 72nd hole Canadian Open Nationalsthe second being in one equally exciting playoffs at the WM Phoenix Open – Taylor had snatched victory from the jaws of the impossible.

Taylor was a winner again on the PGA Tour, and he had cemented himself as one of the tour’s worst finishers — though the top-tier Canuck would never admit as much.

“I feel like I can be ready and it’s a lot of fun,” he said Sunday with a smile.

Indeed he can. In ’23, the genius of the pack redid the Canadian Open tournament logo. In ’24, turned him into a Signature Event winner. And in the 25th he made it a winner even when it I didn’t believe it was possible.

Was it fate? Maybe. But it certainly didn’t feel that way.