PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. – The scariest golf shot is somewhere between three and four feet.
Short enough that you expect to make it.
As long as it may not.
It gets harder, I would imagine, to hit a bottom three and a half with 5,000 people watching from the hill in front of you.
Tougher when they’ve just gasped in horror at what you’ve just done.
Even tougher when one of those people is Rory McIlroy, who happens to be a shot behind you.
And tougher when the other is Tiger Woods, your childhood hero, watching from a clubhouse perch 50 yards 500 miles away, waiting to shake your hand as long as you can somehow get the ball to the bottom of that hole.
It gets tougher when you’re on the verge of winning your first PGA Tour event, something you’ve dreamed about your whole life, something you know you can do but also know isn’t guaranteed.
And tougher to know that losing doesn’t just mean letting an opportunity pass you by—it means blowing a six-shot lead, crashing on the last turn, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It gets tougher when the pressure isn’t slowly building, but instead, after three rounds and 15 low-stress holes and lots of birdies, it hits like a freight train, with a shrinking lead, a growing crowd, decibels, nerves and heart rates rising by the minute.
And it gets tougher when you can’t feel your hands.
SUNDAY BROUGHT THE MOST GLORIOUS WEATHER in Los Angeles history, tied for the first time with 80 percent of all days in LA history, 70 degrees and sunny, deep blue cloudless skies, matching the deep blue ocean visible from the balcony of the iconic Riviera Country Club.
That was the setting for the final round of the Genesis Invitational, which felt like it could go either way. Jacob Bridgeman started the day with a six-shot lead over Rory McIlroy and seven more over the rest of the pack after playing near-perfect golf through three rounds. Bridgeman has been very good and very consistent since last season, but entering Sunday he had never won. Would he give in to the pressure, blow up, and surrender to the chase group? Or would he keep his foot on the gas and continue to speed away from the rest of the field? They felt like the two options.
Instead, most of the day settled into a difficult situation in the middle.
There are few better golf settings than Riviera’s iconic old-school turnout, though early practice times plus an LA crowd living up to its reputation for a tie in fourth led to a slightly muted early stretch.
Fans were rooting for McIlroy, wanting to make him a comeback, but they also quietly backed Bridgeman, an imposing unknown without an ounce of villainy in him. Bridgeman matched McIlroy’s birdie on No. 1 to keep his lead at six. He birdies the third to stretch it to seven. This too was met with light applause. McIlroy’s early birdie tries to slide, doing little to fire up the crowd. Hollywood didn’t seem impressed with this particular anticlimactic piece.
(One star among them: Ben Affleck, who walked the entire front nine inside the ropes with his son and tried several times to create the perfect iPhone photo of a photo of McIlroy. Stars, they’re just like us!)
Bridgeman has been forged in the fires of competitive golf, growing up first at South Carolina, then at Clemson and most recently on the game’s top circuit. It has been on a steady upward trajectory. He has made it clear that the success is not his alone.
When he first started working with his swing coach, Scott Hamilton, he had some work to do. “I didn’t hit the ball straight, I didn’t hit it high, I didn’t have much control with my irons,” he said.
When he settled on his first caddy, GW Cable, there was just one problem: He would have to take a pay cut to join Bridgeman on the Korn Ferry Tour.
“He took a gamble with me and luckily we only spent a year down there and I think he’s pretty happy with his game,” Bridgeman said.
He earned $4.4 million on the course last season. He was playing for a $4 million jackpot on Sunday. Good pressure to have.
But just because he’s been good doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. As the day wore on, Bridgeman allowed the rest of the field to do the same. He bogeyed 4. He bogeyed 7. He hit the middle of the green, he bogeyed the hole, just missing the easy shots he had seen fall the first three days.
McIlroy finally made a semblance of a push early in the ninth. Birdie at 11 cut the lead to five before a key hole birdie from the bunker at 12 electrified the crowd for the first time all day.
Ahead, several other contenders made their presence felt. Aldrich Potgieter reached 15 with an eagle at 11. Adam Scott played stunning golf, racking up eight birdies and zero bogeys to post the club lead at 16. 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 front group to post 17 under par.
Bridgeman faltered with an unfair tee shot at no. 16, dropping his iron into the front right bunker, an inescapable dungeon.
“It was honestly easy until I got to about 16 and then it got really hard,” Bridgeman said after the round. His Qadi, seeing his lie, did not hesitate. He had to aim straight and play for bogey. His long shot wandered past the hole; he negotiated a nervous bogey attempt. The lead was suddenly one.
Things only got tougher on the par-5 17th, where Bridgeman’s second shot sailed straight and found a bunker, leaving him with no good options. He did well to play a reasonable shot.
“Definitely around the green, it was the first time I had to play defense,” he said.
It was at this time that Bridgeman lost feeling in his hands.
“I didn’t really feel crazy nervous until I had a five-footer for bogey on 16; it was a no-brainer,” 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 two greens, I just hit the putt hoping it would go somewhere close to the hole.”
But on full shots, Bridgeman said, he still felt good.
“I felt like I was just in robot and autopilot mode, I could just move the club and it would do exactly what it was supposed to do,” he said. An envious feeling.
That’s what he did in no. 18, driving into the fairway left-center off the tee and playing a high approach right to the hole, 20 yards short, straight uphill.
And then he left it three and a half meters short.
The crowd groaned. They grumbled. Suddenly, a tantalizing possibility came back into play: a loss would mean a three-way playoff between Bridgeman, Kitayama and McIlroy, whose dramatic birdie putt had tipped over the front fringe moments earlier.
Bridgeman is good friends with Chris Gotterup, a rising star on Tour and a recent multiple winner. He pointed to watching the WM Phoenix Open, where Gotterup hit a winning birdie putt with aggressive speed.
“We were like, what were you doing? You hit your putt so hard, it would go four feet from 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 point and then I was like, yeah, I know what you’re talking about now, Chris. I had no idea what to do.”
It’s hard to make a three-and-a-half finish, and it’s even harder if you can feel that part of the crowd around you is suddenly hoping you’ll do it.
Hard for you or me.
But, as he and we suddenly realized, easier for Jacob Bridgeman.
“The hole is really white and it looked pretty big for whatever reason on 18,” he said. He read—hit it in the middle—and knew what he could control.
“I was just hoping the ball rolled where it was supposed to roll.”
In most cases, nothing good can happen with a foot three and a half. It is a multiple choice test with two options: relief or disaster. This time, however, salvation lay within. The ball rolled as it should. Bridgeman’s triumph was official. He plunged into the vortex of the winner; his wife greeted him on the green, he went through his CBS interview, he walked up the stairs, shook Woods’ hand, didn’t process whatever he said.
“This is way, way better than I ever dreamed of,” 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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