Carl Pettersson won the Wyndham Championship on his home course.  The Swedish North Carolinian shot 2 under par 68 Sunday for a two stroke victory, his first since 2006.  It didn’t always look good for the man with the southern Swedish drawl, in fact after the way he played the 10th and 11th holes I was thinking to myself that he was about to fold like a cheap suit.  You know the kind, couldn’t hold a crease if it had hands. 

“Not getting it up and down on 11 kind of (ticked) me off,” Pettersson said. “I kind of told myself, ‘I’m letting the tournament get away from me again.’ … That was where the tournament was won for me.”

What followed was three birdies during the next four holes and the rest was, as they say, history.  Most of the afternoon was a duel between Mr. Pettersson and another long putter wielder, Scott McCarron.  The beneficiary of those two bogeys on 10 and 11, Mr. McCarron gave the stroke back on the 12th, three putting from 13 feet.  “Second place is obviously tough to swallow right now, but I’ll probably be pretty happy here when I realize I’ve got a job for the rest of the year,” McCarron said.  And for a man who missed all of 2007 due to elbow surgery and has no Tour card,  a second top 10 finish for the year is quite an accomplishment. 

Adding a modicum of interest to this final event before the beginning of the highly anticipated FedEx Cup playoffs, were moves by a couple of players on the bubble, as the jargon of playoffs goes,  J.J.Henry and Rich Beem.  Mr. Henry, without a top 25 finish to this point in the season, fired a final round 62 finishing tied for fourth place and playing his way into the Barclay’s next week by moving up 42 spots to 135.    Mr. Beem shot a second straight 63 finishing third and playing his way into the Cup playoffs as well bhy jumping 52 spots to 114th place.  “I knew I had to play my butt off just to make it up there,” Beem said. “I didn’t want to have four weeks off, you know, and I’m glad at least I got into the first one.”  Seems to me that Mr. Beem ought to consider playing his butt off more often as he seems to do quite well when the alternative for the coming week is to go home until silly season starts.

Martin Laird was another mover, after sharing the first round lead and falling off the pace, he shot a 63 to tie Mr. Henry and move 36 spots to number 128. 

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, and while I know that TV tends to show very few shots hit by players other than Tiger Woods or others in the world top 10 in addition to the tournament leaders, today’s broadcast left out a whole lot of what might have been entertaining stuff.  I think they showed six different players at most so the broadcast team could spout a whole lot of nothing.  This was the first time it really hit me that part of the reason I don’t know any of the players on the PGA tour is that I never get to see the majority of them hit even a single shot.  Irresponsible journalism.  Maybe to weighty a term.  Lousy entertainment.  That seems like a better fit.  I wonder though, if I don’t watch do you think they’d miss me?  Yeah, I thought not too.