PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Mother Nature interrupted the Players Championship on Mother’s Day and nearly wrecked one of the greatest moments of Martin Kaymer’s golfing career.
Kaymer was cruising with three-shot lead and five holes remaining when play was suspended for an hour-and-a-half Sunday at TPC Sawgrass. When he returned the course after the delay, Kaymer looked like a different player than the one he’d been for the previous 13 holes, which was self-assured and unflappable.
Kaymer almost let the tournament slip away — with a sloppy double bogey on 15 and a tentative par the birdieable par 5 16th — before making an improbable recovery to secure a stirring one-shot victory at 13-under par.
It was just good enough to edge Jim Furyk, who was sitting in the clubhouse at 12-under par watching and waiting for a possible playoff or back-in victory.
The moment of the tournament occurred on the famous island-green 17th hole, where Kaymer summoned the gumption amid chaos to bury a 28-foot par-save putt to retain his one-shot lead.
When Kaymer stepped to the 17th, a hole he had played 23 times in tournament competition and hit only one ball into the water, he nearly made it two when his tee shot hit a slope and nearly spun off the green, settling on a sliver of greenside rough, just inside the hazard line, inches from the bulkhead.
“Really?’’ an exasperated Kaymer uttered when he saw the bizarre bounce.
He proceeded to fluff the chip and leave himself with that 28-foot par putt with eight feet of break in it. When the ball disappeared into the hole, it immediately joined the famous “better-than-most’’ bomb Tiger Woods drained there in the third round of his 2001 win as one of the most memorable moments on that hole in tournament history.
“That up‑ and ‑down at 17 … I know how hard that is living here … and that wasn’t one that I would have expected him to get up ‑and‑ down very often percentage‑-wise,’’ Furyk said. “That putt was incredible, to have a good eight feet of break in it and pour it right in the middle … it was one really, really good putt.’’
Kaymer called it “a very strange and very nice way to make a 3 on that hole. Making a putt like this is more than big; I think I will realize it the next few days.’’
The putt left Kaymer floating to the 18th tee needing a par to win.
He pounded his tee shot to the fairway, then left his approach shot short of the green, 42 feet from the flag and pushed his putt three feet, seven inches past the cup.
Kaymer then calmly drained the inside-left putt, looked to the darkening sky with the relieved expression of a man who was just released from jail, pumped his fist and hugged his caddie, Craig Connelly.
The putt was of similar distance — not to mention pressure — to the one Kaymer made to defeat Steve Stricker and secure the clinching point in Europe’s Ryder Cup triumph over the U.S. in 2012 at Medinah.
Some six years have passed since Kaymer lost his mother, Rina, to cancer, but thoughts of her never stray far from his mind — particularly on Sunday, Mother’s Day.
That’s why the usually-stoic German unleashed such uncharacteristic emotion when he was finally able to nail down the victory. His voice cracked in the immediate aftermath of victory when talking about his mother and revealing that his brother, Philip, had sent him a poignant text message Sunday morning.
“I think about her every day; I don’t need a Mother’s Day,’’ Kaymer said. “It was a very nice text. It was very emotional. I don’t get those texts usually from my brother. I was just alone today. There was no one really here from my family or anyone else, and I just had Craig. We battled our way through the last two days.
“So they were with me somehow [in spirit], but they were not [physically],’’ Kaymer said of his family. “It was a good day for all of us.’’
It was not a good day for Jordan Spieth, who began the round tied for the lead with Kaymer at 12-under and shot 74 to finish three shots behind Kaymer — the same deficit he ended on at last month’s Masters, when he shot a final-round 72 and lost to Bubba Watson.
For Spieth, it was a bitter finish considering how flawlessly he’d played all week, playing the first 58 holes without a single bogey before carding five of them in his final 14 holes, and considering his game became unglued in a similar way to Augusta last month.
“It’ll probably feel similar to the way it felt at Augusta and I can draw on that,’’ Spieth said Saturday as he looked forward to Sunday’s final round. “Hopefully, it goes my way.’’
It, of course, did not.