Harsh lessons of losing can pay big dividends on the PGA TOUR

Tiger Woods made a quadruple-bogey 8 and four-putted on the way to losing the 1996 Quad City Classic (now the John Deere Classic) to rumpled journeyman Ed “The Grip” Fiori. This, after Woods had held the solo 54-hole lead.

Three weeks later, Woods got his first PGA TOUR win.

“It should have come at Quad City,” he said after winning the Las Vegas Invitational, where in his fifth pro start he dispatched Davis Love III in a playoff. “I learned a lot from that.”

Well, yeah. You could say he’s had an OK career. Woods, of course, reeled off his 81st win and 15th major championship at the Masters three weeks ago. And holding leads? Not until 13 years after Quad City, at the 2009 PGA Championship (Y.E. Yang), would Woods give up another solo 54-hole lead. Like Albert Einstein said, “Failure is success in progress.”

Most every TOUR pro can tell you about the proverbial one that got away, a tournament they had in their grasp only to fumble it away at the end, oftentimes in gruesome and agonizingly public fashion. What’s apparent in hindsight, though, is that such days are not just a rite of passage but also building blocks, foundational necessities even.

Those hard losses? They often lead to spectacular victories. Examples abound:

Rickie Fowler was just 65 starts into his PGA TOUR career but already beginning to hear some chirping about his inability to close, having lost 54-hole leads at the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide in 2010 and the AT&T National in 2011. But at the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship, he rallied on Sunday to make the playoff, then outdueled Rory McIlroy and D.A. Points for his breakthrough victory. “Obviously there's a lot of people that have doubted or said you'll never win,” Fowler said afterwards. “So it's nice to kind of shut them up a little bit.”

Bubba Watson rolled Kevin Kisner 7 and 6 in the championship match of the 2018 World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play, but a year later a smarter, stronger Kisner powered through his bracket and won it all, beating Matt Kuchar 3 and 2 in the final a month ago.

Anirban Lahiri lipped out from five feet in his 2015 Presidents Cup match against Chris Kirk, one of a handful of missed opportunities, any one of which would have won it for the International Team in Seoul, South Korea. But at the 2017 Presidents Cup at Liberty National, with the Americans poised to celebrate a day early, a tougher Lahiri came through in the clutch.

Kyle Stanley went from the lowest low to the highest high in a span of seven days in 2012.

Then there’s two-time Wells Fargo champion McIlroy (2010, 2015), whose entire career has followed this bust-boom cycle. In fact, he said at the Masters, he’d even been reading books on the subject, including “The Obstacle is the Way,” by Ryan Holiday.

What is going on here? And what’s so great about losing that it leads to so much winning?

What doesn’t kill you …

You could be excused if you watched the 2012 Farmers Insurance Open through your fingers as Kyle Stanley, an epic talent from Gig Harbor, Washington, suffered an epic meltdown.

“God, how did I feel?” he says. “Pretty embarrassed.”

With one hand on the trophy as he played the par-5 18th hole at Torrey Pines South, Stanley spun a wedge back into Devlin’s Billabong, took a drop, pitched on with his fifth shot, and three-putted for an 8. He lost to Brandt Snedeker in a playoff, making bogey on the second extra hole.

“It’s no fun to blow a lead like that, especially with a par 5,” Stanley says now. “I think I said after that that I could probably play that hole 1,000 times and always make less than 8.”

Although they’d never met, Mark Few, head coach of Gonzaga, Stanley’s favorite basketball team, texted and told him to keep his head high. “It just kind of brightened my spirits,” Stanley says. Zach Johnson and Steve Stricker checked in, too.

“So many people reached out; I felt a lot of support,” Stanley adds. “A number of players. I wasn’t in as bad a shape as one would think.”

Once the shock wore off, he told himself he was going to have some bad holes, and he’d just had one at a really bad time. He had to forget it; he was still playing some of the best golf of his life.

Seven days later, checking fewer leaderboards, he shot 65 to overtake a faltering Spencer Levin to win the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Fans called him “The Comeback Kid,” and Stanley teared up as he thanked his parents. His roughly 6,000 new Facebook friends reached out, and one of the first congratulatory texts he received was from Few.

“I think winning was maybe the only way I would have put it behind me that quickly,” he says. “I was just playing so well. After something like that it turns into more of a mental thing.”

Experience is the best teacher

Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Before beating Stanley at Torrey, Snedeker was leading the 2010 Waste Management Phoenix Open but, with his mind a whir of activity, shot 78 in the last group and finished T43.

“I hadn’t had the lead on Sunday and been successful,” Snedeker says. “That stuck with me on the West Coast. I said, Listen, I’m not going to play that way again, scared and afraid.”

Something obviously clicked; he now has nine TOUR wins, and won the 2012 FedExCup. One of the game’s elite players, Snedeker looks back to that abysmal final-round 78 in Phoenix.

“That was the one where I realized, you’re not doing this right,” he says. “I said, Next time I’m in that position I’m going to focus on the small things, stop looking at leaderboards, and stop focusing on things I can’t control. And it really made a difference.”

Keegan Bradley, who cites the 2012 Northern Trust Open (now Genesis Open) as the one that got away, says such losses can still provide a helpful shot of confidence. To be fighting it out with Phil Mickelson and Bill Haas, who ultimately won, told Bradley he was on the right track.

“I still think about it,” he says. “I had 10 feet that I thought was going to be to win the tournament. And (Haas) makes this 60-footer and I miss.”

Did the loss fuel an ensuing win?

“Well, it did help,” Bradley says, sounding surprised by his answer. “I won Akron the following year. It just helps you realize you’re supposed to be there, that you can be there, going up against Phil, you know. That was one of my favorite memories, actually.”

Every week is a clean slate

Before he won THE PLAYERS Championship in March, McIlroy had strung together five top-six finishes in a row without a victory. He patiently answered questions about his ability to close after each one—the golfing equivalent of being nibbled to death by ducks.

Then he notched his electrifying and historic win at TPC Sawgrass.

“Maybe if I hadn't have had those experiences,” McIlroy said afterward, “I wouldn't be sitting up here with this trophy, so I'm thankful and grateful for those experiences I've had this year.”

One such experience came at the 2011 Masters, when he took a four-shot lead into the final round but triple-bogeyed the 10th hole on the way to an 80. McIlroy is normally an easy-going and even chatty competitor, but upon reflection he realized he’d been trying to be someone he wasn’t: a ruthless, tunnel-vision type. Part golfer, part cyborg.

That was one of the lessons he took to heart as he crushed the field at the U.S. Open at Congressional two months later, winning by a gaudy eight shots over Jason Day.

“I was very honest with myself and I knew what I needed to do differently,” McIlroy said.

Kisner, too, spoke of lessons learned after winning the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play in March. Namely, getting waxed in the 2018 championship match had taught him what not to do.

“Last year I felt like I rushed around to get ready to play in the second match,” Kisner said. “I ran around and ate really fast, ran back out. Tried to go through my whole normal routine in an hour to get ready, and that's just not feasible (considering) how much golf you played.”

And this time?

“I hung out,” said the low-key South Carolinian, “took a shower, chilled out, got some treatment on my body and really went to the range at 2:05, and teed off at 2:25. I just went and hit 20 balls and went to the tee. I think that greatly helped my mental side of the game as much as anything.

“I wasn't overhyped for it and just tried to go play a casual round of golf.”

Lahiri: A changed man two years later

Lahiri’s 2015 miss in his match against Kirk was more than just a cruel lip-out; it swung the entire Presidents Cup. Unbowed, Lahiri would play a prominent role for the International Team at Liberty National in 2017, with the outcome all but decided. On Saturday, he and partner Si Woo Kim took on Americans Kevin Chappell and Charley Hoffman in a Four-Ball match.

No team had ever clinched on a Saturday; a Chappell/Hoffman win would make history.

“We obviously wanted to end it,” Hoffman said. “We knew what was on our shoulders.”

Hoffman pitched in for birdie at the 17th hole, prompting a delirious American celebration, but Lahiri had spied champagne on ice in the U.S. Team’s carts and vowed that the corks wouldn’t pop early. He converted from 20 feet, his final birdie of the back nine -- he also had birdied 12, 15 and 16 -- to halve the hole and thwart the Americans as the Internationals won, 1 up.

The champagne went back on ice.

“Got to give it up to Lahiri,” Hoffman said.

Did he work harder on his putting after the 2015 Presidents Cup?

“Much harder,” Lahiri says. “It’s hard; you’ve got to learn from it. You can’t persecute yourself. There wasn’t anything I could’ve done differently (in 2015) except maybe hit the putt a fraction softer. I was just waiting to get that opportunity again where I needed to make a clutch putt, and I made a few. That’s the one area of my game that has improved in the last few years.”

Would he have come through in Jersey without his agonizing finish in Seoul?

“Hard to say,” Lahiri says. “I don’t think anyone can look back at their life and say, ‘I would be exactly where I am had that not happened to me.’ Life doesn’t work that way."

“You just accept what comes, you learn from it and you evolve,” he adds. “I’m grateful for whatever I’ve experienced - the good and the bad.”