Talor Gooch held his nerve to assert the LIV Golf Adelaide title at a sold-out The Grand Golf Club on Sunday, overcoming a mid-round droop to maintain Anirban Lahiri at bay to win by three strokes and safe the US$4 million first-place pay cheque.
Gooch held a 10-shot lead over former Masters champion Charl Schwartzel going into the third and last spherical of the occasion, the Saudi Arabia-backed tour’s first in Australia, solely to see his benefit whittled down all through the course of the day.
“Winning on any tour is hard, winning on this type of golf course in front of this type of a crowd is not easy,” mentioned Gooch, who completed 19-under. “There were a couple of moments there where it got shaky and you know that’s going to happen.
“You can’t go three days on this type of golf course and not make mistakes so when I made the birdie on 11, that was time to dig deep and go get a victory.”
Gooch began the day 20-under following back-to-back rounds of 62 and he picked up one other shot with a birdie on the par-four fifth.
But the 31-year-old dropped 4 strokes in 4 holes as he adopted up consecutive bogeys on the seventh and eighth with a double bogey on the tenth to permit the chasing pack to shut.
Lahiri, who opened the day 11 photographs adrift, put the best strain on Gooch and at one level had pulled to inside two strokes of the lead.
Gooch rallied, nevertheless, with birdies on the eleventh and thirteenth, steadying the American as he went on to win his first occasion on the LIV Tour.
Meanwhile the 4Aces, captained by Dustin Johnson and that includes Patrick Reed, Peter Uihlein and Pat Perez, received the US$3 million first prize within the staff occasion, ending one shot forward of the Bubba Watson-led Range Goats.