Golf Roundup : Glasson Wins Doral Open, but It Isn’t Pretty

Billy Glasson won the $1.3 million Doral Open at Miami by one stroke Sunday when Mark Calcavecchia completed a back-nine collapse with a double bogey on the 18th hole.

“The win was great, but it was tarnished by the way I played,” said Glasson, who needed only a round of par-72 to fend off the faltering Calcavecchia.

Glasson didn’t exactly back into it, having held the second and third round leads. But he knew it was far from a thing of beauty.

“It was like we were trying to see who could play the worst,” Glasson said of his back-nine battle with Calcavecchia, a two-time winner already this season.

And Calcavecchia had the edge there. From a tie for the lead at the turn, he played the back nine in 41.

Playing in the final twosome with Glasson, Calcavecchia trailed by one and apparently needed a birdie to force a playoff when they went to the intimidating 18th hole of Doral’s Blue Monster course.

“When he got it to the back of the green, I figured he could two-putt easy for par, so I’ve got to make birdie,” Calcavecchia said. “It kind of relaxed me. I knew I had to go right at it.”

But his 6-iron approach, he said, was caught up in the wind, which took it left and into the lake. That took him out of it.

For Glassen, who finished with a 13-under-par 275, the win was the fourth of his seven-year PGA Tour career. It was worth $234,000, boosting his earnings for the year to $322,200.

Fred Couples, who completed his 68 and 276 total long before Glasson and Calcavecchia played the 18th hole, was second.

The double bogey dropped Calcavecchia back into a tie for third at 278 with U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange and Bruce Lietzke. Strange shot 69 over the final round and Lietzke had a 71.

“I’m disappointed. This is tough,” Calcavecchia said after his 74, which included 41 over the back nine.

Dan Pohl, Wayne Levi and John Huston were next at 279. Pohl had a closing 66, Levi 69 and Huston 71.

Gene Littler birdied two of the final three holes to win the Senior Challenge at Naples, Fla., after Harold Henning made a double bogey at the 16th hole to lose the lead.

Littler finished at seven-under-par 209, two strokes ahead of Henning.

Henning fell to five under with his double-bogey at the par-3 16th hole. Henning needed two shots to get out of a buried lie in a greenside bunker. Littler, meanwhile, sank an eight-foot birdie putt at 16 to go to 6-under.

Greg Norman of Australia shot a five-under-par 67 for a two-shot victory in the $410,000 Australian Players’ Championship at Sydney--his second win in a week.

Norman last week won the Australian Masters at Melbourne.

Betsy King shot five-under-par 67 to win her second straight championship in the $400,000 Women’s Kemper Open tournament at Princeville, Hawaii.

King, who also won the Kemper Open in 1984, finished with a total of seven-under-par 202, two strokes ahead of Jane Geddes.

King took home $60,000 for her win in the 52-hole tournament, which was postponed one day due to rain and played two holes short the next day due to flooding on the 6,171-yard, par-72 Lake and Ocean Course at Princeville Resort on Kauai Island.