PGA Team Final Has a Familiar Feeling to It

The Hyundai Team Matches aren’t exactly fertile grounds for fostering a rivalry, but a couple of teams from the PGA Tour are doing their best to start one. Fred Couples and Mark Calcavecchia held off defending champions Tom Lehman and Duffy Waldorf for a 1-up victory Sunday in the PGA Tour portion of the matches at Monarch Beach Golf Links.

Allen Doyle and Dana Quigley needed 21 holes to defeat Tom Watson and Andy North in the Senior PGA Tour final and Janice Moodie and Lorie Kane defeated Grace Park and Wendy Ward, 5 and 4, in the LPGA final. The winning teams split $200,000 and each player receives a car. The second-place teams split $100,000.

It was the second consecutive year the Couples-Calcavecchia and Lehman-Waldorf teams met in the PGA Tour final, the third consecutive year that one of those teams has won the event and the sixth consecutive year that one of them has played in the final. Lehman and Waldorf, who have won three titles in the team matches, won, 1-up, last year.

“It’s not really a rivalry where if we lose we’re going to go home and think about it and dislike those guys,” said Couples, who teamed with Calcavecchia to win in 1999. “It’s a very, very fun atmosphere and there’s a lot of jabbering going on pretty much the whole way, but you still want to win. We’ll be back next year and I’m sure they will be too.”

Couples and Calcavecchia took a 3-up lead when Calcavecchia made a birdie at the par-three eighth, but Lehman and Waldorf won three of the next five holes to square the match. A 50-foot eagle putt by Waldorf, followed by a leaping chest bump between Lehman and Waldorf, highlighted the run.

“After that I was like, ‘Here we go again,”’ Couples said, referring to the see-saw match in last year’s final that featured several chest bumps between Lehman and Waldorf. Couples gave his team the winning margin when he sank a 12-foot birdie putt on the 17th.

In the seniors’ match, Doyle chipped in from 20 feet on the third extra hole to end Watson’s bid for a third consecutive title. Watson had won the previous two with Jack Nicklaus, but teamed with North this year after Nicklaus withdrew because of a sore back. Watson did have the shot of the day, however, when he made a hole in one with a seven-iron on the 170-yard, par-three 13th.

Moodie made a 20-foot putt for birdie on the first hole and Kane, who battled flu all week, made a birdie on the second to set the tone in the LPGA final.