Chopra Another First Time Winner
The first one is always the sweetest.
The weather wreaked havoc all week, but in the end, a first-time winner and an old veteran walked away all smiles on Monday. Daniel Chopra of Sweden picked up the $810,000 cheque for first-place beating Shigeki Maruyama and Frederick Jacobsen by 1-shot with a 19-under total over 72 holes. Chopra is the twelfth first-time winner on the Tour this year, many of those coming in the fall series and pre-season.
It was hard to tell who was happier, Chopra or Maruyama. The second place finish for Maruyama ensures his PGA Tour card for next year and you could tell that was more than a consolation for coming in second. After reading John Feinstein’s book, Tales from Inside Q School, gaining your Tour card and bypassing that grueling experience must feel like heaven. Maruyama used to be a regular on leaderboards and a perennial top 50 player, but this past season has been his toughest to date. According to Maruyama, it was “the most difficult year in eight years” and that he was “really happy” to have qualified for next year.
Back to the champion, Daniel Chopra. The swede, with Indian heritage, was one of those journeymen who seemed to have played on every tour on the face of the earth. The Nationwide, European Tour, Asian Tour, Chopra has done all of them waiting for his breakthrough. Well, he has that now with his first PGA Tour win. Chopra has played well this year with 3 top 10s and making more than half of the cuts he entered this year, it was really a matter of time before Chopra broke through.
After posting about John Daly earlier in the week, his story got even more bizarre after he withdrew on Sunday for no apparent reason. His withdrawal came after a quad-bogey, mix in the bad weather and it’s easy to see what happened there.
The PGA Tour heads to it’s final stop in the fall series starting on Thursday at the Children’s Miracle Network Classic played at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista (FL).
PGA Tour, Ginn sur Mer Classic, Daniel Chopra, Shigeki Maruyama
November 27th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
[...] trying to avoid disaster by earning their tour card, Rich Beem is one of them. I posted earlier how Shigeki Maruyama did just enough to keep his card. All I can say is that it’s going to be one heck of a week for these [...]