Russell Henley birdied the sixteenth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth on Sunday at Colonial, walked into a playoff he had no business being in with three holes to play, and then birdied the eighteenth a fourth time to take the Charles Schwab Challenge from Eric Cole. Four birdies in a row to win a Tour event, the last of them from five feet in sudden death, is the kind of finish that the player on the right end of it remembers for the rest of his career and the player on the wrong end of it tries, without much success, to forget. Henley has the win. Cole has the long drive home.
The closing stretch
For most of the back nine the tournament had belonged to Cole. He had carried the fifty-four-hole lead into the final round, played the kind of steady, unspectacular golf that a Colonial lead is built to protect, and signed for an even-par seventy that, on any normal Sunday at this course, is enough. The trouble for Cole was that the man chasing him refused to let the round settle into the procession Cole needed. Henley got to twelve under with a seventeen-footer on the last in regulation, the third of three consecutive birdies, and posted a number that turned Cole’s comfortable walk up the eighteenth into a two-putt for the win that suddenly carried the weight of the whole week.
Cole made his par. The playoff was the eighteenth again, a par four that had decided nothing all week and was about to decide everything. Both men found the fairway. Cole, playing first from a touch further back, wedged to thirteen feet. Henley, with the look of a player who had already decided how the hole was going to end, spun his approach to five. Cole’s birdie putt slid past on the high side. Henley rolled his into the middle of the cup, and the Charles Schwab Challenge, which Cole had led for the better part of two days, was gone in the time it takes to read a five-footer.
The right game for Colonial
The result is, in its way, a confirmation of the argument this column made about the same course on Thursday, when an unheralded Ryan Gerard sat on top of the leaderboard. Colonial does not reward the player who hits it the furthest. It rewards the player who can shape a tee shot into a narrow fairway and then control the second shot into a small green, and it rewards, above all, the player whose iron play holds up when the number matters. Henley’s iron play has been the spine of his career. The approach to five feet on the seventy-third hole of the week was not a fortunate result. It was the shot a player who ranks among the best in the field from a hundred and fifty yards is supposed to produce, produced at the only moment it counted.
This is Henley’s sixth PGA Tour win and his first of the 2026 season, and it moves him to eleventh in the FedEx Cup standings with the bulk of the summer still to play. He is thirty-seven, ranked twelfth in the world coming into the week, and has spent most of the last decade as the sort of player who is always somewhere near the top of a leaderboard without ever being the story. A win at Colonial, a course whose list of champions is a roll-call of ball-strikers, is the kind of win that fits the player. Nobody who watched him flight his irons under the Texas wind for four days will argue he stole it on merit. He stole it, if he stole it at all, only on timing.
The runners and the near-miss
Behind the two playoff men, the day belonged in part to Ben Griffin, the defending champion, who closed with a sixty-five and finished a single shot out of the playoff alongside Alex Smalley and Mac Meissner. A sixty-five on a Colonial Sunday is a round to be proud of, and in most years it would have been enough to be involved at the death. This year it left Griffin watching the playoff from the scoring area, his title defence ended not by anything he did wrong but by the two men who simply got to twelve under and he did not.
For Cole the loss is the one that will linger. He is thirty-seven, the same age as the man who beat him, and he has now made more than a hundred and twenty starts on the PGA Tour without a win. He did very little wrong on Sunday. He led, he protected the lead, he made his pars, and he hit a perfectly reasonable wedge to thirteen feet in the playoff. He was simply standing across the green from a player who had decided, three holes from the end of regulation, that the tournament was not going to be allowed to finish quietly. The cruelty of the result is that there is no obvious lesson in it for Cole to take away. Sometimes the other man makes four in a row. There is not much a player can do about that except keep putting himself in the position to be on the right end of it next time.