Wyndham Clark did not make the BMW Championship easy on himself. He arrived at Bellerive Country Club on Sunday with a five-shot cushion built over the previous two days, three-putted the first hole for a bogey before most of the leaderboard had finished breakfast, and spent the better part of the afternoon watching that cushion shrink one dropped shot at a time. By the turn he had given back three strokes and was clinging to a two-shot lead over Patrick Cantlay and Rory McIlroy. Then, with the tournament and his third win of the season on the line, he birdied the sixteenth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth in succession to close it out at 17-under 263, three clear of Cantlay, with McIlroy a shot further back in third.
A front nine that threatened to unravel
Clark’s day started poorly and briefly threatened to become a collapse. The three-putt at the first cost him two shots off his overnight lead in a single hole, and Rory McIlroy answered with a birdie of his own to make it a three-shot game before either player had reached the second green. Gary Woodland, who had shared the first-round lead here on Thursday, produced the round’s most dangerous early charge, making three birdies in his first five holes to pull within two, then birdieing the eighth to get within one. For a few minutes on the front nine, Bellerive looked ready to produce the kind of Sunday shootout the FedExCup Playoffs are supposed to deliver.
It did not last. Woodland topped an iron off the tee at the par-four ninth and watched it skip into the creek that guards the fairway, a single mis-hit that undid his momentum as thoroughly as three good holes had built it. Clark, meanwhile, missed the green at the par-three sixth and failed to get up and down, then bogeyed the tenth to fall to 14 under, his lead down to a single shot over McIlroy and two over Cantlay and Woodland. Whatever margin for error a five-shot overnight lead is supposed to buy a player, Clark had spent almost all of it by the turn.
The finish that decided it
What changed the complexion of the back nine was not a run of birdies so much as the absence of further mistakes, until the very moment mistakes stopped mattering. Clark and McIlroy traded chances through the middle of the back nine, McIlroy burning the edge of the cup on a go-ahead try at the fourteenth, both players still tied with four to play. Clark’s first birdie of the day, when it finally arrived at the par-three sixteenth, could not have been better timed, moving him a shot clear with two holes left. The margin doubled at the next when McIlroy bogeyed the seventeenth as Clark made his second straight birdie, and by the time both players reached the last, the tournament was already decided in every way that mattered. Clark birdied the eighteenth anyway, closing his round in even-par 70 that felt considerably better than the number suggests, and finished three strokes clear of Cantlay.
It is Clark’s third PGA Tour title of a season that already included the U.S. Open and the CJ Cup Byron Nelson, and it continues a run of late-round nerve that has become something of a signature. He has now won multiple times this year despite giving shots back early, which says as much about his temperament as it does about any particular round. Bellerive punished carelessness all week, and Clark was careless more than once on Sunday. He simply stopped being careless before anyone still within range of him did.
What it means heading to East Lake
The result also settles the final shape of the field heading to next week’s Tour Championship at East Lake, the last of the FedExCup Playoff events and the one that decides the season-long title. Thirty players advance to Atlanta; Bud Cauley and Rickie Fowler, who began the week inside the cut line, were among the twenty who will not be part of it, their seasons ending in St Louis rather than continuing on Bobby Jones’s old course. For Clark, McIlroy and Cantlay, all three now among the leading contenders for the Cup itself, Bellerive was a preview of the kind of pressure East Lake tends to apply. Whether Sunday’s finish was a rehearsal for another big week or simply the shape of Clark’s season repeating itself, he will take some finding out.