Not One for Wilting

With the threat from Mickelson reinvigorated, Rose responded with some telling blows himself. “I immediately answered with birdie, birdie of my own on 12 and 13. And I think that that point was huge because it just gave me that little bit of leeway playing the last five holes.”

He added: "I kind of knew that no one was going to play the last five perfectly, so if you were coming into the last five holes two or three-over par already, you were going to have a hard time closing out the tournament. You kind of needed that little bit of a cushion. And that's what the birdies on 12 and 13 gave me."

Rose entered the final five holes (Part III – 'The Tragedy’) having played them in six-over par for the first three rounds. It was during this stretch that Graham had separated himself from the field in ’81 by playing them in two-under. Adding to the difficulty of this stretch this time around was the rain and wind that hit as the players approached the last segment of the course.

Rose bogeyed the long 14th from the greenside bunker to drop back to even par and two exceptional scrambling pars from Mahan and Mickelson on the same hole reduced Rose’s lead to just one. However, both would fall back on the 15th after poor approach shots, most alarmingly from Mickelson who had only a gap wedge to the green. This came after he airmailed the tiny par-three 13th to also drop a shot. For one of the best wedge players in the history of the game, these were almost unimaginable errors.

"13 and 15 were the two bad shots of the day that I'll look back on where I let it go," Mickelson lamented after the round. “At 13, I hit a pitching wedge and when I was drawing that shot I had too much club. I needed a gap wedge and it would have been a better fit.

"Then I did hit the gap wedge on 15, I quit on it, and missed it short left. If I had hit that one aggressively and flown it past the hole, I think it would have given me a birdie chance. So those two wedge shots were the two costly shots, I felt."

Rose three-putted the 16th from 35 feet above the hole to drop back to one-over but his following three swings would ultimately win him the championship. At the 229-yard 17th, Rose’s 5 iron was striped at the hole and came to rest just off the fringe some 12 feet from the cup for a simple up and down – if there is such a thing at this stage of the championship.

At the brutal 18th, Day’s dogged bid for the title ended when a four-footer lipped out for a closing bogey and a three-over total just as Rose strode to the tee with his destiny in his own hands.