The first playoff event of the season was pretty intense.
Justin Rose was victorious (shout out Team Rose!) at the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis over the weekend. For all of the talk about the playoff events being lackluster (the format is definitely an issue) this one delivered.
Amazingly this event is pretty used to things requiring extra competition. Rose’s victory came in a playoff against US. Open winner J.J. Spaun and it was the 20th playoff in this event’s history. Rose picked up his second playoff win of his career while Spaun fell to 0-2 in playoffs in general, interestingly both gentleman lost playoffs to Rory McIlroy this season with Spaun losing The Players and Rose falling at The Masters. It has been quite the year.
Rose has come quite close to many victories for some time now. He obviously contended at Augusta and also did so during last year’s Open Championship. The win marked his first since the 2023 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
There is no question that Rose was the star as he came away the tournament’s winner, but Tommy Fleetwood should be mentioned as well. It looked like the Englishman might finally pick up his first PGA Tour win, he held the lead entering Sunday’s final round, but a bogey down the stretch took him out of contention and he missed the playoff entirely.
Fleetwood finished T3 and notched his 43rd top-10 finish (out of 162 total starts). It is, as we all know, the most of any player without a win on Tour since 1983. His time is coming, surely.
