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By Brett Avery
PGATOUR.COM Contributor

Eight years ago the World Golf Championships became a new sensation with one of the oldest formats in golf history: match play.

Professional circuits around the globe have employed match play in several variations throughout time. In fact, for its first four decades the PGA Championship was decided at match.

But this February 1999 gathering at La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif., brought a handful of significant differences to the table: the top 64 players in the world competing for a $5 million purse bearing the first $1 million payday in PGA TOUR history.

Jeff Maggert was the first player to win the Accenture Match Play Championship. (Stan Badz/PGA TOUR/WireImage)

As if that weren't enough the first WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship had only two extra-hole matches, and the second one was a beauty. Jeff Maggert, who recorded a TOUR-leading 13 second-place finishes in the 1990s, made a dramatic chip-in at the 38th hole to clip Andrew Magee.

"The first half-dozen or so times I came up short, it bothered me," admitted Maggert, whose first title was the 1993 Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic. "Then I came to realize that I wasn't giving golf tournaments away. Other people were playing good golf to beat me."

There was a lot of that going around that week at La Costa. Sometimes a match-play draw goes according to form and two of the top players meet in the final. And sometimes, as was the case that week, the expectations melt from the first stroke.

Wednesday's first round saw 18 lower seeds among the 32 players reaching the second round. In all, the 64 matches saw 38 lower-seed victors. Tiger Woods was the only player in the world top 10 clawing into the third round after topping Nick Faldo and Bob Tway.

Maggert, the No. 24 seed, was happy to chug along. He attracted little attention despite a pair of second-place finishes the previous season (Bay Hill Invitational, Shell Houston Open) and another early in 1999 (Sony Open in Hawaii).

"I'd been playing pretty well, had come off a pretty good stretch of successful years," Maggert recalled. "The World Match Play being early in the season, everybody was still trying to get their game organized. I felt pretty good with my game and always feel like match play is a good format for me when I'm playing well."

More than anything, over those five days Maggert displayed his trademark of hitting fairways and greens and making few errors. He opened with a 2-up victory over No. 41 Fred Funk, then dumped No. 9 Nick Price and No. 25 Bernhard Langer by 1-up margins.

That brought a quarterfinal date with Woods, by then the only top-20 survivor in an unlikely final eight that included No. 50 Magee, No. 60 Eduardo Romero and No. 61 Steve Pate. At that point Woods had the look of a dead lock favorite.

Enter Maggert.

"Winning those early matches at the end gave me a little bit of confidence," Maggert said. He failed to connect on some putts he should have holed on the back nine against Woods. But late in the match Woods "was struggling a little bit with his driver. I just kept putting the ball in the fairway [while] he put the ball in the rough and made bogeys. I just wore him down at the end."

Maggert had a ready sound bite after defeating his 1997 Ryder Cup teammate: "Tiger was the dragon, and somebody had to slay him."

Saturday's semifinals featured two contests you wouldn't have predicted in a million draws: Maggert against Pate and Magee against No. 27 John Huston. What they may have lacked in recognition -- Maggert was the lone major-championship contender, over the last nine of the 1997 U.S. Open -- they made up for with scrappy play.

Pate grabbed a 3-up lead through 11 holes, typically enough to secure victory. But Maggert won four of the next five, an eagle at the par-5 12th beginning the fireworks. Once again he claimed his pass to the next round at the 18th green.

Huston won the first three holes with birdies but was back to all square by the 10th. They kept jousting until Magee saved par from a greenside bunker at the 16th, holing from 30 inches, after Huston missed from eight feet.

The first WGC title and the million bucks were weighty rewards for both men. Magee later said "I thought about the money all day." Not surprising considering he had never even broken seven figures for an entire season.

Magee took a 2-up lead to the lunch break but lost the 21st through 23rd. He got back to all square with a 25-footer at the 28th.

They traded two more holes, Maggert making birdie at the 31st and missing 20-footers for birdie at the 34th and 35th and a 15-footer at the 36th. Magee had a 12-footer to win at the 36th but the ball hung on the left edge.

"I thought I made that putt," Magee said. "I knew I needed to make a birdie somewhere to untie this deal, and I couldn't do it."

They halved the 37th and went to La Costa's par-3 11th. Maggert's pulled 8-iron found the left rough, a few yards off the front of the putting surface. Magee had a 30-footer for birdie but left it woefully short. After asking his caddie to pull the flagstick Maggert hit a pitch that hit the right-center of the hole, hopped off the back lip and dove into the hole, setting off a wild celebration.

"That chip was something that I really needed all day long," he said after accepting the trophy and $1 million check. "Thank God it came on the last hole."