Thanks to Sunday's victory at the Buick Championship, J.J. Henry earned 375 points toward making the U.S. Ryder Cup team and jumped from 26th to sixth on the list with 778.850 points with seven weeks remaining before the team is selected. The top-10 list as it stands after the Buick Championship:
• In anticipation of inclement weather on Sunday afternoon, final-round tee times ran from 7:45 a.m. ET to 9:45 a.m. ET with players grouped in threesomes off of both the Nos. 1 and 10 tees. • The three-stroke victory by Henry is the largest the tournament has seen since Brent Geiberger defeated Skip Kendall by three in 1999. • Henry captured his first victory at the tournament in which he made his very first PGA TOUR start. In 1998, he made his first start as an amateur at the then Canon Greater Hartford Open, where he finished tied for 58th. • Hunter Mahan, who finished tied for second, also made his first PGA TOUR start at the tournament as an amateur in 2000. Mahan came into this week's Buick Championship with five career top 10s in 90 starts (87 professional) and it was his first on TOUR since a tie for seventh at the 2005 John Deere Classic. The tie for second matched his career-best finish. Mahan lost a four-man playoff to Vaughn Taylor at the 2004 Reno-Tahoe Open. • This is the first win by Henry as a professional since he captured the 2000 Knoxville Open on the Nationwide Tour. • Three players posted top 10s to get them into next week's field at the Cialis Western Open: Notah Begay III (tie for ninth), David McKenzie (tie for ninth) and Skip Kendall (tie for ninth). Kendall's finish was his third top 10 at TPC River Highlands in 10 starts. • Four players posted four rounds in 60s this week: Henry (first), Ryan Moore (tie for second), Mahan (tie for second), McKenzie (tie for ninth). • Six players posted their first top-10s of season: Mahan (tie for second), Moore (tie for second), Bubba Dickerson (tie for fifth), Begay (tie for ninth), McKenzie (tie for ninth) and Joe Ogilvie (tie for ninth). • Moore's second-place finish was the second of his short PGA TOUR career and just his second overall top 10 in 27 starts. Moore finished second at last year's Canadian Open behind Mark Calcavecchia to help him secure his card for 2006. In doing so, he became the first since Tiger Woods in 1996 to go from college to the PGA TOUR in the same season without having to go to Qualifying School. • Through 27 events, the Nationwide Tour rookies lead the q-school rookies with 13 top-10s to six. Nathan Green, who has four top 10s this season, moved out of a tie with Camilo Villegas (3) and Charley Hoffman (3) for most top 10s by a rookie with his fourth-place finish. All three were 2005 Nationwide Tour grads. • Green collected his third top-5 finish this season. In his second start of the season he lost to Tiger Woods in a three-man (Jose Maria Olazabal) playoff at the Buick Invitational, the first of three tournaments sponsored by Buick. • 1997 champion Stewart Cink and 2004 champion Woody Austin shared honors for best finish by a past champion. They ended up tied for fifth. For Cink, it was his fourth top-10 finish at TPC River Highlands in nine trips: win (1997), tie for second (1998), tie for eighth (1999) and tie for fifth (2006). • A 54-hole leader/co-leader has now gone on to victory 26 times in 55 years at the Buick Championship. In the last 10 years, four players have won after holding at least a share of the lead through 54 holes: Brent Geiberger (1999), Phil Mickelson (2001), Peter Jacobsen (2003) and Henry (2006). Henry became the 20th player in 26 stroke-play events this season to turn a 54-hole lead into a victory and did so in his first attempt at holding a third-round lead in 177 TOUR starts. • There were only two bogey-free rounds on Sunday -- Frank Lickliter II and Brent Geiberger -- for a total of 15 bogey-free rounds for the week. |
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