U.S. Open champion Michael Campbell has every reason to smile. (Photo: Getty Images)

Soggy Saturday sets up a huge Sunday at the CPC

Sunday is shaping up as a long and dramatic day at the PGA Club Professional Championship, thanks to the heavy weather that halted Saturday's third round and left the leaders still facing a round and a half. The Sunday showdown for the Walter Hagen Cup and berths in the PGA Championship and on the PGA Cup team looms as one of the most closely contested in years.

By Bob Denney, PGA of America

Newly crowned U.S. Open champion Michael Campbell will be in familiar territory when he takes his place in the field at St. Andrews. In the 1995 Open, Campbell shot a third-round 65 over the Old Course to take a three-stroke lead into the final day. But a Sunday 76 dropped him back into a three-way tie for third, one shot behind joint leaders John Daly and Costantino Rocca. Daly won the title after a four-hole playoff.

That week mirrored Campbell's entire career -- extreme highs followed by alarming lows. At one point just three years later he came close to quitting professional golf.

"I just could not play the game. I could not focus on what I was doing. I could not swing the golf club," he said. "I remember throwing my golf bag across the room in a hotel one time. I thought this is it, it's all over. I was about to get an ax and chop them up in two pieces and throw them away. But my wife was very supportive. She believed in me and got me going again."

Campbell's first major championship victory came at an ultra-difficult Pinehurst No. 2, thanks to a final round of 69 that left him with an even-par total of 280, two shots ahead of Tiger Woods and three clear of Sergio Garcia, Tim Clark and Mark Hensby. As he looked at the U.S. Open trophy, etched with the name of his boyhood hero Ben Hogan, Campbell thought about all he had accomplished in the last decade.

"Today I thought about Bob Charles winning the British Open back in '63, the only time a New Zealander won a major championship," Campbell said after his win. "And to be in the same circle, in the same sentence as Bob Charles, is an honor for me."

His third-place finish in the 1995 Open led to a tendon injury in his left wrist. "Basically I played too much," Campbell recalls. "I played like eight tournaments in a row in seven different countries, back at the end of '95. I played from Spain to Australia to Japan, back to Spain, I travelled the world, because I was a hot item. I just finished third at the British Open, a young kid from New Zealand doing so good, age 25, 26 years old. They wanted me to play around the world. So maybe it was greed, maybe I wanted to expose myself too much, I don't know. And then all of a sudden I felt this tweak in my left wrist. I was playing the New Zealand Open and it just snapped on me. I couldn't even hold a pen or a spoon or a fork for two months it was so painful.

"But it's just been an interesting journey the last 10 years. Leading The Open championship back in '95 and having a chance to win a major championship. It wasn't my time to win then. But today was."

News Index