One glance at the leaderboard was all it took to convince Andrew Magee that he couldn't afford a bad shot during the final round of the Northern Telecom Open.
There were still eight players within two shots when he made the turn at 16-under-par."I didn't want to fall back into that grouping," Magee said Sunday after his errorless, 5-under 67 either unnerved or outdistanced his pursuers. "There was a real crowd at 15-under, and I didn't want to join them."
Magee, 31, never faltered en route to his fourth career title and first since 1991, when two wins produced $750,082 and fifth place on the money list.
At the time, Magee considered himself one of the game's elite "for a week or two." Then the reality of golf's intense competition set in and he struggled through two winless seasons.
"It's amazing how up-and-down it is in anybody's career." he said.
Magee played the 7,148-yard, par-72 Tucson National course during his first college tournament at Oklahoma, and the 465-yard 18th hole stuck in his memory after he took a triple bogey-7 the final day and lost by one stroke.
This time, he used a 1-iron off the tee to stay left of the first lake and short of the second. Then he hit a 3-iron to within 15 feet and two-putted for a score of 18-under 270 and a two-shot triumph over Loren Roberts, Vijay Singh, Jay Don Blake and Steve Stricker.
The 50-year-old tournament had produced first-time winners three of the last four years. This time, the $198,000 first prize went to a player who skipped the first two events of 1994.
Blake and Stricker took themselves out of the running with late bogeys, and Roberts and Singh simply had too much ground to make up.
Blake had been 17-under since the 13th hole until he bogeyed No. 17, a short but tricky par-3.
"I got caught between clubs," Blake said. "The wind was right into us, and I got caught between a 5-iron and a 4-iron. I blocked the 4 right, and then I hit a terrible putt."