Go David!

David Duval is my rooting interest in the US Open.

Amateur career

Duval was born in Jacksonville, Florida. The son of former Champions Tour player Bob Duval, he graduated from the Episcopal High School of Jacksonville. He was the U.S. Junior Amateur champion in 1989. He continued his amateur career at Georgia Tech, where he was a four-time first-team All-American, two-time ACC Player of the Year, and 1993 National Player of the Year. After two years on the Nike Tour, he earned his PGA Tour card in 1995.

Professional rise and fall (and rise again?)

Success came quickly, as Duval posted seven second place finishes on the PGA Tour from 1995 to 1997, qualifying for the 1996 Presidents Cup and posting a 4-0-0 record for the victorious American team. But a PGA Tour victory eluded him until he won the Michelob Championship at Kingsmill in October, 1997, and winning his next two tournaments in the same month, including the 1997 Tour Championship. Altogether, from 1997 to 2001, he won 13 PGA Tour tournaments, including the 1997 Tour Championship, the 1999 Players Championship, and the 2001 Open Championship, as well as the 2001 Dunlop Phoenix and the 2000 World Cup (with Tiger Woods) internationally. He also tied for second in both the 1998 and 2001 Masters.

Duval's winning speech at the 2001 Open was welcomed by British commentators as "delightfully modest and heartfelt".^[1]

Other career highlights include achieving the number one spot in the Official World Golf Rankings in April 1999 and shooting a 59 in the final round of the 1999 Bob Hope Chrysler Classic on the Palmer Course at PGA West in La Quinta, California (doing so in dramatic fashion by making an eagle on the 18th hole). When he won the Players Championship he became the first player in history to win on the same day as his father, Bob Duval, who won a Champions Tour event that same day. Before 1999, only two other golfers in PGA Tour history, Al Geiberger and Chip Beck, had posted a 59 in competition and no one had ever done so in a final round. He also played on the victorious 1999 Ryder Cup team, as well as the 2002 team. (from Wikipedia)

He was so great and then so bad all of a sudden. What I saw of him today was the same guy who used to rain iron shots on the flag, one putt and move on. Today he was hittinng them stiff. In the fourth round he just needs to do that again and nail those putts. He could easily have had 5 more birdies today. So could Tiger by the way but he too far back.