LOS ANGELES – Retief Goosen entered the Northern Trust Open’s final round with a two-shot lead, quickly extended it to three … and fell two strokes short of a playoff after a 4-over 75.
What transpired in between was a lot of scorecard messiness. He bogeyed the fourth hole, then tacked on another at the seventh and a double on the eighth. On the back-nine, he played Nos. 13-16 in a collective 5-over, sealing his fate before the final holes.
“I’m kicking myself, that’s for sure,” said Goosen, who was seeking his first PGA Tour victory since 2009. “That was an opportunity missed, and we’ll move on. It won’t be a nice pill to swallow, but that’s just the way this game is.”
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He cited mental errors on the seventh and eighth holes – poor club selections into each green – as the initial part of that downward spiral.
Even so, he could see a tiny sliver of silver lining after the title contention.
“Yeah, something positive to take to next week. But also something negative. I would have rather gone into next week with a win. But I can just, you know, continue to work away. But I’m going to need to work on my driving the next few days. Next week, you need to drive it pretty good. So I need to find, really, what was going on. I sort of really lost it out there a little bit.”
