First Win in 413 Starts for Lee Janzen

Lee Janzen

LEE JANZEN IS A TWO-TIME U.S. OPEN CHAMPION, winning the silver trophy in 1993 and 1998, but it had been more than 400 tournaments and 16 years since the tour veteran had notched a victory.

That changed yesterday at the ACE Group Classic in Naples, Florida.

Janzen faced an 8-foot birdie putt on the final hole to force a sudden-death playoff with Bart Bryant.

"I was like, 'I have to make birdie here to get in a playoff,'" Janzen said, "or I make a par and I don't and I'll just go back to the drawing board and work harder on my putting because I had some putts I could have made that would have made a difference. But there was a peace that, to me, it didn't matter whether I won or not."

Janzen sank the putt and then won the playoff on the first hole (the 18th) when Bryant hit a weak drive and deposited his second shot in the water.

A Florida Southern College product along with Rocco Mediate, Janzen said he stopped caring what others thought about his golf game.

"I work on my game in a certain way so I'm going to do the best I can on every shot and I don't need to worry about what people think, whether I hit a good shot or a bad shot. I used to have a terrible temper and threw clubs and carried on.

"That was really the breakthrough was to realize I was only doing that because I was too worried about what other people thought about my golf game, so I felt like I had to get mad to show them that I was better than that, which was just ridiculous."

Janzen, just 50, can now look ahead to possibly more titles on the second-chance circuit otherwise known as the Champions Tour.