Steady Lehman wins Senior PGA Championship

PARKER, Colo. - Tom Lehman has always prided himself on outlasting his flashier opponents by playing steady if unspectacular golf.

Never was that more evident than Sunday when Lehman won the 71st Senior PGA Championship with a par on the first playoff hole, where Fred Couples and David Frost double-bogeyed after terrible tee shots.

Lehman began the sudden-death playoff on No. 18 with a solid shot down the fairway before Couples' only bad tee shot of the tournament veered left into the shrubs, forcing him to take a drop.

Frost's tee shot ended up in the left bunker and he pulled his second shot left of the gallery. He cleared out dozens of pine cones in between him and the green before striking his ball, which was nestled in a shrub, across the green.

"That was just a bizarre playoff," Lehman said. "I'm not sure I've ever experienced anything like that. I turned to my caddie and I said, 'How many shots have they taken?' "

Frost and Couples finished with 6s before Lehman's birdie putt from 12 feet came up a quarter roll short. He smiled, tapped it from there, pumped his right fist and cradled the silver trophy.

"I think I had an advantage from the start because I had just finished," Lehman said. "The longer you have to wait, I think the tougher it gets to play in a playoff."

Frost had waited 45 minutes, Couples half an hour.

"And I basically just finished signing my card and went back and hit it," Lehman said.

Just getting into the playoff took the kind of gapless golf and dogged determination that Lehman is known for. After bogeys on three of his first five holes, he huddled with his caddie and promised not to beat himself.

He didn't, finishing the last 13 holes bogey-free at 3 under par.

"And I really didn't do anything exceptional," Lehman said, "but I didn't make any mistakes."

Everyone around him did.

Johnson wins Colonial

Zach Johnson now has a plaid jacket to go along with his green one. Johnson shot a closing 6-under 64 in the final round of the Colonial, winning with a tournament-record score of 21-under 259. The 2007 Masters champion finished three strokes ahead of Brian Davis, who had a closing 68. The Colonial champion gets a plaid jacket and Johnson has a green jacket from his Masters victory in 2007.