Palpitating action as field cut to eight in chase for million

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- The airplane soared over the grounds at the Trump International Golf Club, obviously aware of what lay below.

The colorful Christina Kim is still alive for the big prize after her late comeback. (Getty Images)

Golf audiences tend to skew toward older folks, and in South Florida, that fan demographic is even more pronounced. Thus, for perhaps the first time in aviation and advertising history, a plane was towing a banner for a retirement hospice.

OK, so the assumption is that average age of those in attendance at the ADT Championship is 10 pulses above dead. With Sunday's heart-pounding finish and $1 million first prize dead ahead, we might just find out how hearty they really are. Same for the players, too.

"It's all or nothing, you know?" said Paula Creamer, who wasn't far off the mark.

Eight players will tee it up for a $1 million first prize at a veritable track meet in golf spikes, where the low score over the final 18 holes takes home all the big money. Which, by the way, was on display for players to eyeball after completing their third round.

Colorful Christina Kim, one of two players who earned a spot in the Grate Eight by surviving a tense four-player playoff, stuck her nose up to the transparent display case and got a whiff of the 10,000 Benjamins that were packed inside, the richest first prize in the women's game.

"It smells good," she sighed hopefully. "But I'm not Rain Man, so I wasn't able to calculate whether it was all there."

There was nothing missing in Saturday's frenetic, 16-player free-for-all, which featured a handful of head-shaking collapses and a charge back from the abyss from Kim, who clinched the final spot in the field by stiffing a 7-iron to two feet on the second playoff hole.

In other words, perhaps the most unpredictable event in golf followed the LPGA headquarters' script to the letter. Well, make that the current brass' script, anyway.

You want an eyeful of awful irony? Sophie Gustafson was the poster child for the volatile cruelty of the format, blowing up with a double-bogey and bogey on the last two holes of regulation, forcing her into a four-way playoff for two spots. Her first swing in sudden death went in the water on the 17th and she was officially toast.

The funky format was the brainchild of Gustafson's husband, former LPGA commissioner Ty Votaw, who was on hand to watch the carnage. They must have had a wonderful drive up Interstate 95 to their home in Ponte Vedra Beach, huh?

On the other end of the spectrum was Kim, who birdied three of the last five holes of regulation to make the playoff, then put away Nicole Castrale on the second extra hole with a 7-iron from 153 yards that nearly went in. Castrale, forced to answer or else, sent her approach into the water to make it academic -- the identical result to when she played the 72nd hole a few minutes earlier.

Bad as it ended for Castrale and Gustafson, 47-year-old veteran Juli Inkster felt worst of all. She was 4-under through nine holes and tied for the lead, cruising to an apparently carefree berth in the eight-way sprint for the cash. Then she fell apart on the back nine, playing the closing six holes in 4 over to miss the playoff at 1 under by a shot.