Tuesday November 08, 2011 - 8:51 PM

Doug Flutie's Hail Mary has nothing on Sunday comebacks

By Steve Elling | CBSSports.com Senior Golf Columnist
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Ben Crane got the fireworks started in the McGladrey Classic when he won in a playoff. (Getty Images)

ORLANDO, Fla. -- So, were you watching?

No need to eyeball the Nielsens, really, because the answer has been borne out over time. When the PGA Tour season meanders sleepily into the Fall Season, then off to Asia for a couple of semi-official events in the wee hours, most fans have long since channeled their attention toward football, or perhaps, their pillows.

Let us be the first to rub it in, though we had to rub our eyes to earn the right to say it.

All you missed were 2011's best Hail Mary finishes, fare that Doug Flutie and Billy "White Shoes" Johnson would have found hair-raising on their best heave-it-and-hope days.

For merit and global impact, Charl Schwartzel's consecutive birdies on the last four holes to win the Masters was the chart-topper of the season. No winner had ever birdied the final four holes of a major championship in the television era. The fan thunderclap shook windowpanes at the Augusta National clubhouse.

But for sheer doggedness and determination, the Month of Sundays at the end of the PGA Tour season cannot be topped for volume or volatility. In successive final rounds, as every stat and gut instinct screamed that the eventual winners were dead and buried, they saved the best for last.

Of the six lowest final-round scores recorded by winners during the PGA Tour play, five were recorded in the last five starts, almost uniformly by players facing Sunday odds that straddled the border of absurdity and impossibility.

The flash fireworks truly began with Ben Crane lying on his back before the final round of the McGladrey Classic, four weeks ago. All year, he had grumbled and groused about why his season had been so disappointing compared to his breakthrough, two-victory year of 2010.

As he was lying in the workout area, limbering up, it occurred to him that he could glean as much from his train wrecks as triumphs, and he turned to his trainer, upbeat for the first time in weeks. Call it an epiphany.

"After basically complaining all year, for the first time all season, I said, 'You know what? It's been a great year, because I have learned so much,'" Crane recalled this week.

So did we. Like, it ain't over until every improbable arithmetic possibility has been exhausted. If not euthanized.

Just inside the top 10 heading into the final round, Crane was an insurmountable eight strokes off the lead with 11 holes to play at Sea Island when an entire season of wrongs went right. In the most incredible 150-minute span of his career, Crane didn't just get hot, he got nuclear.

He birdied eight of his next 10 holes and closed with a 7-under 63, which matched the lowest score by a winner all season relative to par, after he dispatched Webb Simpson in a playoff.

That distinction lasted ... seven days. Is there an echo in here?

In a fashion, Bryce Molder started the Sunday onslaught a week before Crane's comeback, at the Frys.com Open, with a closing 7-under 64, though it was mostly overlooked because of the 90-minute playoff that ensued with Briny Baird. In recording his first victory, Molder birdied five of his last 10 holes in regulation.

A month later, that feat elicited yawns by comparison.

One week after Crane's comeback, world No. 1 Luke Donald played in the official season finale at Disney World in a last-ditch attempt to win the PGA Tour money title and secure support for a Player of the Year bid. Donald also was on the cusp of rigor mortis at the midpoint of the final round in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

In what seemed a killing blow, he sloppily bogeyed the par-5 eighth hole at Disney to fall to T10, five strokes off the lead with 10 holes left to play. A couple of us who were following his threesome hustled back into the media center to, you know, watch the guys who still had a chance to win the title. Bad decision. It wasn't over by a long shot, much less a short wedge.

In a defining moment of his career, Donald recorded birdies on the first six holes on the back nine to finish with an 8-under 64, the lowest Sunday round by a winner all season relative to par. After freely admitting all week that he needed to win the official-money finale to have any real shot at postseason chrome, Donald won by two strokes -- effectively picking up seven shots in 10 incredible holes.

This Fantasyland fare just doesn't happen, especially not in consecutive weeks.

"It's hard to put into words," Donald said an hour later. "It's one of the most satisfying wins of my career, because it was do or die."

Death wasn't exactly a foreboding feature for the next two victors, either, who mustered up similar heroics on a different continent.

While the two offshore events that followed are co-sanctioned by the PGA Tour, they fall into semi-official category since the money doesn't count. But for Bo Van Pelt, who had one win in his career and had long been considered something of an underachiever, the $1.3 million in folding money he earned will spend the same nonetheless.

Van Pelt, whose lone victory came at a diluted opposite event staged the same week as the British Open, birdied five of the final eight holes at the CIMB Asia Pacific Classic in Malaysia, finishing with a 7-under 64, which equaled the second-lowest raw Sunday score by a winner, behind Crane's number a fortnight earlier.

Unlike his two predecessors, Van Pelt's pelting erased any vestiges of drama -- he pulled away from playing partner and fellow Indiana native Jeff Overton to win by a commanding six strokes.

"That was one of the best rounds of golf I've seen," Overton said.

Those sentiments could have been sprinkled liberally over the series of Sundays, which concluded last weekend in Shanghai at the co-sanctioned HSBC Champions event, a World Golf Championships tournament featuring many of the biggest names in the game.

It produced perhaps the most incomprehensible rally of all, though few in the States were able to bear witness. Finishing the final round at 3:30 a.m. ET on Sunday, former world No. 1 Martin Kaymer of Germany added an exclamation point to the U.S. tour's 2011 season.

Stuck in a greenside bunker on the seventh hole, he was five shots off the lead and seemingly headed for nowhere but the nearest airport -- then he holed the sand shot to begin the most furious rally of the fantastic four closing events on the schedule.

Incredibly, the soft-spoken German star birdied nine of the last 12 holes to finish with a 9-under 63, which matched or broke the lowest round by a 2011 winner relative to both par and total raw score. The 63 also represented the lowest Sunday score by a winner in 13 years of fairly impressive WGC history.

"I just played really good golf, and I'm glad that it came together," Kaymer said.

Kaymer, like Crane, had been in something of a funk, though he had won earlier on the European Tour in January and climbed to No. 1 for a couple of months in the spring.

"I was just in a mindset of, 'OK, this is my last official round in PGA Tour play,'" Crane recalled this week.

As it relates to the last hurrahs on the U.S. schedule, these guys all went down swinging.

Correction: Make that, went up.