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Stanley emerges stronger for sudden death experience

Kyle Stanley celebrates an impressive victory © Getty Images

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Once a choker, always a choker - or so professional golf's received wisdom goes.

One meltdown over the closing holes of an important tournament, and a player can expect to be branded someone who crumbles under the pressure for the rest of their career. The bigger the tournament, the longer the memories. Scott Hoch and Greg Norman may have achieved a number of great things in the game, but ultimately the first thing most casual fans will remember about them is their high-profile collapses at The Masters.

Those are extreme examples, but nevertheless it doesn't take too long at the business end of a leaderboard to assess what a player is made of. Nick Watney has great fundamentals, but his eyes grow worryingly wide when in a position to win a big event, an affliction that affects Dustin Johnson to a similar, if slightly lesser, extent.

So, after his memorable meltdown at the Farmers Insurance Open last week, it appeared the book had already been written on 24-year-old Kyle Stanley. Great player, big hitter - but disintegrates under pressure. The American should have cruised to victory after coming to the final hole with a three-shot lead; instead he blundered his way into a play-off (an almost unforgivable collapse) before missing a short putt to hand the title to a disbelieving Brandt Snedeker.

"It's tough. I mean, it's really tough to take," Stanley said at the time.

"I wasn't very nervous. Looking back, I don't really know what I was thinking. [The 18th is] not a hard golf hole. It's really a pretty straightforward par five. I could probably play it a thousand times and never make an eight."

For someone who has clearly put a lot of effort into overhauling their physical fitness, it seemed the cruellest of blows - to be cursed with a mental frailty that costs them dearly in the toughest situations. Having spent much of the off-season in the gym (turning himself into a finely-tuned athlete with power the envy of almost every player on tour), exactly what use would all that effort be if his mind lets him down when it matters most?

One week on, however, and Stanley is a PGA Tour winner. The nightmare at Torrey Pines simply denied his rush towards the upper echelons of the game, rather than signified why it would never happen.

Eight shots behind Spencer Levin (a player whose disintegration under pressure would be spectacular and, you sense, something that will happen repeatedly with such an erratic swing) at the start of the day, Stanley burst through the field to jump into contention over the final few holes of the back nine, and then just about held on under immense pressure (surely only exacerbated by memories of the previous week) to close out his maiden tour victory.

To turn things around so quickly, to have the strength to compete at the business end of two successive tournaments - suddenly we are talking a player of quite spectacular resolve, rather than someone unfortunate to have been born without the required steel.

The result was very different; the disbelief remained the same.

"Yeah, I'm not sure what I'm thinking right now," Stanley said. "It's been a great week. You go from a very low point to a high point.

"I'm not sure I expected to maybe recover this quickly. You know, I'll take it."

While everyone crumbled around him - as Levin fell away, literally everyone from Ben Crane to Jason Dufner started hitting errant shots - Stanley held his nerve. If last week was just an unfortunate collision of circumstances, then maybe - in much the same way Rory McIlroy learned so much from his struggles at Augusta - it actually gave him a lesson he needed in order to take that next step.

"You can't really teach somebody the experience aspect of it, and I think being in contention last week, I think the more times you get there, the more comfortable you get," he noted. "My caddie, Brett, did a great job of keeping me in the present there on the back nine. I don't know what I'd do without that guy.

"We just played golf, stuck to our game plan, and here we are."

The question now is where Stanley will go from here. The suspicion, based on his latest performance, is that the sky is now the limit.

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