The Limerick Summary: 2011 WGC-HSBC Champions

Winner: Martin Kaymer

Around the wider world of golf: There wasn't a whole lot going on this weekend unless you were a Dolphins or Broncos fan. ;-) Jay Don Blake won the Charles Schwab Cup Championship but Tom Lehman won the yearlong race for the actual Cup on the Champions Tour; and Momoko Ueda won the Mizuno Classic in a 3-hole playoff against Shanshan Feng on the JLPGA. Both the Constructivist and BangkokBobby have details. (BB has photos!)



Question: Where, oh where have you been all year, Martin Kaymer?

Answer: Hanging out in China, along with Graeme McDowell and Louis Oosthuizen, waiting for the WGC-China.

When I wrote my Sunday post, I only mentioned Fredrik Jacobson and Paul Casey because they were the players making a move at the time. Martin had posted 2 birdies on his front 9 and parred the 9th when I finally had to give up and go to bed. All he did was shoot 29 (-7) on his final 9, and -9 in his last 12 holes! In fact, if you go back and look, Kaymer was -13 on his last 27 holes. He basically birdied every other hole!

But it was that torrid back 9 that ripped the field apart and officially announced that Martin Kaymer was back and ready to play. The leaders essentially stalled out down the stretch, with the Junkman doing well to snag solo second. Ironically, the challengers turned out to be 2010 major champs who struggled this year. Graeme McDowell did indeed find his game, as he intimated in a tweet earlier in the week, and finished in solo third. Louis Oosthuizen, another lost soul this year, was in it until his putter went cold again, as did Rory McIlroy's.

Of course, Charl Schwartzel posted another of his patented back-9 runs to shoot -7 on the day, but he started out too far back. Once he gets rid of a few of those early bogeys, he'll go from high finishes to winning finishes. The Masters champ is just too good not to win more often. One thing he probably won't be doing is changing his swing...

A lesson Kaymer learned all too well this year. His ill-fated attempt to learn a fade draw for Augusta pretty much trashed his game for the whole year. (It didn't help him at Augusta either.) Now that his game finally seems to be back, that's a mistake he won't be making again!

Kaymer had dropped to 6th in the OWGR but this should bump him back up to at least #5, probably #4 since neither Steve Stricker nor Dustin Johnson played this week. And if the Porsche that was Martin Kaymer is truly back on the autobahn, those higher positions might want to keep a eye on their rear-view mirrors.

So this week's Limerick Summary welcomes the Germinator back to the race:

All year, our best minds were confounded;
His promise had seemed so unbounded!
But Martin's drought ended.
The win he appended
This week proved our fears were unfounded.

The photo was one of the pics on the front page of PGATOUR.com.