Three feet. It's not quite inside the leather, not quite gimme, but close. Veeery close. So close that you've probably knocked down a hundred of them in your life without thinking twice about it.
Brandt Snedeker would love to have one of those hundred, please, delivered to Sunday afternoon. By four-putting from 12 feet, and three-putting from inside three feet, he not only bounced himself out of the Tour Championship, he cost himself a nice little chunk of change. ESPN's Bob Harig figures it this way:
• $100,000 by falling from a T-8 to a T-10 in the BMW standings.
• At least $120,000, the take for the last-place finisher in the Tour Championship.
• $175,000, the bonus for anybody competing in the FedEx Cup.
• Guaranteed invitations to the Masters, British Open and U.S. Open next year.
Ouch.
The last thing Snedeker needs is for anybody to pile on; facing a three-footer with that much on the line must have felt like facing a 300-footer. And according to Snedeker, everything came unraveled when he made the mistake of asking NBC's Roger Maltbie in the 18th fairway what he needed to get in:
"I thought I had to make par and he told me bogey would get in," Snedeker said. "Shouldn't have affected me. Shows you how weak mentally I am. Shows you what I need to work on. We'll work on it and we'll be back next year."
Ouch, again. Instead of making par, Snedeker finished with a quadruple triple bogey. And hopefully not a completely wrecked psyche.
