He was ranked 25th, his ball buried in a lake, $10 million on the line — then he blasted it to 3 feet and stole the biggest payday in golf history.
The 2011 FedEx Cup Playoffs were a four-tournament, month-long gauntlet — The Barclays, the Deutsche Bank Championship, the BMW Championship, and the Tour Championship — that whittled the PGA Tour's field from 125 players down to just 30 for the season finale. Whoever won the FedEx Cup at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta would collect a $10 million bonus on top of whatever they earned that week.
Bill Haas arrived at the Tour Championship ranked a distant 25th in the FedEx Cup standings, with only 260 reset points to his name against leader Webb Simpson's 2,500. He was not considered a serious contender for the Cup itself.
His eventual rival, Hunter Mahan, wasn't a favorite either — he entered the week ranked 21st. The two long shots tied at 8-under-par 272 after four rounds, forcing both the tournament and the FedEx Cup title into a sudden-death playoff, the first in the Cup's five-year history.
On the second playoff hole, the par-3 17th, Haas's approach shot came up short and plugged into the lake guarding the green, coming to rest mostly submerged on the muddy bank. Rather than take a penalty drop, he waded in and played the ball as it lay.
Haas splashed the ball out to within about 3 feet of the hole and calmly saved par. "It was all or nothing," he said afterward — the swing is remembered today as one of the most iconic clutch shots in modern golf.
Mahan couldn't match him, and the two moved on to the 18th hole, where Haas made another par while Mahan bogeyed, handing Haas both the Tour Championship title and the FedEx Cup in the same moment.
The financial swing was staggering: Haas earned a combined $11.44 million between the tournament title and the FedEx Cup bonus, while Mahan's runner-up finish was worth $9.876 million less — nearly $10 million decided by a single shot out of a lake.
It capped off a wide-open playoff season with no single dominant player: Dustin Johnson won The Barclays (shortened by an approaching Hurricane Irene), Webb Simpson took the Deutsche Bank Championship in his own sudden-death playoff, and Justin Rose won the BMW Championship — four different winners across the four events, none of whom ended up with the Cup.