• “A week that began with a loss ended with the biggest victory of Kisner’s career when he holed a 20-foot birdie putt to close out Matt Kuchar, 3 and 2, in the chilly championship match at Austin Country Club.

• “It was a long week. I prevailed. And I’m a world golf champion,” Kisner said off the 16th green.

• “He became the first player to win Match Play after losing in the championship match the previous year. That one wasn’t close, as Bubba Watson raced out to a big lead and ended the match in 12 holes.”

• “You know that old adage about form being temporary and class being permanent? Well, Graeme McDowell proved it. After struggling with his form in recent seasons, the 39-year-old Northern Irishman rekindled much of that old magic of his to scoop a $550,000 payday at the Corales Puntacana Championship in the Dominican Republic and, more importantly than the financial benefits, regained his full PGA Tour exempt status.”

• “McDowell fired a closing round 69 for a total of 19-under-par 270 to claim a one stroke winning margin over American Chris Stroud and Canadian Mackenzie Hughes. The victory ended a three-and-a-half year drought on tour for McDowell, whose last win had come in the Mayakoba Classic in 2015.”
• “The win catapulted McDowell from 119th in the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup standings from 119th to 38th and moved him from 257th in the world rankings into the top-150.”

• “The Scot had shared the first round lead but a second round 74 saw him slip back and his chances looked doomed when he made a quadruple bogey eight on the seventh hole on Sunday.”

• “The lead kept moving backwards on a windy day at DLF Golf and Country Club but as he stood on the 15th tee, Gallacher still looked an outside bet facing one of the toughest closing stretches on the Race to Dubai”

Full piece.

• “A form chart is not necessarily a reliable handicapping tool in golf, sans Tiger in his prime. Yet with the LPGA’s first major championship of the year on deck, a contender at least emerged on Sunday.”

• “Up next is the ANA Inspiration in Rancho Mirage, Calif., to which Hataoka will bring confidence and already a strong track record in majors, albeit with a small sample size.”

• “The goal for me this year was to win a four-day tournament as well as a major,” she said via an interpreter. “I’m happy I’ve accomplished one of them. As a player it’s always great to see that what I’m practicing leads to results. It gives me a lot of confidence and will be a good flow into next week’s major.”

• “…But it could turn out that the surprising turn of events against Bjerregaard will be a blessing for the 43-year-old with a bad back who pulled out of the Arnold Palmer Invitational four weeks ago with a neck sprain.”

• “The capital of Texas broke cold and windy on Sunday, with temps not reaching 50 until noon and the wind-chill roaming from the high-30s to the mid-40s. Not exactly ideal weather for a man nursing a bad back.”

• “A victory in the semifinals and then a match in the finals could have meant 36 or more holes on the card for Woods, possibly stretching his total to 120 holes played in five days. Instead, Woods was home in Jupiter, where it was 80 degrees.”

• …Paul McGinley, the former Ryder Cup captain, has already claimed that the saga has underlined that Kuchar’s nice-guy image is “a big façade.”

• “It gives an insight into Matt Kuchar,” McGinley, the Sky Sports analyst, said. “You see the smiley, nice Matt Kuchar. You’ve seen the incident with the caddie. There’s a hardness about him. Don’t be fooled by him. I think we saw another illustration of it there. There’s a hardness, a toughness about Matt Kuchar that he puts a big facade up around.”

• With this…”There’s nothing wrong with “all-square” or “halve,” terms that have served the game well since two shepherds decided to play against each other with crooks and stones on the Fife coastline 500 years ago.”

• And this…“Sadly, there is no mention of all-square in the new rule book. It’s been quietly deleted in the supposed attempt to make the game more accessible to new players. Maybe the governing bodies think the game’s going to become populated by morons incapable of understanding simple terms like all-square and halved.”

• And this…“Can you imagine the uproar in other sports if ruling bodies suddenly started replacing age-old terms? Imagine if football commentators suddenly stopped using “touchdown” and replaced it with “six-point score”?”

• “For the past year people have asked which event I’m going to cover the first week of April. With the ANA Inspiration and the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur overlapping, there was a choice to be made.”

• “I have covered the past 15 ANAs, but for all the girls like Shepherd who dreamed of one day competing at Augusta, and for those who couldn’t bring themselves to even think it, the choice was clear: Go watch history be made.”

• “It’s going to be everything,” said Shepherd of what it would mean to win. “They’ll always be the first winner of what could be the biggest turning point in women’s golf.”