PGA Tour Champions Stars Can Relate to Mito Pereira's 72nd-Hole Debacle at the PGA

'I'm not over that, never will be,' said one player about his own final-hole disaster. It can come with the territory of playing professional golf.

BENTON HARBOR, Mich. -- Mito Pereira, 2022 PGA champion. It had a nice ring to it.

Pereira, who had withstood most everything Southern Hills Country Club could throw at him, stood on the tee at the 72nd hole with the win in his grasp.

Except instead of winning the Wanamaker Trophy, Pereira double bogeyed the final hole and missed the playoff eventually won by Justin Thomas.

But Mito Pereira is not the first player to blow a chance to win a tournament on the 18th hole, major or not.

When Pereira hit his tee shot on the 72nd hole with a swing that looked like a combination of Jon Rahm and Jim Furyk, the handwriting was on the wall. Pereira found the water and that was that.

After his ball found the hazard on what was the hardest hole on Sunday, many started to suggest it was a mistake to have taken a driver and that his caddie should have kept it in the bag and handed the Chilean a 3-wood.

Second-guessing is part of almost every major championship.

"After 71 holes, he was ahead and that's a hell of an effort,” said Colin Montgomerie of Pereira, talking on Wednesday at the Senior PGA Championship in Benton Harbor, Michigan. “After 72 he wasn't, but after the first 71 holes to be ahead is a bloody good effort and he should try and take as many positives as possible.”

Montgomerie never won a major championship and his best last chance came at the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, a result he clearly still remembers vividly.

Tied for the lead, Montgomerie was standing in the middle of the fairway of the final hole and pushed a 7-iron, leading to double bogey and derailing the Scot on that Sunday.

“I'm not over that, never will be, sleepless nights, get up five times thinking about it every night,” Montgomerie joked. “Hey, if somebody said to me, one shot left, if you want one shot again, obviously it's that one.”

If you play golf long enough you will have a situation where a win or loss comes down to one hole or one shot, so it’s not surprising that anyone you talk to at the Senior PGA Championship has had a similar experience as Pereira.

“It's going to leave scar tissue,” Bernhard Langer said. “It's going to be a tough one for him to digest for quite a while. … In golf, we make decisions on every shot. You've got to be committed to your decision, and sometimes they are the wrong decisions. Sometimes they are the right decisions. Sometimes you make a good swing and sometimes you won't.”

Langer was leading by two shots at the 2013 Senior British Open Championship at Royal Birkdale when he stood on the par-4 18th tee on Sunday, knowing he only needed to make a bogey. After taking a conservative 3-wood off the tee, he told his caddie he then wanted to hit a 4-iron that would come up short of the green and the bunkers. But his caddie suggested hitting a 2-hybrid and if he went off the green, there was no trouble to deal with.

Langer took his caddie's advice, thinned the 2-hybrid into the greenside bunker, needed two shots to get out of the bunker and then missed the 15-footer for bogey. He eventually lost in a five-hole playoff to Mark Wiebe.

“It still does,” Langer said about the loss still hurting. “I feel I try to prepare as good as I can and I try to have good course management, and that was just about the opposite from good course management. I'm not very proud of it, and again, I learned my lesson. This will not happen again if I'm ever in a situation like that again.”

Rocco Mediate is best known for losing to Tiger Woods in a playoff at the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines and while he didn’t make a mistake on the 72nd hole to lose the championship or force a playoff, he could sympathize with Pereira.

“If that was me and (caddie) Pete Bender was there, he would have broke my driver on the tee to say, 'If you get in a playoff you're not going to have a driver, because you're not hitting one here,'” Mediate said. “Easy to say now. What if he pipes it?

"JT (Justin Thomas) took the shot because he had to. He had to try to get a short club in, and he did everything except for make the putt. He hit a good putt, but my point is he had to take the shot. Can you look back on that? You can't criticize that. It's just something that unfortunately (Pereira) blocked it a touch and that was the end of that.”