LA QUINTA, CALIFORNIA | Tony Finau still remembers the feeling that stayed with him after losing the 2020 Waste Management Phoenix Open in a playoff to Webb Simpson.
By that point, the narrative had grown old – Finau was four years into what would be a five-year stretch of trying to win his second PGA Tour event – and another chance had escaped him.
Even for a man as relentlessly optimistic as Finau, the sting lingered, made worse by a three-month forced sabbatical from tournament golf due to the pandemic shutdown. Finau believed his day was coming, but it was taking its sweet time in arriving.
“That was the hardest loss of my career,” Finau said Tuesday in advance of the American Express, which begins in this corner of the southern California desert on Thursday.
“But I think that was like probably like the greatest thing because it was just perspective to me. It was just like, my kids and my family truly don't know how I feel and that I'm going through this, but they actually don't really care. That was like good for me b...
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