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 because it kind of humbled me to just, like, how big was that actually? Is it that big a deal?
“So I think it helped bring kind of balance to what I was doing. At the end of the day, it ended up helping me.”
Ask Finau what changed, and he doesn’t point to a specific statistic but a collective improvement in everything from his driving accuracy to his putting.
It is against the backdrop of Finau’s near misses – he posted 40 top-10 finishes between his 2015 Puerto Rico Open and his 2021 victory at the Northern Trust – that his new career profile stands in sharp relief.
From late July through mid-November, Finau won three times on the PGA Tour, turning himself into a trophy collector. He won the 3M Open and the Rocket Mortgage Championship in successive weeks in July then tacked on the Cadence Bank Houston Open last fall.
The questions changed from “Why not” to “Why?” and “How?”
Ask Finau what changed, and he doesn’t point to a specific statistic but a collective improvement in everything from his driving accuracy to his putting.
There was room for improvement. Blessed with uncommon power, Finau was his own worst enemy. In 2015-16, he ranked third in driving distance and 175th in accuracy. Last year, he was 129th in accuracy, a modest but meaningful improvement. So far this season, he’s 18th in accuracy off the tee.
The smile on Finau’s face hints at the pride in what he’s doing.
“In the last kind of seven months where I’ve been on this run, I’ve been a top-10 putter in the world through the biggest stats. So having a team that can kind of help me kind of look at that and say, Yes, you are actually like really great at this over this period of time,” Finau said.
Still, if each of us is a product of our experiences, Finau’s success is tied to his journey to get here. Rather than be consumed by self-doubt or succumbing to his frustration, Finau never lost faith in himself.
“I didn’t allow the doubt to creep in. I definitely at times felt deflated and frustrated. I felt like things were just unfair. Like sports, right? And life sometimes can just be unfair,” Finau said.
“I’ve always had that perseverance attitude to overcome. I don’t know that I ever doubted that it wouldn’t happen, I would say, but I definitely was frustrated at certain points and disappointed, angry. But doubting never crossed my mind. It never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t win again.”
But it seemed as if it took forever. Along the way, Finau shot 64 at Riviera on Sunday at the Genesis Invitational but lost a playoff to Max Homa, his eighth runner-up between victories. It felt as though fate was teasing him, or testing him.
Then it all changed when he won a FedEx Cup playoff event at Liberty National, beating Cam Smith in a playoff.
“I knew the second win was the biggest hurdle of my career. They say the first one is usually the hardest, but because of how long it took me to get the second one and the validation I think … that that was a huge kind of turning point in my career,” Finau said.
Finau, ranked 12th in the world, is one of the reasons this American Express boasts its strongest field in two decades including five of the top seven players in the Official World Golf Ranking. Jon Rahm, Scottie Scheffler, Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele and Will Zalatoris are among the heavy hitters in the desert, where temperatures are forecast to be in the low 60s and framed by sunny skies.
Other than Rahm, who has three recent victories, no one carries more positive vibes than Finau.
“Winning breeds confidence; there’s no question,” Finau said. “I feel that for the most part I’ve always been a pretty confident person, but winning breeds more confidence.”