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SPORTS

Duo earns name recognition

Monday, August 22, 2011
(Updated 6:59 am)

— If you’re not a hard-core golf fan, chances are you don’t know the two players who made the best run at Webb Simpson during Sunday’s final round of the Wyndham Championship.

George McNeill, a 35-year-old who played at Florida State, shot Sunday’s best round, a six-birdie, no-bogey 64 to finish in second place.

Kyung-Tae Kim, the slender 24-year-old South Korean ranked No. 20 in the world, made a run of his own with back-to-back birdies at Nos. 15 and 16.

But Kim’s birdie putt came up short at 17. Then he snap-hooked his tee shot on his way to a bogey at 18, finishing in a five-way tie for fourth.

It was the fourth top-10 finish this year for McNeill — a career high — and the second as a runner-up.

No one was more surprised.

“Honestly, I thought it was going to take a much lower number,” McNeill said. “... I can’t control what everybody else does. I’m very happy with the way I hit it, the way I putted, the way I played.”

A birdie at No. 18 would’ve put pressure on Simpson, but McNeill caught a bad break.

“I laid up off the tee,” he said. “basically to make sure I hit it in the fairway. Then I hit a good (approach) shot, but it got caught by the wind and ended up short of the green.”

He nearly chipped in. But instead made par to finish his bogey-free round.

McNeill will take it. He jumped to No. 54 in the FedEx Cup standings, comfortably in the playoffs for at least two rounds barring a disaster at The Barclays.

And the $561,600 prize for his solo second-place finish pushes him to more than $1.3 million in earnings this year.

Kim, a four-time winner in Japan, won $196,040 in his best finish at a PGA Tour event. He tied for sixth two weeks ago at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational in Akron, Ohio.

It could be the fans who followed Kim this week saw a future star.

Contact Jeff Mills at 373-7024 or jeff.mills@news-record.com

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