Joel Dahmen is the king of the bubble after a dramatic last day at the RSM Classic

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[PHOTO: Mike Ehrmann]

Wherever the PGA Tour’s season finale is held, it tends to produce moments steeped in drama and at least a little bit of weirdness. An example: in a moment late in the final round at the RSM Classic that wasn’t televised, Michael Thorbjornsen, 23, had a birdie putt on the 18th hole that would have moved him from 129th in the FedEx Cup Fall standings to 125th by virtue of improving from T-8 to T-5 in the tournament. Despite the fact that the cutoff for full status is 125, reaching that plateau wouldn’t have mattered much for Thorbjornsen – his status is secure through his win at PGA Tour University. But for Sam Ryder, the player sitting in 125th, it meant everything. If that putt went down, he’d be booted out of the top 125, and Thorbjornsen’s status wouldn’t have mattered.

The putt missed. Ryder, who missed the cut at the RSM and could only hope for the best on the weekend, survived by the skin of his teeth.

Some of the action was a little more clear-cut, including the challenge facing Joel Dahmen. The fan favourite began the week ranked 124th, but a pedestrian beginning sent him down the ladder and onto the wrong side of the bubble. He made the cut on the number to keep his hopes alive, a disappointing 70 in the third round left him 128th in the projected rankings. His mission was simple: on Sunday, he had to go really low.

Which is exactly what he did. The magic on the 13th hole (Dahmen played the back nine first) when he holed out from 100 metres to get the scoring started. A par on 14 followed, but then he made birdie on three straight holes, draining almost 30 feet of putts to do so. He posted a 30 on his front nine, and while he cooled off significantly, making just a single birdie, he played clean golf in the home stretch, saved his bacon with a terrific up-and-down on the sixth, and finished with seven straight pars. When he signed for his 64, he had done plenty to break back into the top 125, finishing at No.124 and securing his tour card for 2025.

After the round, Dahmen made clear that he didn’t see this coming, called his mood on Saturday night “sombre, say funeral effect maybe”.

“Lona, my wife, did an amazing job of letting me… I’d say grieve,” he said of his low point after the round. “Just like driving, going to pick up my kid thinking, Man, it would be really cool if I could pick up my kid for five more years from this daycare thing and maybe not having that opportunity. And the kid’s amazing, he doesn’t care and he’s so much fun. But he was playing and Lona and I were just kind of sitting there and I was just staring off into the wall. She was like, ‘Are you OK?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m not OK. I want this to happen.’ She’s like, ‘Well, you can still play golf tomorrow, right? It’s not over.’ And that was kind of one of those things, like the switch flipped. It was about two hours after the round probably when the switch flipped for me to be able to kind of pull myself back up for today.”

Pick himself up he did, and his embrace with Lona after that round was somehow sweeter for all the stress they experienced.

“That embrace was, I thought about it both ways. I thought of the tears of sadness and how it can kind of change our life going forward and I’ve thought about it the other side,” he said. “So I’m very happy it was tears of joy.”

There was more joy to go around today, although in the case of Daniel Berger, that joy may have been slightly qualified. Berger started the week at 127th in the standings, and after missing significant action in 2022 and 2023 with a back injury, simply fighting his way into the top 125 and securing his card would have been very good news at the start of the week. As it happened, though, he had a great chance to win coming down the stretch, and missed a handful of birdie putts that would have put him at least in a playoff with Maverick McNealy. That might have made the result at least a little bittersweet, but the signs are good for Berger, who continues to improve since his return.

Along with Berger, the only player to go from outside the bubble to inside the top 125 was Henrik Norlander, whose final-round 68, after a scintillating 63 a day earlier, was enough to improve his position from 126th to 120th. As he pointed out in his press conference, even his relatively underrated performance this week came with drama – he had to make a 12-foot putt on the last hole on Friday just to make the cut. And he came desperately close to repeating his feat last year, when he finished just outside the top 125.

“Last year I finished 127 and then someone went to LIV so I moved up to 126,” he said. “In December, I was looking and looking, looking, seeing if anybody else would go and hoping to sneak in. It was pretty hard early in the year not getting in any tournaments. I was first alternate on-site in both American Express and out at Torrey and didn’t get in.”

He ended with just 20 starts, but he made the most of them, and caught fire at exactly the right moment in Georgia.

With Berger and Norlander fighting their way into the top 125, simple maths dictates that two players had to go the other way. One was Zac Blair, who missed the cut at the RSM and ended up as the first man out, the victim of Norlander and Dahmen playing great closing rounds. (You have to imagine Blair wouldn’t be heartbroken if LIV managed to poach a player before year’s end.) The other player who fell out of the top 125 was Wesley Bryan, who began the week as the last man in, but saw his position fade past the point of hope after he missed the cut.

One of the toughest outcomes of the day of the 2024 PGA Tour season belonged to Hayden Springer, whose heartbreaking story – he lost his 3-year-old daughter Sage, who passed away last November after being born with a genetic condition called Trisomy 18 – made him an emotional favourite. Springer made the cut and shot a red-hot 63 of his own on Saturday to be inside the projected bubble, but a closing 70 and a T-30 finish left him at 127th, just an agonising stroke away from knocking out Sam Ryder for the final spot.

“I’ve dreamed about being out here for a long time, so it’s really cool to be able to have a full season and to be able to do that,” Springer said of his 2024 campaign. “It’s been awesome and it’s really great experience. It’s only going to make me better. I think I learned a lot and will come out the other side better no matter what… I’m proud of myself and I’m proud of the fight, but I think that there’s more in there.”