Dustin Gets It Done to Get in POY Mix

I'm man enough to admit when I've jumped the gun, even when I'm not 100 percent sure I've jumped all the way.

Two weeks ago, in my Aug. 30 entry, I all but handed the PGA Tour's Player of the Year trophy to Mr. Consistency Matt Kuchar, who had just won the Barclays. And he's still my guy, though it's no longer a done deal in my mind. With his third-place tie at Cog Hill, he maintained a precarious though much-deserved top spot in the FedEx Cup rankings, a scant 636 points ahead of Dustin Johnson, the only player to honestly figure into as many water cooler conversation over the course of the nearly completed PGA Tour campaign as Tiger Woods.

First, in February he won his second straight AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. He played pretty well through the spring, notching a T3 in L.A. and a T7 at the Byron Nelson, and came back to Pebble in June as a minor U.S. Open favorite. Then he damn near won the thing save for a final-round 82 that, in fairness, could have turn out much differently had the ball bounced a different direction on No. 2, and had someone spotted his errant tee shot diving into the hazard on No. 3, thereby costing him a mere one-shot penalty rather than the stroke-and-distance fate of a lost ball.

Then came the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits, 72nd hole, second shot. Bunkergate. A grounded club in a sea of humanity without a rake in the vicinity. Two-stroke penalty. No playoff for Dustin. Another bad beat for the tall, free-swinging soon-to-be-superstar.

Johnson, a cool South Carolinian who's part super-chilled surfer dude, part 330-yard-driving assassin, took it all in stride as well as any sentient being can be expected to, which is why he needs to be part of the POY conversation. Near-missed major don't normally set a guy up for end-of-the-season kudos, but with his win this past weekend near Chicago, at the BMW Championship — a performance capped by his electrifying tee shot on No. 17, which left him with a flip wedge to birdieland — Johnson showed the world he had shrugged off the summer's setbacks, that he can play with anybody in a style that foments deep admiration among the nation's short-hitting masses, that he truly is the real thing. So is fellow Southerner Kuchar, but in a different, more circuitous way. Whereas he has taken his time to reach the game's pinnacle of success, Johnson has pretty much shot up the charts in a couple of years. And he shows no signs of falling off a cliff into the great middle ground of professional golf. He has legs, and a refreshing attitude toward the game. Not aloof, not uncaring, not dull. Just different, somehow.

And now he just might be a worthy Player of the Year. At least one well-known fellow golf scribe, PGATour.com reporter Melanie Hauser, agrees with me. And if he takes down his 30 fellow competitors at the Atlanta Athletic Club next week, we'll have a lot of company.