Anyone who thought you had to hit the ball extremely far or at least hit the fairways to win major professional golf tournaments has been taught otherwise by Cameron Smith.

The 28-year-old Australian won the PGA Tour's flagship event, the Players Championship, the world's highest endowed and best-attended tournament at $20 million on Monday in Ponte Vedra Beach (Florida).

The man with the stringy "mullet" hairstyle from Brisbane not only received the winner's check of 3.6 million dollars (3.29 million euros) at this unofficial fifth major, which was extended to Monday due to heavy rain and hurricane-force winds, and moved up from tenth in the world rankings to sixth place.

He is also eligible to start at all majors for the next three years and the Players Championship for the next five years.

Smith, who has his second home just 10 minutes from the Stadium Course in neighboring Jacksonville Beach, did all of this while not hitting his drives extremely far or with precision.

In the length statistics of the PGA Tour, he is only ranked 110 with 297 yards (271 meters). In the ranking precision off the tee, he is only ranked 160.

Over the five days of the tournament, he hit just 24 of 56 fairways, making him the worst of the seventy pros to make the cut.

"Driving for show, putting for dough"

So how did the Australian manage to beat 34-year-old Indian Anirban Lahiri by one and 44-year-old Englishman Paul Casey by two with a final round of 66 and a total of 275 strokes (13 under par)?

The explanation is simple and was also valid in times when the American Bryson DeChambeau, who was absent this time due to a wrist injury, had caused an uproar in the golfing world with his muscle building program and his distance hunt: "Driving for show, putting for dough".

There's plenty of show off from the tees, but the money is made on the greens.

Smith was by a wide margin the very best despite his driver blunders on the greens.

In strokes gained putting, a complicated mathematical formula that calculates how a player compares to the field, he won a whopping eleven and a half strokes.

On Monday he only needed 24 putts on the last 18 holes, and only 101 on all five days. With ten birdies on the last 18 holes he equaled a record on the Stadium Course and was able to afford four bogeys.

On the last nine holes, just one putt was enough eight times, a coup with which he sealed the greatest triumph of his career on the very last hole.

Although he shot his ball out of the small grove into the pond after a twisted drive on the 18th hole, he spectacularly saved the par when he put the ball 90 centimeters to the flag from 55 meters.

Behind him in the group of three, Lahiri, ranked only 322 in the world and leading the field after the third round, failed to equal Smith with a birdie on the 18th hole.

After all, Lahiri was a lavish consolation with $ 2.18 million in prize money.

“Golf came only second”

But in the end everything revolved around the winner, who said after the round that he had significantly improved his iron game: "I have a lot of confidence in my iron shots." He demonstrated this most impressively when he famously on the infamous 17th hole, hit the ball with a three-quarter swing with a 9-iron from 125 yards just 1.33 yards from the hole on the island green.

Only the Spaniard Sergio Garcia managed to get the ball closer (66 centimetres) to the small, four meter long strip between the hole and the water that day, when the sun had replaced the long periods of bad weather and cold (2 degrees on Sunday morning). place.

"I aimed ten feet to the left of the flag," Smith admitted afterwards, so this spectacular result was the result of a shot slightly to the right.

But Smith's second win of the season was special for another reason.

For the first time in more than two years he saw his mother Sharon and his sister Melanie, with whom he had only kept in touch via video switch due to the strict corona entry rules in his home country.

Both witnessed the victory live together with his girlfriend Shane Naoum and were the first to hug him after the triumph: "My priority in the last few weeks has been to be with them.

Golf came second,” Smith said, explaining the ease that helped him get through all the tricky situations.