Honda Classic playoff: Tears of redemption for Wilson and his caddie

Pass me the tissues, I’ve just been listening to a real tear-jerker on XM radio. Winner Mark Wilson’s caddie Chris P Jones was dissolving in floods of them while his interviewer, his buddy and former caddie Michael Collins, was also balling his eyes out. It seemed the only decent thing to do was join in. The only one that didn’t end up crying was Wilson himself.

You couldn’t call them tears of joy exactly, more tears of “redemption” as they put it. Try as I might to bring my normal cynical mind to bear, I couldn’t help feeling this is a story of why the game still stands a little apart from other sports.

The emotions of course were stirred by Jones’s potentially calamitous Friday gaffe in giving Camilo Villegas’s caddy some club advice, which is apparently against the rules. Wilson immediately called the two-stroke penalty even though, had he done nothing, no one apart from the three of them would have been any the wiser.

If I’m honest I’d probably have pretended nothing had happened (which I guess means that actually I’m dishonest!). I’d certainly be spitting blood at my caddie, especially on the Sunday when those two strokes would have ensured outright victory instead of the playoff.

Not our Mike. As he recounts, it was the spur he needed, a “kick in the butt … I had two choices, I could be mad at him or I could use it as a springboard and I chose the latter thankfully.”

And so say all of us. It was such a solid all-round performance, in conditions that defeated all the favourites, that you wonder why it has taken Wilson so long to make his mark.

But I also wonder whether he won’t now slide back into the shadows like so many others before him. Is that the cynic in me returning? There’s one or two below the cut line in this one that fit the bill: Todd Hamilton anyone? Was it just three years ago that he rose from obscurity to make monkeys of Woods, Mickelson and Els in The Open, then just as quickly faded from view?

More tissues please!

Tuesday PS: PGA Tour have now put Michael Collins’s interview with Chris P Jones on their website.