US TOUR:A GHOST was in Kyle Stanley's gallery, a flash of red that kept tripping the mind throughout his final round at the Farmers Insurance Open.

Stanley began the day 18 under par, equaling the Torrey Pines 54-hole score of 198 posted by Tiger Woods in 2008, when he won by eight strokes. His advantage at Sunday’s start was five strokes, and he came to the final hole in his attempt to become a wire-to-wire winner leading by three, when he got a bad break.

On his third shot, a wedge from the fairway, Stanley landed the ball 15 feet from the pin, only to watch it spin off the green and into the water. He put his next shot 43 feet from the hole and three-putted to finish with a two-over 74 and a 16-under 272, the same score as Brandt Snedeker, who at one time in the round trailed him by nine.

In the ensuing play-off, each golfer made birdie on 18, the first extra hole. Snedeker, who shot a final-round 67, won with a par on the second, the par-three 16th. It was the third PGA Tour victory for Snedeker and the day’s second-most significant golf result, after Robert Rock’s two-stroke victory over Woods, whom he was tied with for the 54-hole lead at the Abu Dhabi Championship.

Woods’s failure to close out the tournament, juxtaposed with Stanley’s runner-up finish, provided two snapshots that coalesced into a matrix for men’s golf. Woods (36) once virtually invincible as a front-runner, has seemingly lost his aura at the very time the generation he inspired to take up the game is coming of age.

The 24-year-old Stanley was nine when Woods won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes for the first of his 14 major championships. “His influence on me, I mean, kind of our generation, he was the one who you grew up watching,” Stanley said, adding, “When I was little all through high school, I had his poster above my bed.”

Stanley’s prodigious drives call to mind a young Woods, whose length off the tee ushered in an era of stretching courses like putty in an effort to “Tiger proof” them.

On Sunday, Stanley’s drive at the par-four fifth travelled 337 yards and split the fairway. In the third round, he striped a 341-yard drive on the 13th hole (his drive on Sunday measured 326). “It was just downwind,” he said of the 341-yard effort, “and I hit that as good as I can possibly hit it.”

Torrey Pines, perched on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, provides the ideal canvas for artists and long drivers, which goes a long way toward explaining Woods’s seven victories there as a professional, including his 14th major title, the 2008 US Open.

On Saturday, Stanley said he didn’t expect to encounter any problems sleeping on his large lead, and if he did, he’d take a Benadryl capsule. If he was still tossing and turning, would Stanley then turn on the coverage of Woods’s final round, which came on at midnight locally? Stanley said he doubted it.

“I’d probably watch something else,” he said.

– (New York Times Service)