US PGA Championship: From runner-up to Pointless answer

David Lynn, runner-up in the 2012 US PGA Championship, was a renowned prankster on tour.

We all remember Rory McIlroy's brilliant US PGA Championship win at Kiawah Island nine years ago, but can you remember who finished as runner-up? Meet David Lynn...

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Nine years after finishing second at the US PGA Championship, the former European Tour star now finds himself managing a property portfolio which has more than a passing link to his former profession. But, as Today's Golfer's Features Editor Michael Catling found out, he’s lost none of the humour which made him one of the most popular players in the game.

The way Englishman David Lynn tells it, it was a minor miracle that he was even in the field at Kiawah Island nine years ago, let alone that he ended up being the answer to an obscure quiz question: Who finished second at the 2012 US PGA Championship?

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Up until that point, Lynn had never even played in a 72-hole event in America. He was so unfamiliar with his surroundings that he accidentally stood on the head of an alligator outside his rental house. The fact he escaped unharmed only added to the craziness of a week which began with him sleeping on the floor and taking seven flights just to get to South Carolina.

There was also the small matter of having not played any competitive golf in the four weeks leading up to the US PGA Championship, which was only his second-ever appearance in a Major.

“I needed to protect my World Ranking so I could get in,” Lynn tells Today's Golfer. “I’d just moved house as well, so I was doing quite a bit of grafting in the garden. I was certainly digging more than I was practising! At the time I was feeling quite comfortable with my game and didn’t want to lose that feeling. Then we had the whole airport fiasco…

“From what I remember, we had an eight-hour wait in one airport. I actually said to my caddie, Wayne (Husselbury), do you just want to go home? He still reminds me about it now because his reply was like, ‘Don’t worry, kid, this time next week we’ll be millionaires’.”

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And so it almost proved to be. Despite being one of the shortest hitters on what was the longest course in PGA Tour history at the time, Lynn produced the performance of his life to storm through the field with a pair of 68s at the weekend. Admittedly, he still finished eight shots behind runaway winner Rory McIlroy in second, but his efforts were rewarded with an $865,000 payday, by far the biggest of his 22-year career, and a PGA Tour card for the following season.

“When we finished, I had a glass of wine with my caddie, and it was one of them where we puffed our cheeks out and looked at each other like, what happened there? 

“The PGA gets the top 100 players in the world, there are no duck eggs in that field. I do look back now and think, wow, that was quite an achievement. But then a part of me also thinks, what if Rory wasn’t playing or got injured down the stretch? It’s all ifs and buts, but it was certainly one of my best weeks.”

Not knowing how much money was at stake, nor that a top-five finish would guarantee him an exemption to the Masters, probably played a part in finishing so strongly while others around him floundered. But the fact he exceeded his own expectations also meant he missed his flight back home. It was then that he received a helping hand from an unlikely source.

“I remember we were sat at a table, trying to sort out flights, and Caroline (Harrington) overheard what we were doing. I’d just played the last two days with Padraig, so she said, ‘Look, we’re going to New York tomorrow so if you want a lift with us, that will be fine. I’m sure you can get home from there’.

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"She gave us her number and as we were leaving, my missus was like, ‘I hope they’ve got a big enough car’. That’s when I said, ‘She’s offered us a lift on his plane’. So, we travelled over to New York with the Harringtons and we got a limo to drive us around New York for the day, so it all worked out quite well.”

That invite to the Masters followed him back home soon after, by which time Lynn had already accepted PGA Tour membership for the first time at the age of 38.

In just his fifth start at the Honda Classic, he was paired with Tiger Woods for one round and outscored him by two strokes. “So is this what happens out here?” Lynn tweeted a few hours later. “Outscore Tiger when you play with him and whisked straight off for a drug test.” He howls with laughter at the reminder and is quick to point out that he is probably one of a handful of golfers who boast a superior head-to-head record over Tiger and Phil Mickelson. “I’d still swap bank balances with them,”he adds mischievously.

Despite only playing on the PGA Tour for one full season, Lynn still managed to make a name for himself. From the end of January 2013, he made 10 of 15 cuts in 17 weeks and won more than $1.3 million to keep his card for another year. He also had the experience of leading the Masters after nine holes on his debut, a fact he still reminds his kids about today.

If he has one regret, it’s that he lost a sudden-death play-off to Derek Ernst at the Wells Fargo Championship, but he still won plenty of fans for his dry, northern humour and his often bizarre practical jokes. As well as being consumed by the short-lived craze of planking, he used to carry around a pink golf travel bag with the words ‘Lynn Dawg’ stitched into it and would often be greeted with chants of “Lynn-sanity” wherever he played.

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“I loved Lynn-sanity,” he smiles. “There was another one at the PGA the following year… ‘Lynn Diesel’. I had a car which needed high octane unleaded in it and I put the cheap one in. The car, consequently, packed in. It was a brand new Mercedes GL500 and it actually got written off. It was Ian Poulter who tweeted that I put diesel in it and sure enough, this nickname emerged and everyone was calling me Lynn Diesel.”

Then there was the time he took the mickey out of all the apparel companies who post pictures of what their players will be wearing by sharing a semi-naked picture of himself on Twitter. “I used to tweet a lot which got me in trouble,” says Lynn, pausing to reference another time he shared a photo of a testicle with a union flag embossed on it, after claiming he had produced “a new marking for my ball”.

“One day, the player liaison officer for the PGA Tour rang me – he was laughing at the time – and he said: ‘Your last tweet, you’ve pushed it too far and the PGA are going to organise a disciplinary hearing’. It then transpired that they’d been monitoring me and I never knew.”

Ultimately, he managed to escape with a warning, but it wasn’t long before he was suffering from burnout and scaled back how much he was playing, particularly in America.

Part of his problem was trying to juggle events on both sides of the Atlantic while his wife and newborn were in England. As well as playing 11 times in Europe and twice in Dubai, he clocked up 21 starts in America in 2013, often driving himself to and from tournaments. When he did take a break, he was criticised for turning down the opportunity to play in the US Open for the first time.

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“I wasn’t exempt at the time, so I booked a holiday in the Maldives,” recalls Lynn. “Off the back of a runner-up at the Wells Fargo, I got back in the world’s top 50 and got an invite. But I just thought, I’ve booked a holiday, I’ve been playing a hell of a lot and I’m not going to change my plans. I was absolutely comfortable with that decision. I still am, even though I never played in a US Open. But a lot of people did think I was mad.”

Victory at the Portugal Open in October 2013, his first since the 2004 KLM Open, helped to appease his critics and briefly catapulted him to a career-high 34th in the World Ranking.

Any joy however was short-lived. A missed cut at the Masters was sandwiched by several more, and then he shocked everyone by announcing his retirement at the end of the 2014 season. It was widely reported that tendinitis was to blame, but his version of events now are a little different.

“I did have tendinitis, but that didn’t finish me,” says Lynn, who had just turned 40 at the time. “I was struggling with my back and was definitely losing speed.

"There are two types of golf – stressful and frustrating. Stressful golf is where you find yourself trying to cling on a lot of times for par, whereas frustrating golf is where you’re missing a lot of putts for birdies. I felt I was playing stressful golf. 

“I still could have competed quite well for a few years. I’m pretty sure of that. Getting my exemption in America probably kept me going a little bit longer because I did feel re-energised with my game.

"But I always knew that it was never going to last forever. I had other interests at the time and I’ve always said that it’s the best job in the world when you’re playing well and the worst job in the world when you’re not. It was the right time to walk away.”

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Those other interests saw him invest a large chunk of his earnings into acquiring a property portfolio of mixed-use investments, which he now manages full-time.

More recently, he’s been involved in his first-ever housing development and is currently selling off the last of 38 homes which are all named after his favourite UK courses. 

“The site is about 10 minutes from home in a place called Immingham (in Lincolnshire), and we’ve actually called it ‘The Approach’, says Lynn, who made his first property deal back in 2002.

“Originally, I wanted to name it after The Masters and the houses after famous holes there, but that would have meant going through the rigmarole of contacting Augusta to check if I was breaching copyright. In the end, we went for names like The Belfry, The Sunningdale, The Wentworth, The Turnberry and The Muirfield.”

It’s been more than six years since he decided to walk away from the game after 19 years as a pro, but any suggestion that he is a serious businessman now are a little wide of the mark. He’s certainly lost none of his trademark humour and has found other ways to entertain himself away from the tour, including the time he hired a delivery van and filled it with almost the entire contents of footballer Jimmy Bullard’s house.

“I left him his bed and the three-piece suite!” he says, laughing. “But I literally got bin bags and emptied everything out of the cupboards. It took a good few hours. I did a proper job on him. I think I’ve still got half his stuff! It was getting one of the beds off the first floor, that was a tough one. That’s going to the extreme, hiring a removal van, but those are the lengths I go to.”

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The tour is probably a safer place without him, if not a much quieter one. Lynn hasn’t touched his clubs in more than six months. But with his 50th birthday only two years away now, would he ever consider a comeback on the senior tour? 

“It’s not in the front of my mind, put it that way,” he smiles. “But I do question whether I can really do it again. Ever since I’ve stopped, I’ve probably averaged 12 or 15 rounds a year. I can still get it round.

"About three years ago I was playing Aloha (in Andalucia) with my old caddie, Wayne, and a couple of mates and I went out and shot 60. Wayne was shaking his head all the way round, asking ‘Why have you stopped playing?’ So it’s still in there, somewhere, but I’ve always felt it was the right decision to finish when I did. I certainly don’t have any regrets.

Every now and then I’ll get a message off someone saying I was a Pointless answer or part of a quiz question because of what I did at the US PGA. It’s nice when people remember you because you don’t normally remember who finished second.”

David Lynn's tales from the tour

The rocky start

“I once put a big rock in my golf bag on the 2nd tee at the Scottish Open. It must have been a good couple of hours until Wayne, my caddie, realised.

"The following year, on exactly the same tee in the pro-am, I wandered onto the beach and snuck another rock into the bag. As we walked off that tee, Wayne turned round to me and said, ‘Hey Lynny, do you remember this hole last year? You got that big rock in my bag, didn’t you? You’ll never get that past me again.”

The fake profile

“Wayne kept going on about this dating app and he was annoying me a little bit because he kept saying how all these women fancied him. We were playing at Torrey Pines in San Diego and we both had an apartment. I went round to his and set up a fake profile while I was talking to him.

"The hardest thing was keeping a straight face every time his phone was pinging. We did exchange a few messages but I did feel bad. I let the cat out of the bag later that evening when I went back to my apartment.

"When I saw him the following morning he just had a massive beaming smile on his face because he knew he’d been done.”

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The tree removal

“About 20 years ago, I was playing in Germany and there was a massive plant/tree in the reception of the hotel Mark Roe and I were staying in. It was in the days when you didn’t have digital keys, so you can just ask reception and get a card for Roe-ey’s room, which I did.

"I then got a luggage trolley and three of the lads out of the bar to take this tree up to his room. It just fitted through his door, but it covered the whole entrance. He didn’t get back until late and he had to call reception to get somebody to give him a hand so he could get this tree out of his room.”

The dodgy number plates

“When Ian Poulter won the Wales Open (in 2003), he had this Ferrari and he would park it in the lobby every night, making it known to everyone that he had this fancy car. 

“On the Saturday night, me and Roe-ey drove down to the underground car park and for once Poulter had parked his car in there. Roe-ey and I got a marker pen and changed his registration, which read ‘Ian P’. It took us a few minutes, but if you write down 14NP on a piece of paper, it’s so easy to change to ‘Tampax’. It looked monumental.

"We were telling everyone the following day and one of the players told him. Poulter says to this day that he wishes he hadn’t been told because Sky asked him to drive off in his car for the finishing set. If he hadn’t known, Tampax would have still been on there.”

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