Las Vegas, Nevada (August 8, 2011)–We're not 100 percent sure, but we believe this is the first time ever that two PGA Tour golfers with strong ties to Las Vegas golf courses have won tournaments on the same weekend. This daily double happened when former UNLV golfer Adam Scott won the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and longtime resident Scott Piercy won the Reno-Tahoe Open. Each of the wins was done in impressive fashion. —By Brian Hurlburt
Scott led pretty much wire-to-wire while Piercy used a stunning third-round 61 to jump to the top of the leaderboard. It was Scott's eighth win on the PGA Tour while Piercy won for the first time, getting the so-called monkey off his back. "The word that comes to mind was, 'finally'," Piercy told the media after the tournament. "Like I said, I've been in the final group. I've had my chances, and I didn't close in the past. It's just a wave of emotions. It's almost, I don't know what word. In my head, it's like finally. Finally did it. You believe in yourself and everybody just — everybody is your opponent out here. If you don't believe in yourself and you don't have good results, then you can start not believing in yourself, which is hard. So it's kind of like a pat on your back when you do something good, that you are that good and that you can do it." Click for the interview transcript from Piercy.
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Scott had been to the winner's circle before but this one felt and looked different. Scott dominated an elite field and had Steve Williams, Tiger's old caddie, on the bag for the first official time as a new partnership. It all gelled nicely. Scott played at UNLV in 1999-2000.
"It was a great day on the golf course for me," a beaming Scott told the media. "I went to the range and had the best warm-up of the week. Like I said maybe a couple days ago, I wasn't feeling 100 percent with the golf swing, and today I felt 100. It felt great in the warm-up, so I was confident going to the course. I just had to kind of control myself a little bit and stay patient and not get ahead of myself. So went out there with a good strategy and played a solid front nine and not much happened, but started hitting some good shots on the back nine, chipping in on 12, all these good things happen when you win. Ended up playing a really solid round of golf for this golf course. With this win, I mean, I'm really stoked to have won a World Golf Championship and win around this course in nice fashion. The way I closed it out, I was really happy with, too, so overall extremely happy."
As for his new caddie: "Obviously he has such a great knowledge of this golf course and the greens. He's seen a guy play incredible golf, the best golf anyone has ever played around here so many times, so absolutely. He really guided me around the course nicely when he needed to step in and just make a point of where we need to be, he did, and had some great little notes in his book about putts on greens. And yeah, he knows this place very well, so he was, no doubt, a help." Click now for the Adam Scott interview transcript. Quotes from ASAPSPorts.com. For all photos and other information, click to PGATour.com.