FanHouse Angel Cabrera

CASARES, Spain (AP) -- Ross Fisher beat Anthony Kim 4 and 3 on Sunday to win the 36-hole World Match Play Championship final.

Fisher eagled the 22nd hole and birdied the next to take a 3-up lead at the Finca Cortesin golf course. Kim won the next hole before missing short putts at the next two, then squandering several chances to win holes down the stretch.

"Fortunately the putter finally got a little bit hot," said Fisher, who became the fourth Englishman to win the event. "It was slow to get going but when I needed some crucial putts, there were some really good putts I holed today."

Fisher never trailed his American opponent as the first 18 holes were played in cool, overcast conditions. The sun finally came out in the afternoon.

Angel Cabrera, Lucas Glover, Stewart Cink and Y.E. Yang got together Tuesday and Wednesday in Bermuda to play 36 holes of golf.

They did this because each year the PGA of America invites the season's four major championship winners to some exotic site, puts up a boat-load of money and calls it the Grand Slam of Golf.

In the best of years, the ones when Tiger Woods shows up, the event can be mildly interesting because there always is a chance television will show a brief glimpse of "Privacy," the 155-foot, $28 million yacht he might have anchored in the harbor.

Most of the time, however, you get what this week so whole-heartedly provided: A reminder that golf all too often is its own worst enemy.

A good rule of thumb: If the final results do not count, there's no reason to care.

In what was as close a race as Secretariat vs. field, Tiger Woods was named PGA of America Player of the Year on Wednesday for the 10th time in his career.

The award was basically a lock for Woods, who won six events this season, the FedEx Cup, the Vardon Trophy and the Bryon Nelson Award for sporting the lowest scoring average, a salty 68.05. The main reason Tiger was able to claim this award, and most likely the PGA Tour Player of the Year which will be announced at a later date, is because all the major winners didn't make much noise in the other events.

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For the last big event of the 2009 season, the Presidents Cup gave us more drama than the score might appear. A captain's pick failing to win a point (Gasp!). An 18-year-old rookie stealing the show for the losing team (Wow!). And, as you probably expected, the number one golfer in the world doing exactly what he does, week in and week out. So who left Harding Park a winner, and who will look back at this event wishing it never happened?

SAN FRANCISCO -- The eighth Presidents Cup begins play Thursday afternoon at Harding Park Golf Club, but the action started Wednesday when team captains, American Fred Couples and International Greg Norman, matched twosomes for six first-round foursome matches.

The alternate-shot competition will begin at 12:10 p.m. PDT with the International pairing of Canadian Mike Weir and South African Tim Clark taking on Americans Anthony Kim and Phil Mickelson.

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Greg Norman will play hurt at next week's Presidents Cup.

OK, as captain of the International Team that is taking on the Americans at San Francisco's Harding Park Golf Club, Norman will not hit a shot, but no question he is ailing.

Captain Shark has his right arm in a sling, the result of arthroscopic shoulder surgery performed Wednesday.

"A bit of a surprise," Norman said Friday. "I was trying to delay it until January of next year, but the doctor said I needed to get it done now."

Normal PGA Tour playoffs are important on a number of levels, one of the major ones being financial improvement. A guy winning a playoff normally pockets around a million bucks, along with an extended exemption of at least two years. But what if a playoff were worth $11.35 million? That's what could happen this week at the Tour Championship.

For all the complaining from the players and the media about the continued project that is the FedEx Cup, one thing's for sure -- the third year has been a lot smoother than the previous two. We've had a random winner (Heath Slocum) toss himself in the mix. We've had the Zeus of the golf world (Tiger Woods) put himself in his rightful position atop the standings, but with a decent shot of not winning if someone else were to win the Tour Championship.

For all the good, there is still some uncertainty in the system, with one of those possibilities coming to light this week -- the FedEx Cup could end, on Sunday at East Lake, with two potential playoffs.

Over the next two weeks, FanHouse will be delivering any and all awards for the 2009 PGA and LPGA Tour season. It will be a collection of anything that needs to be awarded, from Player of the Year, to Best Shot of '09 to Breakthrough Twitterer. It is, simply named, The Green Jacket awards.

The saying goes, "I'd rather be lucky than good," and anyone that has been paired with a random twosome on a beautiful summer day has probably heard it after a bounce goes their way or a high lip decides to let the ball in the side-door.

On the PGA Tour, that saying holds true just like for any hacker -- a guy hits a poor tee shot only to have it kick off the lip of the bunker, roll through the second cut and find itself perched up in the fairway, awaiting a short iron to set up another birdie. The biggest breaks usually come in the biggest tournaments, and 2009 was no different. So what was the luckiest break of the year?

We all fail, at times, to do more random acts of kindness. Pick up a stranger's $3 tab when he's struggling to cover it with dimes. Help an older lady with a flat tire on the side of the road. Help someone move instead of golfing.

Angel Cabrera, who has been gifted with a talent we all dream of having, wasn't short of helping others out last week.

At the Deutsche Bank Championship, Cabrera decided to take care of the lesser-known workers on the PGA Tour -- the 2009 Masters champion picked up all the meals for the caddies the entire week, deciding not to disclose the price it would lessen him.