GREENSBORO, N.C. – Matthew Wolff achieved a rare feat on Friday at the Wyndham Championship – he missed the cut but still will take home a bigger check than anyone in the field except for the champion on Sunday.
How, you ask? Wolff claimed the season-long Aon Risk Reward Challenge and the corresponding $1 million prize on Friday. The 22-year-old Oklahoma State product took care of business with a birdie at the par-5 15th hole in his second round to reach the contest’s 40-round minimum.
“There’s a lot of money to be made out on Tour, but I’m new out here and every little bit helps,” he said. “Just happy that I got it done. And I knew about it kind of the last couple months, so on the Aon holes I was a little more nervous than I usually am, but played them pretty well and just came out on top.”
The Challenge is based around chosen holes at Tour stops throughout the year and designed to test a player’s strategy on what are considered some of the most challenging holes a player will face week to week. For every participating event, a player’s best two scores on the designated hole counts towards the season-long leaderboard. Wolff had played the designated hole at 10 Risk-Reward events in an average of 1.105 under par.
“I’m a pretty risky player and I guess it just happened to turn out in my favor on those holes,” he said. “I feel like I have a pretty good game plan every single week, but seems like those holes I just have a better one.”
Wolff’s chaser Louis Oosthuizen withdrew from the tournament on Wednesday, which made it a virtual slam dunk for Wolff to win as long as he completed two rounds – he shot 69-70 to miss the cut – but he said he was happy he finished in style with a birdie.
“If I’m going to win the Challenge, I want to win it because I play the best golf, not because someone gives it to me,” Wolff said. “I feel like I did that and on those holes I happened to play them really well. I think I was averaging like a stroke under par every single week or according to the contest, so I played those holes correctly, just got to play the rest of the holes right.”
