PALM COAST, FL — Let’s begin with who did not win.
It wasn’t Zach Johnson, and it wasn’t Stewart Cink or Steven Alker, either. Those three had won every event since late July, and 15 of the first 23 on this 12 months’s PGA Tour Champions.
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In the finish, none of them had a likelihood, and frankly, the winner did not have a ton of hope either after a bogey on the next-to-last gap.
But Vaughn Taylor first took benefit of another golfer’s misfortune, and on the second playoff gap he leaked a 7-foot birdie putt over the left edge to beat Alex Cejka and win the 2026 Furyk & Friends at the Hammock Beach Ocean Course.
Vaughn Taylor celebrates after making the successful putt on the 18th inexperienced during the Furyk and Friends PGA Tour Champions event on Oct. 11, 2026 on the Ocean Course at Hammock Beach.
“Making a winning putt is a heck of a feeling,” Taylor said after the trophy presentation.
For a golfer who was once a promising PGA Tour newcomer, and even a 2006 U.S. Ryder Cup group member, Sunday’s win was Taylor’s first victory anywhere since a one-shot win over Phil Mickelson at the 2016 Pebble Beach Pro-Am — the third of his three PGA Tour wins, which came 11 seasons after his second.
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Not to say it came completely out of nowhere, but Taylor’s rookie season on the Champions tour included just three top-10 finishes, with a best of seventh, in 17 begins.
“I’m in disbelief, to be honest,” Taylor said. “I keep just thinking about the whole week, the whole day, the whole year, just everything. I can’t believe I’m standing here right now, to be honest.”
What appeared to be a successful kick began on the incoming 9 for Taylor, who made the par-5 tenth the first of 5 straight birdies to attain 18 under par and he was finally tied for first with Michael Wright.
Things shortly unraveled for both leaders, beginning with Taylor, who bogeyed the par-3 seventeenth. A bunch forward on the 18th tee, Wright leaked his tee shot into the right-side fairway bunker, and from there yanked his next shot approach left into the dune scrub alongside the Atlantic Ocean.
Vaughn Taylor smiles with the trophy after successful the Furyk and Friends PGA Tour Champions event on Oct. 11, 2026, on the Ocean Course at Hammock Beach.
Wright’s double-bogey dropped him to 16 under and one behind the sudden clubhouse chief — Cejka, who discovered himself in a playoff when Taylor made par on the closing gap. And surprisingly so, he said later.
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“I already showered, changed to shorts,” said Cejka, a four-time Champions winner (three of them majors) since becoming a member of the tour in 2021. “I was already literally in the car. I had to hop out and change again. Didn’t really hit balls. Like two, three balls on the range.”
Prepared to play the 18th as long as it took, both golfers made par on the first go-round before Taylor ended issues with a tight method and the barely uphill birdie putt.
This article initially appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Vaughn Taylor wins Furyk & Friends for first PGA Tour Champions victory
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