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  • Zack Suchar, seen here watching a putt during his final round, beat Nick Rousey in a playoff to win the inaugural Cullman Summer Pro-Am Classic Thursday at TP Country Club. Rob Ketcham

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July 14, 2012

Gardendale's Zack Suchar wins first pro golf title

By Laura Owens Cullman Times

CULLMAN — The Emerald Coast Golf Tour’s inaugural Cullman Summer Pro-Am Classic came to a close in dramatic fashion. The two leaders matched each other’s scores through every round, and so into a playoff they went.

Zack Suchar, from Gardendale, and Nick Rousey, from Pensacola, were neck and neck all three days of the tournament, and it took an eagle on the 18th hole Thursday for Suchar to keep it tied.

“Today, I had a bad stretch,” he said. “I was 3-under through 10 and then bogeyed 11, 12 and 14 to get back to even. I think Nick had a pretty big lead on me at a couple different times. I figured the only chance I had was to eagle 18, so I didn’t have anything to lose, which was nice.”

Suchar then birdied the first playoff hole to win the $5,000 prize for first place.

“This was my first professional playoff,” he said. “I played in a few of them in amateur golf, but this was my first professional one. It was nice to birdie the first hole.”

Rousey, in second, went home with $2,500. The third- through seventh-place golfers also received a check for their 54-hole performance at TP Country Club.

The tournament victory was Suchar’s first as a professional. He said he called his wife from the golf cart on the drive to the clubhouse to fill her in on the outcome.

“I was like, ‘Hey, I finally won one,’” he said.

The group teed off at 8 a.m. Thursday morning to complete Wednesday’s second round, which had been postponed due to heavy rain and lightning.

The conditions still weren’t ideal when the field picked up where they had left off. The lightning had stopped overnight, but the rain still came down steadily.

“It didn’t rain that hard, but it was just constant for a couple of hours straight, so I didn’t think we were going to finish for a while, and then everything behind it broke up,” Suchar said.

It took about two hours to finish the round and then another two hours to wait for a potential window to begin the final 18 holes.

The rain had almost entirely passed by the time the golfers started Round 3 at noon. The original plan was to get in at least nine holes, but each group ended up playing all 18.

“This course dries really well,” Suchar said. “It’s amazing. I was expecting it to be worse than it was.”

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