Tongun Lako LoSarah took a 1UP lead on the very first hole of his final match against Blaine Staggs and never looked back. His wire-to-wire victory makes him the 2022 SCGA Match Play champion.
LoSarah’s win over Staggs was full of highlights including an up-and-down bogey on the par-3 15th where he curled in a downhill 25-foot slider to halve the hole and maintain his 1UP lead. After the round he called it the biggest putt of the week.
But perhaps his best shot of the tournament came on the 18th hole after he pumped a drive dead right into the rough on No. 10 a couple of first-downs off the fairway that Staggs was sitting in the middle of. LoSarah was protecting a 1UP lead when he found himself needing a Houdini routine from a blind shot 110 yards away. After walking off the distance, consulting with his caddie, and picking a target way behind the green, LoSarah stoned one to eight feet.
Meanwhile Staggs had left his greenlight approach shot a club short on the wrong tier of the dance floor. In a matter of moments, the script had flipped. After their tee shots, Staggs looked poise to make a birdie and win the hole to even the match—while LoSarah appeared to be grinding for par at best. Now it was the opposite. And after Staggs missed his long and difficult birdie putt, LoSarah turned on the vacuum one last time and found the bottom of the cup for a championship winning birdie putt worthy of the massive fist pump he fired off as the new SCGA Match Play champion.
