Yang tops the list of biggest surprises in 2009 season

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Tom Watson's surprising run at the 2009 British Open ended with Stewart Cink lifting the Claret Jug.

The only certainties in life are death, taxes and Tiger Woods winning a major championship every year. OK, scratch that last one. Woods went major-less for just the fourth time in his PGA TOUR career, which was a surprise to some. So who were the biggest surprise players of 2009? For starters, how about the guy who took down Woods in the year's final major.

BEST MOMENTS: From another record-breaking Tiger performance to Stenson's decision to bare almost all, golf fans are left with plenty of indelible images from the year. Click here BEST SURPRISES: Who were the surprise players in 2009, the ones who played beyond our expectations? We've got the list. Click here BEST PLAYERS: Who joined Tiger and Phil in the Big Three? Can you name all eight multiple winners? Which big name had 11 top-10s but no wins? Click here BEST FINISHES: The PGA TOUR had 13 playoffs in 2009, including two at major championships, and 13 more were decided by just a shot. Click here BEST ROUNDS: Count down the 10 most memorable rounds of the season, including Troy Matteson's back-to-back 61s and Tiger Woods' 62 at Cog Hill. Click here

Season in review

How it shook out in 2009

PGA TOUR: Tiger's return, surprise major winners and Phil's finish were just some of the headlines from an exciting year. Click here CHAMPIONS TOUR: A thrilling season-long battle for the Charles Schwab Cup begs the question: Just who had the best year on Tour? Click here NATIONWIDE TOUR: Michael Sim. Michael Sim. Michael Sim. The Australian phenom lit it up in 2009 with the most successful individual season in Tour history. Click here

1. Y.E. Yang. Winning the PGA Championship as the 110th-ranked player in the world is one thing. Doing it by rallying from two strokes back on the final day (with a couple of highlight-reel shots) to beat the world's No. 1 player, Tiger Woods, is another. That's what Yang did, becoming the first Asian-born player to win a major championship when he captured the Wanamaker trophy at Hazeltine in August. Yang, who didn't even begin playing golf until age 19, then capped his year with two wins in The Presidents Cup. Predicting that would happen would be like saying David Duval and Ricky Barnes would contend at the U.S. Open ...

2. David Duval and Ricky Barnes. One was once the No. 1 player in the world, the other a promising amateur destined for stardom. Though Duval and Barnes have had vastly different careers, they shared one thing in 2009: each returned from the depths of despair to nearly win the U.S. Open. No one could have seen that coming, either, not with Duval, a sectional qualifier ranked 882nd in the world, and Barnes, also a qualifier who spent the last five years on the Nationwide Tour. Neither won, but they weren't supposed to.

3. Tom Watson. Had a 53-year-old Greg Norman not nearly won the British Open a year earlier, Watson's near-victory would have ranked higher. Still, the 59-year-old and six-time British Open champ almost nabbed Claret Jug No. 6 before making a bogey on the 72nd hole, where he badly missed an 8-foot putt to win the tournament. That miss wasn't terribly surprising given Watson's history of having a balky putter, but it was surprising that Watson, unlike Norman, was in that position so late in the tournament to begin with. Watson ran out of gas in the playoff against Stewart Cink, but not before providing one of the year's most memorable moments.

4. Lucas Glover. After a sophomore season on TOUR that included a victory at the FUNAI Classic at Walt Disney World Resort and six other top-10s in 2005, Glover was dubbed the next big thing in American golf. Nearly four years later, though, he was still searching for his second win. He got it in a big way, of course, when he emerged from a messy U.S. Open with some spectacular golf to capture his first major. He also had second- and third-place finishes in 2009, finished 17th in the FedExCup standings, was a Captain's Pick for The Presidents Cup team and earned more than $3.5 million (a career-high by more than a million dollars). That's how you go from underachiever to superstar.

5. Padraig Harrington. The results the first two-thirds of the year were as surprising as the fact that Harrington, who entered 2009 having won three of the last six majors, decided to change his swing. In his first 14 events on TOUR this season, Harrington missed six cuts, including three in a row at one point, and had just two finishes in the top 20. That caused many in the media to wonder why Harrington would try to fix something that isn't broke. Harrington answered by finishing 2009 with that new swing and six-straight top-10s, including a pair of runner-up finishes at the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational and The Barclays.

6. Angel Cabrera. Yes, Cabrera was my "sleeper pick" for the Masters, but even when the final round was winding down at Augusta National, I wasn't exactly confident that he would win -- especially given how Kenny Perry played the first 16 holes that day. That's when something divine happened, at least for Cabrera. Perry crumbled, Chad Campbell gagged and Cabrera got his second career major and first Green Jacket by playing U.S. Open-style golf with par after par. The biggest of those pars came on the first playoff hole, the 18th, where Cabrera's first and second shots found the trees. He got up-and-down, though, and one hole later another par won him the tournament.

7. Steve Stricker. I'm not sure which was more surprising for Stricker in 2009: His runner-up finish just two weeks after blowing the 50th Bob Hope Classic hosted by Arnold Palmer with a final-round 77, or his spectacular second-half run that included three wins, three other top-six finishes and a world ranking at one point of No. 2. During that run, Stricker also found himself paired with Tiger Woods a number of times. That's a position a lot of players might crumble in, but Stricker relished it and went lower than Woods on two of those occasions.

8. Henrik Stenson. Shock might be a better word than surprise when talking about Stenson in 2009. He first made headlines for stripping down to his underwear to hit a shot from the edge of a hazard at the World Golf Championships-CA Championship. Two months later, Stenson made more appropriate news for winning THE PLAYERS Championship with a final-round 66. The latter came with Stenson beginning the day trailing by five shots -- and Tiger Woods ahead of him on the leaderboard in a tie for second. It ended with Stenson as the only player bogey-free on an extremely difficult day of scoring at TPC Sawgrass. It also marked the biggest victory by far of his career, which included just one other PGA TOUR win.

9. Kenny Perry. Some might argue that Perry's collapse at the Masters wasn't much of a surprise at all -- he'd already been there and done that in a major. But when he absolutely stuck his tee shot on the par-3 16th to set up the second of two consecutive birdies in the final round, it certainly looked like Perry was headed toward his first career major championship. Not so fast. Back-to-back bogeys, followed by another on the second playoff hole, left Perry Green Jacket-less. There were two things stunning about this. First, Perry had played incredibly good golf prior to those final two holes (neither of which he'd bogeyed in any of his three previous rounds that week). Second, he said afterward that great players get the job done and average ones don't -- in other words, he called himself average, a pretty stunning admission for a player of any caliber.

10. Anthony Kim and Camilo Villegas. From young guns to young duds. That's the best way to describe Kim and Villegas in 2009, at least based on the expectations placed on the two twentysomethings. They still might be the future of the game, but both took rather large steps backwards after winning multiple tournaments a year earlier. Kim and Villegas combined for zero wins and just seven top-10s with only one real opportunity for either to win (Kim at the AT&T National, where he shared the lead with eventual champion Tiger Woods going into the final round). In fairness, the expectation may have been a bit high, but I'm guessing very few people thought both of these players would go winless in 2009.