Zach Johnson: Much more than a Masters champion

Zach Johnson is frequently and understandably identified as "former Masters champion."

However, the term "elite pro golfer" would do him more justice.

Mike Weir won the '03 Masters, and has just two Tour wins since. Trevor Immelman, Angel Cabrera and Charl Schwartzel won the '08, '09 and '11 Masters, respectively. None have won on Tour after that.

Johnson's win Sunday in the PGA Tour's Crowne Plaza Invitational at Colonial was the eighth of his Tour career, and sixth since he won the 2007 Masters.

It's easy and lazy for people in my industry to fall into provincial boosterism. Johnson is a Cedar Rapids guy, the only Iowan on the Tour, and it doesn't take much effort or courage for a Cedar Rapids sportswriter to tout what the man has done in his sport.

But what he has done is special, and gets more so all the time. Eight wins in his 8 1/2 years on Tour. That's a pace few other Tour players have maintained.

Besides Johnson, only nine of the other players in the top 100 of the current FedExCup standings have eight Tour championships or more. It's great company: Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh, Ernie Els, Jim Furyk, David Toms, Steve Stricker, K.J. Choi and Adam Scott.

Jason Dufner, who came up second-best in what was basically match play against Johnson this weekend, has been golf's biggest story in the last month with two wins and his second-place. But it was only Johnson who defeated him in that time, and Johnson had two second-places of his own (the Heritage and the Players Championship) in his previous three tourneys.

Sunday's win goes a long way toward putting Johnson on the 2012 U.S. Ryder Cup team with sure-thing Dufner, and 10 other players to be determined.

The top eight in U.S. points at the end of August's PGA Championship automatically will compete in the Sept. 28-30 Ryder Cup in Medinah, Ill. Johnson shot from 13th to 6th in the standings with his victory, and he is closer to third place than he is to ninth.

U.S. captain Davis Love III will add four players of his own choosing after the first eight are set. Johnson, who has played for the U.S. in the 2006 and 2010 Ryder Cups and 2007 and 2009 Presidents Cup, would be tough for Love to pass on even if Johnson didn't hang on to his top-8 position.

Johnson is tied for 158th on the Tour in driving distance this season. But he is fifth in money-winnings and 17th in the World Golf Rankings. That tells you he's got game on top of game on top of game.

It's not exactly news, but it was reaffirmed Sunday in Fort Worth.

Statistics of note that I purloined from golfobserver.com:

Johnson was first in the scrambling stat, getting it up and down 21 of the 27 greens he missed. He also had the least amount of putts (102) and the most one-putts (42). He had 38 putts over ten feet and made 15 of them, second-best in the field.