The Crazy Seven-Man Playoff for an Olympic Bronze Medal in Golf

How did this stampede happen? It’s owing to the peculiarities of Olympic golf. There isn’t a cut, which means players completely out of contention have to suffer the ignominy of playing out the weekend for a purse of exactly zero dollars. 

It’s also part of the rules that ties for second or third place have to be settled because there’s a medal on the line. 

American Xander Schauffele won gold. A South African who’s now Slovak named Rory Sabbatini won silver. Then seven players returned to the course to play for bronze.

That’s how Chinese Taipei’s C.T. Pan won the strangest bronze medal at the Olympics. 

It was a jarring and hilarious sight to anybody who watches professional golf or plays at local munis. Fourteen people—players and caddies included—had to pile into the tee box at Kasumigaseki Country Club as the competitors were slowly eliminated. Third place at the British Open was worth $768,000. This was worth a medal. 

“There was no money,” Schauffele said after claiming gold, “but you had your pride and your country behind you.”

The players in the playoff must have really believed that. The golfers in this group looked like a beleaguered bachelor party gone wrong. 

“It was a long four holes,” American Collin Morikawa said afterward. The group—broken down at first into a foursome and threesome—was Pan, Morikawa, Colombia’s Sebastian Munoz and Chile’s Mito Pereira, followed by Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama, Great Britain’s Paul Casey and Ireland’s Rory McIlroy. 

It was quite the field. Three of the six major winners in the field—Morikawa, McIlroy and Matsuyama—made the playoff. It was a group of players who somehow all managed to play 72 holes of golf and take exactly 269 strokes, good for 15-under par each.

The format was that they would play holes 18, 10 and 11 on a loop until six of the players were eliminated. After just one turn through, there was disappointment for the player the host nation and the hundreds of media and volunteers had followed throughout the round: Matsuyama, who earlier this year became the first Japanese man to win a major when he prevailed at the Masters, was out with a bogey. The result was particularly crushing after Matsuyama, in the final pairing, missed a putt on 18 that would have given him a solo bronze—and avoided this madness. 

With Great Britain’s Paul Casey also out after one, they were down to five. The groups merged to form a fivesome, and all five of them parred the par-3 10th. 

After just one more hole, three more were eliminated. The fivesome became a normal looking twosome. Still alive were Morikawa, coming off his recent victory at the British Open, and Pan, both of whom birdied after brilliant approaches right near the hole. Neither seemed to be in medal contention entering Sunday. But both fired 8-under 63s in the final round to sneak into this fracas, and they were the last two golfers on the course. 

Then, on the fourth hole, the normally super-accurate Morikawa misfired into the bunker. He managed to get out of an extraordinarily difficult lie, but it wasn’t enough to save par. 

The seven were down to one. There could finally be a medal ceremony. 

—Jim Chairusmi contributed to this article.

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com