Pavin Adds His Name To History

Golf

Corey Pavin won the Nissan Open for the second straight year Sunday, joining a couple of golf’s greatest players with his victory at storied Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles.

With a 4-under-par 67, Pavin finished 16 under and three shots in front of Kenny Perry and Jay Don Blake at Riviera, where the Los Angeles tournament was first played 66 years ago and which is the site of the PGA Championship in August.

Pullman’s Kirk Triplett finished with a 70 for 280 and earned $8,406.

Pavin became the first player to win the tournament two years running since Arnold Palmer did so in 1966 and 1967 at Rancho Park. And nobody had won the tournament two consecutive years at Riviera since Ben Hogan in 1947 and 1948.

Pavin began the final round one shot behind Perry, who won the Bob Hope Desert Classic the previous week and finished second at Pebble Beach earlier in the month.

The victory was the 12th of Pavin’s career, but he hadn’t won since his triumph in Los Angeles a year ago.

Seniors

In Acapulco, Mexico, Jim Colbert and Jim Dent won the first two singles matches of the day and the United States went on to recapture the Chrysler Cup 11-5 from an international team of seniors.

Colbert, the U.S. captain, beat his international counterpart, Bob Charles of New Zealand, by three strokes, shooting a 69 to Charles’ 72. Dent then beat Harold Henning of South Africa, 71-76 over the 7,082-yard, par-72 Tres Vidas Acapulco Country Club along the Pacific Ocean.

Those two victories gave the U.S. the two points it needed to reach 8, the necessary margin for victory in the senior tour’s version of the Ryder Cup.