ST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- Marc Leishman says he no longer needs to win his first major title, and hey, don't get him wrong. He would love to conquer The Open on the Old Course. He would love to prove to himself, and everyone else, that he has the game and the nerve to win a big one.
"But if I don't," Leishman said, "I'll be all right."
Why? Win, lose or withdraw, he gets to go home to his wife, that's why. Three months ago, Audrey Leishman was not supposed to be alive and in front of a faraway TV set watching her husband shoot 64 at St. Andrews and threaten the major championship scoring record of 63 held by 26 players, most notably Johnny Miller at the 1973 U.S. Open.
She was so sick in a hospital near her Virginia Beach, Virginia, home, doctors reportedly told Audrey's husband that she had a 5 percent chance to live.
"It was actually 2 or 3 percent," said Leishman's caddie, Matt Kelly, his lifelong friend from their hometown of Warrnambool, Australia.
Leishman had been preparing for the Masters at Augusta National when he got word that his wife was seriously ill. Audrey initially thought she had the kind of flu bug that required nothing more than a garden-variety trip to urgent care. Soon enough she was hooked up to a ventilator and saying goodbye to the 31-year-old father of her two young boys. For the better part of four days, Marc Leishman, world-class golfer, thought he would lose Audrey to the acute respiratory distress and toxic shock syndromes that were shutting her organs down one by one.
Marc Leishman had already decided that he was done as a tour pro, that full-time fatherhood would be his new calling.
"It was a huge possibility that I wasn't going to be playing golf anymore," Leishman said. "Traveling with a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old by yourself ... well, it wasn't going to happen. I wouldn't do that to the boys. ... That was pretty rough there for a while, thinking about everything, the boys not growing up with their mom, me not playing golf anymore, not having a wife."
As it turned out, Audrey was strong enough to make a mockery of the doctors' forecast. She made good on their 2-to-5 percent odds. She emerged from a coma, fought her way out of the hospital, and remains home with her sons on the way to a full recovery.
"She looks completely normal," Leishman said. "She looks just like she did before she got sick. She's just got no energy, no stamina. She's exhausted by lunchtime most days ... but that's a lot better than what it was looking at three months ago. ... She's been strengthening or building muscles for 30 years. She's a pretty strong girl. And then all of a sudden when she woke up from the coma, she couldn't lift her phone. That's how bad she was."
Leishman returned to the tour with an entirely different tee-to-green perspective. A bad shot or a bad bounce or a bad read on the greens is immediately forgotten when he thinks of his wife and what might have been.
"I can still go home and hopefully give her a hug," Leishman said, "and cuddle my boys."
No, he didn't have to deal with any of those bad breaks Sunday, when he managed eight birdies and no bogeys in virtually windless conditions. Leishman said he first thought about a record round of 62 after his birdie on the 13th. Kelly said the first time they talked about the magic number was on the 15th, even though Leishman had just failed to make birdie on the par-5 14th.
With his man already 7 under for the day and 8 under overall, the caddie considered keeping his thoughts about the record to himself. You know, kind of like baseball players staying clear of a pitcher who is about to carry a no-hitter into the seventh or eighth inning.
"But I wanted to keep Marc going," Kelly said. "I didn't want him to start protecting his score. I don't know if he was thinking about it earlier, but I said to him, 'Come on, you've got to get the record here.' And then he made the putt on 15 and we knew what we had to do."
Leishman had to birdie two of the three final holes, and all he could manage were three pars, putting him 1 shot off Dustin Johnson's lead at the time.
"There's no reason why Marc can't win his first major tomorrow," Kelly said. "He's got all the shots, he's got everything. He can win this. There's nothing in the way that would stop him."
Just as there's nothing stopping Marc Leishman from simply savoring the journey if he finishes somewhere south of first.