2020 DGPT - Green Mountain Championship winner Kevin Jones shows-off the hardware. Photo: DGPT

Kevin Jones didn’t call it the best win of his career. “It’s just nice to get one in 2020,” the freshly-crowned DGPT – GMC champ said after turbo-tapping the final putt of the weekend. Nor will it necessarily stand out as such in the record books: this was Jones’ second-career elite series win on the Disc Golf Pro Tour following last year’s win at Idlewild.

But this one felt different.

The 2019 Idlewild win was a career-defining moment for Jones, to be sure. Its significance was magnified by what had gone down one year prior when Jones carried a four-shot lead heading into the final 6 holes of the same tournament, only to lose his nerve and fall all the way to a tie for fifth place.

But there was one element missing from the 2019 redemption bid: Paul McBeth. It was McBeth, after all, who had swooped in from the chase card to nab the 2018 Idlewild title, and who had skipped the event in 2019, robbing Jones of the opportunity to exact revenge on the man who had taken what he must have thought was his for the taking.

Also missing from the 2019 Idlewild MPO field was world No. 3 Eagle McMahon, who, along with the missing McBeth, may have been enough to give the impression that Jones had not, in-fact, beaten the world’s best players on one of the sport’s grandest stages.

Those doubts—if they did exist—have now certainly been laid to rest.

There was plenty of opportunity for doubt to creep into Jones’ final round on Sunday. After ceding three shots back to McBeth over the four-hole stretch, Jones threw his tee shot on the 1235-foot Par 5 seventh into the OB ditch, prompting DGN commentator Nate Doss to exclaim, “Oh boy, here we go.”

But McBeth and McMahon both failed to capitalize of the opening, and the reprieve seemed to shake Jones out of his slumber. It would be the last bogey of his tournament, as he finished with six birdies in the final 10 holes to secure a comfortable margin of victory.

Biggest win or not, it was a significant one for Jones, who moves into fifth place in the DGPT points standings for the 2020 season. “It means the world to me,” Jones said. “This is what I’m out here to do.”

Pierce sets course record on way to victory

Meanwhile in FPO, Paige Pierce was forced to produce the kind of golf that only she can en route to the GMC title. Pierce served up a 1037-rated (unofficial) 7-under par, breaking her previous course record set just two days before at the Fox Run Meadows course.

It was all she could do to edge out Hailey King, who kept pace with the 5x PDGA World Champion until a double-bogey on the challenging par-4 hole 16 cost her a two-stroke swing in Pierce’s favor.

“Hailey King is one of the most relentless competitors that I’ve faced in a while,” Pierce told DGN’s Hannah McBeth. “She’s running every fifty-footer, every sixty-footer, so I know it’s never over until it’s over, and I couldn’t even take a breath until the final putt.”

It was masterful display from Pierce, who hit 84% of the fairways and made 86% C1x putts during the final round on the way to her fourth DGPT win of the 2020 season.

King, for her part, has nothing to hang her head about as she put up a 1006-rated final round after carrying a two-shot lead through 54 holes. She will undoubtedly have many more opportunities to capture marquee titles, and if she continues to raise her game in the most important moments as she did Sunday, good things certainly lay in store.