Darren Clarke and Ben Crane close out AmFam Championship in tight finish
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MADISON – Before the 2026 American Family Championship began at TPC Wisconsin, Madison native Jerry Kelly reflected briefly on why he’s still out on the course on a near-weekly basis in his 30th season as a touring professional. Naturally he opened with a quip, ringed with some truth, that he’s starting to question his motivation, but then proffered the expected answer: Pure competition.
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“That's the way I feel about this tour,” Kelly continued. “It's one of the purest forms of competition that we can have. The guys aren't really in it for the money like some other tours. It is, hey, we want that trophy, we want to be holding it.”
Kelly has held the trophy twice in his hometown when the championship was a stroke play event. Tournament host, Madison resident and Edgerton native Steve Stricker hoisted it once.
AmFam leaderboard: Final round
Unfortunately, their respective teams could not mount a run at more hardware on June 7, as the team of Darren Clarke and Ben Crane fired a 30-under par over three rounds to edge Kenny Perry and Greg McNeill by one shot.
After Crane missed his long par putt to win on the last, Clarke followed by gently rolling in his nervy attempt on the 18th hole to win the tournament. Clarke started walking to the hole during the putts final revolutions and Crane excitedly took his hat off and fist pumped.
"He stepped up there; it was unbelievable," Crane said. "It was so much fun. You can see why this guy's won Ryder Cup after Ryder Cup. It's just elite golf, elite mentally."
The win is Clarke's second straight AmFam Championship, as he paired with Thomas Bjørn to win the inaugural team event last year. Crane filled in for the injured Bjørn this week.
“It was a hard day for us both and we both stepped up and made some clutch putts and clutch shots when we really had to down the stretch,” said Clarke, who won the 2011 Open Championship. “We said at the start of the week, our goal was to get ourselves in the mix on the back nine on Sunday and that's what we did.”
They are only two PGA Tour Champions events Clarke has won since 2022.
It is also Crane’s second win in the state of Wisconsin, as he captured the 2005 U.S. Bank Championship at Brown Deer Park Golf Course. It was Crane’s first Champions victory after turning 50 years old in March and his first victory of any kind since 2014..
“It's the best,” Crane said. “I felt it a couple times being close, but it's the best. And then to have this kind of partner say I got you, you know, it's just the best.”
Stricker, Kelly play through rust
As for the hometown favorites, Stricker and partner Mario Tiziani, a University of Wisconsin alumnus and Madison resident, tied for 17th at 23-under par. The duo tied for second last year.
Stricker teed it up in the tournament wanting a chance to win of course, but to actually pull that off would have been a remarkable feat. In the past he’s admitted feeling the pressure of winning his own tournament is ramped up due to all of his other duties surrounding the week. But beyond the mental fatigue, the championship was 59-year-old’s first tournament rounds since December.
Stricker only recently began hitting everything in his bag after suffering a setback in his rehab from an offseason hip replacement.
“I'm glad it's over, to be quite honest,” Stricker said of the tournament. “It's a stressful week, but a fun week. There's a lot on my plate. A lot of good things on my plate, though. I mean, we're all here to raise all that money for charities, yet I want to play well, too, and I didn't do that so much at times.”
Kelly and partner Justin Leonard finished tied for 24th at 21-under. They shot a 6-under 65 in their final round. The pair joked before the tournament that they couldn’t play worse than last year’s tie for 34th when they beat two teams, but in 2026 Kelly and Leonard couldn’t quite find enough birdies to make a run.
Kelly has been playing with a fracture in his vertebrae, and the AmFam Championship was just his second start since the end of April.
“I'm tired and it showed today,” Kelly said. “I didn't have much at all. I'm pleased that I didn't regress. My swing did, but I did not regress body-wise so I'm happy going forward.”
Clarke and Crane staved off a late charge from Perry and McNeill, who shot up eight spots on the final day by shooting a 9-under 62. Their only blemish was a bogey on the par 4, 448-yard 10th hole and it ultimately kept them out of a playoff.
The water on the 10th, which captured many a wayward shot through the tournament, helped create the tournament’s most difficult hole. Two teams tied for third at 28-under while five other teams tied for fifth at 27-under.
TPC Wisconsin evolving as tournament course
The layout at TPC Wisconsin, which was formerly Cherokee Country Club, was redesigned by Steve Stricker in part to challenge the world’s best players 50 years old and over. The remodel, which began in earnest after the 2021 golf season ended before the course’s reopening in August, 2023, was a challenge for Stricker and the design team because of the location along the Cherokee Marsh.
The course hosted the 2025 AmFam Championship, the first featuring teams of players. The format change was due, in part, to the difficulty of shotmaking around Stricker’s design.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect? Off the tee.
“It's not a course where you can relax the most though,” said Freddie Jacobson, who came into the tournament No. 12 on the PGA Tour Champions money list. “I think you better let go of the jokes a little bit before your tee ball's out there because there's trouble everywhere.”
To that end, Stricker said after playing the course in tournament and getting feedback from players (as well as taking his own notes), he went back to the drafting table for some tweaks ahead of this year’s tournament:
- Widened some of the fairways as much as possible
- Removed a bunker or a mound on No. 1
- Removed a bunker on No. 12
- Removed one bunker, added another on No. 16
- Removed mounds on No.18 to make it wider
“I mean, you wouldn't want to make this place any more narrow,” Leonard quipped. “The only other way to go is try and widen it out. In a lot of places you really can't, but he bought a little room. I say he, the group here, they bought some room and it does, it doesn't look quite so claustrophobic on certain holes.”
Even with Stricker adding a little wiggle room, TPC Wisconsin remained a challenge off the tee box.
“It just really is very demanding off the tee,” Søren Kjeldsen said. “If you hit like a little whoopsie, you probably won't see it again.”
One change Stricker made was to add some decision making and some juice to the tournament. He wanted to make the drivable par 4 16th hole, well, more drivable.
Stricker admitted last year he and partner Mario Tiziani - as well as eventual champions Darren Clarke and Thomas Bjørn - did not take on the green, just laying it out to the right to try and get up and down for birdie. What could be an exciting hole had been neutered by a bunker.
“I'm like, that's not right,” Stricker said. “I mean, nobody tried to take the green on. Then we all pitched it over there and got it up and down. So I added a bunker over there so hopefully people will want to take on the green more and then if they do bail out, they could potentially be in that bunker.”
After the tournament, Stricker was not concerned that Jacobsen/Kjeldsen shot a 59 during the first or Darren Clarke and Ben Crane shooting a 54 in Round 2. Eleven other pairs broke 60 in the scramble format on June 6, but when the winds kicked up for the final round’s best ball format Kenny Perry and George McNeill’s 62 was the low round of the day.
“I just love the format for this course,” Stricker said. “I think it just fits this course to a T. It's hard. You still, a guy puts it in the water, in the hazard and the next guy has to step up and hit a shot. That's what it's about still. You still have to perform, you still have to play well. It's a lot of fun. I don't think the scoring; I think that's the fun part of it all really is that the scores are low and that the fans get to see a lot of birdies and a lot of risk taking with guys pulling off those shots.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Darren Clarke and Ben Crane close out AmFam Championship in tight finish