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ST. PAUL -- The MGA Players' Championship is occasionally referred to as the State Match Play. Tim Hamm played in it last week and made it to the quarterfinals before losing to Colton Buege. On Sunday, his recent match-play experience probably came in handy, as he tied for first place in the Twin Cities Championship and then won the title with a slam-dunk birdie on the second hole of a playoff against Tim Peterzen.

Basically, a sudden-death playoff is a mini-match, and Sunday's playoff definitely had the best elements of match play.

Hamm and Peterzen posted matching 143 (1-under) totals for the 36-hole tournament, the first 18 holes of which were played at Bunker Hills Golf Course on Saturday, and the second 18 at Keller GC on Sunday.

The playoff started at No. 1, and both participants made routine pars, two-putting from 30 feet.

At No. 2, a 373-yard par-4, Peterzen hit a towering 3-iron tee shot that drifted to the right and ended up directly behind a tree. Hamm put his 3-iron tee shot in the center of the fairway, and then hit a 9-iron approach to 20 feet.

Peterzen, a red-shirt junior-to-be at the University of Minnesota, tried to punch-slice his second shot around the tree, but went straight and skipped into the left greenside bunker. His ball ended up in the very back of the bunker, no more than 6 feet from out of bounds.

His situation looked just about hopeless. He had a downhill lie, with 15 yards of sand to carry, then 7 or 8 yards of rough, and the green sloped away from him. The pin was only about 18 feet on the green. It appeared that he would be fortunate just to get his third shot inside of Hamm's second.

Instead, he hit a spectacular blast. It carried just onto the fringe well left of the line to the pin, then spun right and trickled down to within 20 inches of the cup.

"He hit a great shot," Hamm said, with a hint of disbelief in his voice.  

It was a classic match-play turnaround. A minute earlier, it looked as though Hamm could two-putt for a par and win. Now, suddenly, Peterzen was virtually assured of his par, and if Hamm got a little too frisky with his birdie attempt, he might knock it 3 or 4 feet past, three-putt -- and lose.

As it turned out, Hamm did get a little too ambitious with his birdie putt. He wanted to be aggressive, but he hit it harder than he intended, and it went racing toward the hole.

Hamm and Peterzen both said the same thing when asked how far they thought the ball was going to go past the cup -- "5 feet" -- but it didn't. The putt went straight at the hole and dove in. Surprisingly, it didn't pop up and then go down. the way screamers usually do, It just slammed into the back of the cup and disappeared.

Hamm, a former two-time Division III All-American at Emory University who spent four years in Chicago before moving to Minnesota last fall (he plays out of Rush Creek), had his first victory in his new state.

"I had a good feeling about that green," he said, "because I had made a birdie there during the round."

Andrew Layton turned in the second-lowest round of the day, a 71, and that put him in a tie for third place at 145, along with John Pavelko, who completed his sophomore year at DePaul in May.

Pavelko shot a 73 -- with a two-stroke penalty for hitting a wrong ball. Those two strokes kept him out of the playoff.  

The mis-identification occurred on the ninth hole, a 462-yard par-5, by far the easiest hole on the course, and one where the best players in the field routinely make birdies, or eagles. But Pavelko hit his tee shot into the right rough.

He was playing a Titleist 7 (red). Ninety-five percent of Titleists are 1, 2, 3 or 4. Consequently, the odds on there being another Titleist 7 anywhere on the course were remote. Nevertheless, he was directed to a Titleist 7 in the right rough, and after glancing a the ball to make sure it was his, he hit his second shot.

Twenty yards later, he came across another ball. A Titlest (red) 7.

"What are the odds?" he asked. "I can't believe it happened, but it's my fault. It was my responsibility to identify the ball. The first ball was in a bad lie, too. The second one, my real ball, was perfect. I hit a wedge about 10 feet away and nearly made the putt for my par."

Pavelko's wrong-ball episode wasn't the only weird thing that happened to the final threesome, of Hamm, Pavelko and Dave McCook. Hamm lost a ball, which is almost impossible to do at Keller.

Hamm had shot a bogey-free 70 on Saturday at Bunker Hills to take the first-round lead, and on Sunday afternoon he was cruising along through 15 holes at Keller, 1 under for the day, 3 under for the tournament, and two strokes clear of Peterzen, who had just finished off a 3-under 69 and was on the board at 143.

But then he pulled his tee shot at the 550-yard 16th. Normally, it wouldn't be all that difficult to find a ball in the left rough on that hole, but this is the season when the cottonwoods are shedding whatever it is that cottonwoods shed.

"There was all that white stuff over there in the rough, and it made it almost impossible to find the ball," said McCook, who shot 76 and finished fifth with an aggregate of 147. "You would almost have to step on the ball to find it today. That was really unlucky for Tim. He should have made a par there, and he wound up with a double bogey."

Hamm made it through 24 holes this weekend without making any score over par. On Sunday, he birdied No. 2 (15-foot putt) and No. 5 (6 feet) to be a quick 2 under, but he suffered his first bogey of the tournament  at No. 7. He got back to 2 under when he made a 10-footer for birdie at No. 13 (147, par 3), only to give it back with a bogey at No. 14, a short, 352-yard par-4.

Having made the unlucky 7 at the 16th, and fallen back into a tie with Peterzen (even though he didn't know it at the time), Hamm had a chance to regain the lead at the 17th, after hitting a wedge to 5 feet. But he missed.

His putter made up for that failure at the next hole, the 18th, where Hamm missed the green to the left. His chip then came up 12 feet short. Although the course and the greens at Keller got excellent reviews from the players on Sunday, two greens -- No. 1 and No. 18 -- had a lot of rough patches, and the line for Hamm's 12-foot par putt, which he now needed to force a playoff, went right over one of those patches. In spite of that less than silky surface, he made the par putt.

Twin Cities Championship

At Bunker Hills GC (Saturday)

Par 72

& at Keller GC (Sunday)

Par 72

Final results

1. Tim Hamm, Rush Creek                70-73--143 (won playoff with birdie on 2nd hole)

2. Tim Peterzen, Links @ Northfork   74-69--143

T3. Andrew Layton, Keller                  74-71--145

T3. John Pavelko, Minnetonka          72-73--145

5. Dave McCook, Hastings                71-76--147