Paul Casey denied Phil Mickelson’s wild attempt to play Pebble Beach in the dark. So he won it on Monday.

We get a Monday finish at Pebble Beach, where Phil Mickelson will go for his 5th career win against Paul Casey, who refused Phil’s plea to play in Sunday night in the dark.

The weekend broadcasts at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am are arguably the worst of the year. The pace of play is brutal and you have washed-up celebrities or CEOs hacking their way around and sucking up air time. For the non-golf fan who may want to watch Ray Romano putt, it’s fine. But for the weekly golf watcher, it is a drag and can make you grateful it is just a one-week-per-year experiment. The scenery is nice, of course, but as a golf-on-TV product, it’s awful.

This weekend was no different. On Sunday, it took the final pairing of Phil Mickelson and Paul Casey two hours to play the first six holes at Pebble Beach. An unexpected hail storm after a week of nasty weather soaked the course had led to a lengthy delay on Sunday morning. It became unlikely they would finish in time on Sunday night, with sunset at 5:40 local in Pebble Beach. The pace of play was not helping and put together with the weather, it just led to a sluggish, gloomy, bore of a broadcast, even with Mickelson’s involvement.

The final hour on Sunday, however, was completely redeeming and that’s taking into account the fact we didn’t even get a resolution. Phil started lighting it up as he made the turn and with him in an obvious groove, he started racing against the impending suspension of play due to darkness. It was only a matter of time and no one was under the delusion that they could finish in any kind of conditions that would not make it a farce.

Except Phil, who dropped a stunner on the 16th hole, where PGA Tour rules chief Mark Russell joined the final pairing for a walk to gauge their intentions on continuing to play. Phil said he wanted to not just finish 16, but play all the way in, prompting an incredulous laugh from Casey. Russell also seemed confused, but Phil insisted he had great vision and was seeing the ball fine in the rapidly fading light. It was just the beginning, as Phil pushed forward up on the green, while Casey, who was playing poorly, dug his heels in and wanted to call it a night.

Phil then proposed playing ahead without Casey, and getting his tee ball away on the 18th hole.

If you watch much golf, you will know that, at this point, the cameras were making it appear much brighter than reality on the ground. Up ahead, a few groups played into the finish and it was near pitch black with TV tower lights providing some illumination. It even cost Scott Piercy a boatload of money, as he three-putted in the dark to fall into a tie for 10th place.

Phil, however, was not a fan of anyone trying to put a stop to his round, even though the consensus seemed to be from everyone there at the start of Sunday’s round that they would never finish.

Casey is a veteran on Tour, but it has to be intimidating with a legend like Phil pushing so forcefully to finish up and making his position unmistakably clear. Casey, however, never even putted out on the 16th hole, choosing to wait for freshly-rolled greens in the morning. The Tour blew the horn suspending play and Phil was obviously perturbed, waiting up ahead on the 17th tee box.

It made for a fun moment of tension and drama we rarely see between two players. That and Phil’s play redeemed a rough start to the final round broadcast.

Now they’ll come back out Monday morning with Mickelson holding a three-shot lead over Casey and Scott Stallings, who is already in the clubhouse at 15-under. Casey is putting for par at the 16th hole and Phil has just the 17th and 18th to play.

The official resumption of play is set for 8 a.m. local, or 11 a.m. ET. Golf Channel will have the broadcast but this will be a CBS production. Pebble is a CBS party and they have the third and fourth round. But when those rounds run late and into CBS programming, it now kicks over to Golf Channel. With the lengthy weather delay, and the Grammys on CBS, Golf Channel landed all the above drama and the Phil charge in the final hour-plus on Sunday and now they will get the conclusion on Monday.

It’s not what CBS wants but for the golf fan, this is a nice bite-sized snack on a Monday morning. The 17th at Pebble Beach is one of the best par-3s in the world and the 18th is one of the best and most scenic par-5s in the world. You also have a Hall-of-Famer going for his fifth career win at this venue, which will also host the U.S. Open in a few months, the one major that Hall-of-Famer needs to complete the career slam. It’s an unexpected but nice little Monday windfall. Here are your pertinent details:

Tee times

Resumption of play at 11 a.m. ET, 8 a.m. local. The final pairing has two holes to play, which should take 30 minutes or so barring disaster, like Phil hitting his drive into the Pacific Ocean on the 18th. It would have been madness to play that 30 more minutes on Sunday night, but you can understand Phil’s attempt to make it work given the way he was playing.

Monday’s final round coverage

As noted above, it will be a CBS production with all their usual announcers, just running on Golf Channel because CBS will have some regularly scheduled daytime programming and Golf Channel exists to show golf. Make sense? It all works out for the fans wanting to watch.

Television:

11 a.m. ET — Golf Channel

Online streams:

10:35 a.m. ET — CBS simulcast stream

11 a.m. ET — Golf Channel simulcast stream, fuboTV (seven-day free trial)

11 a.m. ET — NBC Sports Gold

Radio:

11 a.m. ET — PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)

UPDATES AND RESULTS

We will live blog the finish on Monday morning here.

• Phil showed up to work in better spirits on Monday morning, casually strolling onto the range with his tumbler and chatting up Casey’s amateur partner. And if you’re curious about what’s in that tumbler, Alan Shipnuck has the details:

• Paul Casey did make one of the most pressure-packed three footers in the history of this event. Because let’s face it, if he stalled and held off on putting it on Sunday night, opting to wait for freshly rolled greens, then came back and blew the three-footer, that would be a baaaaaad look. But Casey converted his par to stay three shots back with two to play.
• Phil absolutely stripes it at the 17th, carrying the ball to the left side of the green and dropping it pin high. Casey followed and put it almost closer with his ball landing just past the pin. Neither, however, could make the birdie putts from about 10 feet. No blood means that this is pretty much done and Phil will walk the 18th on his way to a fifth career title at the Pebble Beah Pro Am.

• Phil caps the dominant final round with a birdie at the 18th for a 65 and a three-shot lead. It’s his 44th win and his 5th ever at Pebble, where he’s now the oldest champion in this event’s history. Also, he continues to do damage in California

• After the win, Phil said the win meant “absolutely nothing” for June and the U.S. Open, when he said the rough will be much more penal and the greens firmed out. But that won’t stop the runaway narrative of Phil completing the career slam at a place where he’s done so well and on his 49th birthday.
• Citing the competitive “bubble” he can get into and not seeing “the big picture”, Mickelson also said he “thanked” Casey on Monday morning for being the voice of reason and getting them to stop before playing in the dark and on greens that were beat up from a full day of play and the hail storms. That’s nice of him and a dramatic change of view from Sunday night’s exasperation.
• Casey, for his part, also finished first with his partner in the pro-am competition and had a lucrative birdie at the last.

• We’re on to Riviera for what is arguably the best event of the year on the PGA Tour schedule. Mickelson made a late add to his schedule last week, deciding to play in LA after initially saying he’d skip the stop. Golf Channel’s Robert Damron said in the postgame show that this is the best Phil has looked since that 2016 Open Championship loss at Troon. He may be right. Phil is completely dialed-in right now and the U.S. Open talk is going to be rampant now for the next four months.