Young Golfers Emerge as Woods Fades From View A ghost was in Kyle Stanley's gallery, a flash of red that kept tripping the mind throughout his final round at the Farmers Insurance Open. Stanley began the day 18 under par, equaling the Torrey Pines 54-hole score of 198 posted by Tiger Woods in 2008, when he won by eight strokes. His advantage at Sunday's start was five strokes, and he came to the final hole in his attempt to become a wire-to-wire winner leading by three, when he got a bad break. On his third shot, a wedge from the fairway, Stanley landed the ball 15 feet from the pin, only to watch it spin off the green and into the water. He put his next shot 43 feet from the hole and three-putted to finish with a two-over-74 and a 16-under 272, the same score as Brandt Snedeker, who at one time in the round trailed him by nine. In the ensuing playoff, each golfer made birdie on No. 18, the first extra hole. Snedeker, who shot a final-round 67, won with a par on the second, the par-3 16th. It was the third PGA Tour victory for Snedeker and the day's second-most significant golf result, after Robert Rock's two-stroke victory over Woods, whom he was tied with for the 54-hole lead at the Abu Dhabi Championship. The 22-year-old Rory McIlroy passed Woods to finish second. Woods's failure to close out the tournament, juxtaposed with Stanley's runner-up finish, provided two snapshots that coalesced into a matrix for men's golf. Woods, 36, once virtually invincible as a front-runner, has seemingly lost his aura at the very time the generation he inspired to take up the game is coming of age. The 24-year-old Stanley was 9 when Woods won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes for the first of his 14 major championships. "His influence on me, I mean, kind of our generation, he was the one who you grew up watching," Stanley said, adding, "When I was little all through high school, I had his poster above my bed." Stanley's prodigious drives call to mind a young Woods, whose length off the tee ushered in an era of stretching courses like putty in an effort to "Tiger proof" them. On Sunday, Stanley's drive at the par-4 fifth traveled 337 yards and split the fairway. In the third round, he striped a 341-yard drive on the 13th hole (his drive Sunday measured 326). "It was just downwind," he said of the 341-yard effort, "and I hit that as good as I can possibly hit it." Torrey Pines, perched on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, provides the ideal canvas for artists and long drivers, which goes a long way toward explaining Woods's seven victories here as a professional, including his 14th major title, the 2008 United States Open. After Woods catapulted into the 36-hole lead at the 2008 regular tour event, one of his pursuers, Stewart Cink, said, "Chasing Tiger Woods is always the tallest task on the PGA Tour." Not anymore. The first arrow to pierce Woods's armor of indomitability was fired by Y. E. Yang, who chased him down in the final round to win the 2009 P.G.A. Championship. Three months later, Woods's aura sustained a self-inflicted wound after his secret adulterous life became a public spectacle. He hasn't been the same closer since. At the 2010 Chevron World Challenge, Woods squandered a four-stroke lead over the final 18 holes and lost in a playoff to Graeme McDowell. In the last round of the 2011 Masters, Woods, a four-time champion at Augusta, birdied five of his first eight holes to take a share of the lead. But then his charge fizzled and he lost by four to Charl Schwartzel. Last November, Woods pulled one shot behind the leader in the final round of the Australian Open before finishing third, two strokes behind Greg Chalmers. The next month, Woods finished with two birdies to seal a victory over Zach Johnson in the 2011 Chevron World Challenge, but it was not a full-field event. His share of the 54-hole lead at Abu Dhabi was the first time Woods has put himself in that position since the 2009 Australian Masters, which was his last win in a full-field event. Woods's publicist last week disseminated the results of a Turnkey Sports poll in which 61 percent of the respondents identified Woods as the golfer they would be most interested in tuning in to watch when he goes into the final round with a lead. McIlroy was second at 9 percent. Stanley professed little interest in what was happening at Abu Dhabi. "I heard Tiger shot 66 and was tied," he said, referring to the third round, "but other than that, I haven't watched any of it." On Saturday, Stanley said he didn't expect to encounter any problems sleeping on his large lead, and if he did, he'd take a Benadryl capsule. If he was still tossing and turning, would Stanley then turn on the coverage of Woods's final round, which came on at midnight locally? Stanley said he doubted it. "I'd probably watch something else," he said.