Azahara Munoz Beats Candie Kung for Sybase Match Play Title GLADSTONE, N.J. - From a Q rating standpoint, Azahara Munoz's 2-and-1 victory over Candie Kung to win the Sybase Match Play Championship on Sunday barely registered. From a controversy standpoint, it was off the charts. Two episodes turned around Munoz's 2-and-1 morning semifinal victory over Morgan Pressel. But Pressel defused the controversy with a pep talk to Munoz before the final and a congratulatory hug after it. "It means a lot," the 19th-seeded Munoz said, referring to Pressel. We are really good friends. I guess what happens on the course stays on the course. The two incidents could have cast a pall over the end of a tournament in which the story line the first three days was more about the premier players who lost than the lesser lights who beat them. The first episode resulted in a slow-play, loss-of-hole ruling against Pressel after the 12th hole, turning her apparent three-hole advantage with six to play into a one-hole lead. Then, when Pressel thought Munoz had committed a violation by touching the line of her birdie putt on the 15th hole, the L.P.G.A. did not have video or other evidence to deliver Munoz her own loss-of-hole penalty. Such a penalty would have left Munoz two holes down with three to play. Instead, she squared the match by making her putt and clinched it by winning the next two holes. There is no guarantee of how things would have played out had the rulings gone differently. But Munoz said she carried no concerns from the semifinal match into the final. "Just knowing that everything was fine was all that mattered," she said of Pressel's pep talk. Pressel was not available for comment after Munoz closed out Kung on the next-to-last green. But after Pressel's 2-and-1 victory over Vicky Hurst in the third-place match, Pressel said, "I don't have to answer that one," when asked if the way the incidents played out was the worst thing to happen to her in golf. After Munoz and Pressel were warned about their pace on the 10th tee, Pressel was clocked taking 2 minutes 9 seconds, including 57 seconds on the tee, to play the three shots that produced a par at the 178-yard 12th, the match timer Doug Brecht said. That was 28 seconds more than the 1:41 threshold at which a player can incur a violation on a hole in which a player hits three shots, according to tour policy, although Heather Daly-Donofrio, the L.P.G.A. senior vice president for operations, said there was leeway given players in some circumstances. "It's not an easy thing to deliver a pace-of-play penalty, particularly in a situation like this," Daly-Donofrio, a former tour player, said of the penalty issued to Pressel on the 13th tee. But at the end of the day, to protect the fairness of the game, we do apply the policy consistently across the field. At the par-4 15th hole, as Munoz lined up a 15-foot birdie attempt by waving her putter over the green near the hole, Pressel told the match referee, Marty Robinson, that she thought Munoz touched the green in front of her ball. According to the Rules of Golf, touching the green along the line of the putt in front of the ball is forbidden. Robinson said Munoz told him she did not touch the line. He then reviewed video in an on-site television truck but said it was inconclusive. "I want to say I didn't," Munoz said when asked about touching the green, "but I can't say 100 percent I didn't." Munoz made her birdie putt and closed out the match two holes later. She later won three of four holes in one midround stretch against Kung to overcome a one-hole deficit and produce a victory she called amazing.