After a long, hard slog around Pebble Beach on Sunday, five and a half hours of taking the lead and giving it away in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, it all came down to whether one of the longest hitters in golf could win with his short game. That gave Dustin Johnson, 25, who has made booming drives his calling card, the opportunity to show once and for all that his repertory includes more than bombs off the tee. After starting the day tied for the lead with Paul Goydos, Johnson was the last man on the golf course who could prevent a sudden-death playoff. He and Goydos had traded the lead three times, the last when Goydos gave it up for good with a quadruple bogey at the par-5 14th hole on his way to a closing 78 and a tie for fifth. After bogeying the 17th hole and falling to 15 under par, Johnson was in a three-way tie with David Duval (69) and J.B. Holmes (71). With the wind in his face and the Pacific waves crashing on the rocks below the tee and along the left side of the fairway at the famous par-5 finishing hole, Johnson hit his best tee shot of the day: 288 yards, perfectly positioned left of the pine trees in the middle of the fairway. He caught his 3-iron approach shot slightly thin from 233 yards, and it fell into the front greenside bunker 40 feet from the hole. To get up and down would require a deft touch, lifting the ball over a 6-foot lip and stopping it short of the hole for an uphill putt. With aplomb, Johnson exploded the shot inside 4 feet and made the putt for his second straight AT&T title and his third win in his first three years on the PGA Tour -- the first player since Tiger Woods in 1996 to come out of college and win events in each of his first three years. 'All you can ask for is a chance to win on the last hole,' said Johnson, whose final-round 74 left him with a total of 16-under 270, one stroke ahead of Duval and Holmes. 'Nothing I had done the rest of the day mattered. All I had to do was hit a good tee shot, and I got it right where I wanted it, next to the pine tree. 'Then to get up and down for the victory, you can't beat that.' No one could, not on a Sunday when the tournament committee decided that the field would not play lift, clean and place on the still-damp course. As a result, players were often finding mud on the their golf balls, and some crazy ball flights ensued. Goydos, who was outdriven by Johnson all day, took the lead at the 13th, where he was 44 yards behind Johnson in the fairway. But at the 14th hole, a devilish par 5 where many tournament leads had gone to die, Goydos met his demise. After a short drive of 247 yards, Goydos joked with the gallery after Johnson airmailed his drive by 75 yards, hitting it 322 to the left edge of the fairway. 'I was hanging in there pretty good, I thought,' said Goydos, whose second shot at the 14th squirted 200 yards into the left rough. 'We were getting a lot of mud balls, and I got some mud on my ball there.' For his approach, Goydos tried a punch 7-iron draw from 132 yards. The ball looked good in the air, but dived out of the air short and left Goydos with a tricky chip shot to the tight pin on the small tabletop green. He pulled the chip, and it went down the slope on the other side. 'It would have been much better to skinny-push it,' he said with a rueful smile. 'Then it went down the hill, then it stayed down the hill, then I chipped it on the green, then I hit a bad putt and another bad putt. Need anything more than that?' With Goydos out of the picture, Johnson was playing the course and the players in front of him. Duval, in a nine-year winless slump, had one of just seven sub-70 rounds and was in the clubhouse. Holmes, who has threatened to win the past two weeks, had a look at birdie at the 18th and missed it. All that was left for Johnson to do was close strong. He parred the 15th and the 16th and hit a good-looking 7-iron at the 17th that caught the wind and fell into the left bunker. His shot went 20 feet down the hill, and he missed the putt. But his next bunker shot was spot on. And with consecutive wins, he is now in the Pebble Beach record book along with some big names, including the five-time Pebble Beach winner Mark O'Meara and the Hall of Famers Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Cary Middlecoff and Sam Snead. As he stood looking around the 18th hole, at the surf crashing below after his win, Johnson had a pithy observation. 'It's such a gorgeous hole,' he said. 'But if you miss it a little left, it's not so pretty.' He did not miss it left. He did not miss it right. He did not miss it at all. 