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Tony Finau proud of his fight and ready to ride the wave at the BMW Championship

It took five years for win number two, but the big Utah man is excited to push on in the remaining FedExCup Playoffs.

Five years.
Twelve top three finishes.
Nine of them seconds.
Three of them this year alone.

It was quite a wait for Tony Finau between his first on the PGA Tour, in the 2016 Puerto Rico Open, and his second, at last week's The Northern Trust.

As he prepared for this week's BMW Championship, the second of this season's three FedExCup Playoffs, Finau explained just how tricky that protracted period of near-misses had been.
"It was hard," he said. "A lot of those losses, you just have to take them on the chin.
"I've always had an attitude of perseverance. I learned that lesson as a kid and something that's very important to me is to learn from your mistakes and overcome the obstacles.
"But I will say it was extremely hard to do that. I have had a lot of disappointment and frustration, but I wanted to get better from it. I persevered.
"The big thing if I didn't get discouraged. That was the biggest part. I used it as fuel to do better.
"I had to not think about how impossible it is to win a golf tournament. It was more of the attitude of, 'Okay, not quite good enough yet, keep working.'
"That's all it was. It was, 'All right, keep doing what you're doing, one foot in front of the other, and it's going to happen.'
"So I had to have that type of belief, but it was extremely hard. We live in an era now where you guys are watching our every move and I'm going to have critics. But that's how it is, it's what I signed up for, and I know that.
"Now that I've kind of broken that barrier, at least I feel like I have, with this big second win, my goal moving forward is to continue with this momentum and make a run down at this FedExCup."

As we explained earlier this week, winners of the first FedExCup event have had a poor record in the Tour Championship (next week's tournament), but two of those 14 winners did win back-to-back.

Finau will be hoping to join them. He's rated:

Here's what else Finau had to say about last week.

On the messages of congratulation

"So many people have reached out. Selfishly I want to win, and of course that's a really cool thing, but to be able to see how many people have enjoyed it has been really, really cool for me.

"One of the very first messages was from Tiger and that was a very special one. He was just explaining that he was proud of me and the fight and grit that I had. That was obviously a very, very special one for me to see.

"And then countless athletes. Donovan Mitchell is an amazing basketball player for the Utah Jazz. Being a Jazz fan, that was a cool one for me. My buddy Mike Conley, who's a point guard for the Jazz.
"And then my fans. I've kind of starved my supporters of a win for five years, so this one is special. I think I've gained a lot of fans in these five years. The messages were in the thousands."

How he celebrated

"I couldn't sleep. Still on a high, which was cool. About 3 am, after returning some messages, talking to some family, I got hungry again so we went to McDonald's. I had a lot. Big Mac, Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese, 10 chicken nuggets, Oreo McFlurry. I had no problem cleaning all of it up. Fell asleep 5am, worked out 8am."

On an incident that proved to him the value of taking hits on the chin

"I was playing a high school match my freshman year. Lasst hole, if I two-putted I would have got into a playoff. I five-putted the last green and stomped my feet around the hole, just like acting like a child.
"My dad didn't say a word to me, and my dad was my teacher and my hero. Just from that silence I understood what that meant to him. That's not what champions do. That's not how you act on a golf course. He didn't say anything, but I was so disappointed in myself that I knew. I said, 'That's never going to happen again.'
"I didn't want my actions to portray me as a brat. That was a teaching moment for me."

READ MORE: Rory McIlroy fighting the dog days of summer ahead of the BMW Championship

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