SAN FRANCISCO -- With a 45th birthday approaching and a potential Hall of Fame résumé, Jim Furyk has plenty to brag about, if he were so inclined.
He's been around for more than two decades, recently having captured his 17th PGA Tour victory after several years of frustrating finishes, and he is the fifth-ranked player in the world.
Nobody would be surprised if he contended at next week's Players Championship or next month's U.S. Open.
But match-play maven, he is not.
That is not to say Furyk can't get it done in the format, as he has shown this week in advancing to the semifinals of the WGC-Cadillac Match Play. Furyk dispatched former Open Championship winner Louis Oosthuizen 4-2 and will face the winner of the suspended Rory McIlory-Paul Casey match on Sunday.
It is the first time Furyk has ever made it this far, going all the way back to his initial appearance in 1999. Last year, he got to the final eight, before Rickie Fowler knocked him out.
"I've played pretty well at times and got beat,'' Furyk said. "It feels good. I wish I would have done it in Arizona. It would have been fun with Wildcat fans and all the support there.''
Furyk was referring to the old Match Play venue in Arizona, where the tournament had been contested since 2007 before moving to Harding Park this year.
The change in venue might not have been great for Furyk, but the different format helped him. He lost on Thursday to Thailand's Thongchai Jaidee, but because it's no longer single-elimination, Furyk managed to fight on and get to the elimination stage. Even there, he needed a three-way, sudden-death playoff to go his way.
"I like the round robin format,'' he said of the first three days of the tournament. "I like it better than what we did before, just for the fact that you've got guys coming from all corners of the world. And to fly into San Francisco, play one day and right back out is kind of ...
"I like the idea that you might be able to slip up early once and still get in.''
Furyk knows about slipping in match play. That might sound harsh because the man has put himself there so often and given himself so many opportunities. This is his 15th WGC-Match Play. He's been on all but one Presidents Cup team dating to 1998 and every U.S. Ryder Cup team going back to 1997.
It is the latter event, however, in which Furyk holds a dubious distinction: He has 20 losses, the most in U.S. history. That is certainly tied to the overall fortunes of the U.S. team during that period, as the Americans have won just twice in those nine Ryder Cups.
But Furyk is often pointed to as part of the reason for the lack of success. His excruciating singles loss to Sergio Garcia at Medinah in 2012, where he bogeyed the last two holes to lose 1-up to the Spaniard in a 1-point defeat, was just one example. He went just 1-3 in September at Gleneagles, pushing ahead of Phil Mickelson by one match for the most losses among Americans.
Now he is one long day from a second straight PGA Tour victory, following his win at the RBC Heritage two weeks ago.
That came after a four-and-a-half-year drought, in which he had nine leads after 54 holes and failed to win. One of those was just down the road from Harding Park at the Olympic Club, where in 2012 Furyk was tied for the lead as late as the 16th hole of final round.
Here, he'll need to beat just two players in a format in which he's got loads of experience -- just not the success to go along with it.