The Unfairway
Increasingly I fear that
golf has become auto racing. What makes it so riveting are the crashes. The
psychological breakdowns. The spasms of self-destruction. The carnage.
We saw
that a year ago at the Masters Tournament with the Greg Norman debacle. Norman
had always dreamed of winning the Masters, and something had always gone wrong.
This time Norman went into the final round with a lead so commanding--six
shots--it seemed to be even Norman-proof. What ended up happening was that he
merely raised the standard by which other blown tournaments will now be judged.
Watching Norman that day was sickening, like seeing Swede Savage crash at Indy,
or Lawrence Taylor break Joe Theismann's leg. I remember calling old friends
that night, people I hadn't spoken to in a long time. In a world of pain,
people need friends.
Until this past weekend Norman was the No. 1 golfer in the
world, according to the Sony rankings. He's won more money on the PGA Tour than
anyone else in history, yet he will go down in history as a man of
extraordinary misfortune--not so much a failure as a fatality, a victim of
golf's surgical ability to bring to the surface a man's mental weakness. I
still root for Norman, but I also think of him as a cadaver. He looks a mite
gaunt, and has been prone to fits of rage lately. He screamed at a volunteer at
the Kemper Open for making a joke about President Clinton blowing out his knee
at Norman's house. At another point he misheard a fan's comment, thought he was
being heckled, and gave the fan the finger. Then at the U.S. Open Championship
he played two rounds in 14 over par, a repulsive performance. Our hero.
Two
weekends ago at the Kemper, Mark Wiebe had the tournament pretty well wrapped
up. It was 11 years since he had won a tournament. With a one-shot lead, Wiebe
played the 17 th hole perfectly, hitting safely over a pond to the
fat part of the green. He lagged his putt to within about two-and-a-half feet.
He had a straight uphill putt for par. He could make a thousand such putts in a
row on a practice green. But golf is about the torture of the weak. Wiebe
yanked his putt left and lipped it out. His wheels had come off. He'd hit the
wall. There was nothing left but shards of metal and the wails of the doomed.
He was still tied for the lead, but that didn't matter, since the devastation
of missing that putt ensured that, on the 18 th , facing an almost
identically easy putt, three feet straight uphill, he didn't even catch any
lip, missed it wide left, game over. The world is a dark, cruel place. A few
days later, at the U.S. Open, Wiebe had a "five-putt green," something so awful
you almost never hear of it--five putts on a single green before the fucking
ball went in the fucking hole.
How did golf become a sport of woe and misery?
It may be that the media spotlight is that much more intense, and golfers know
how many cameras are trained on their quivering hands. Maybe it is the
purses--a missed putt now can cost a golfer a couple of hundred thousand
dollars. Or maybe it is that the competition is so stiff that no single player
can dominate like Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus or Tom Watson did in their
heydays. No one out there has a prayer of winning 20 major tournaments like
did. Many golfers win just one tournament in their entire career--some minor
Kmart Classic sort of thing--and even the golfers who are good enough to win
the majors tend to win only one or two. The window of opportunity is small, and
they all fear having it slam shut on their fingers.
The antidote to the recent
trend of golf tragedy has been Tiger Woods. Coming into the U.S. Open, he had
never lost anything that mattered to him. He'd won six USGA championships in
six years--three junior titles and then three consecutive U.S. Amateurs. He'd
won his first major as a pro, the Masters, in April, and had done so with such
record-smashing brilliance that he'd actually exceeded the hype that had been
built up around him. When he arrived for the U.S. Open, it was as though Jackie
Kennedy had showed up.
"Let's go
over there and get Tiger's divot," I heard a fan say one day, referring to the
tiny chunk of grass and dirt that Woods had scraped from the fairway on one of
his shots.
The U.S. Open is the sport's biggest event. The British
Open has a longer history and the Masters is more familiar--it's played on the
same course every year, and some of us can recite the yardage from tee to green
on the back nine--but the U.S. Open has the strongest field, the toughest
conditions. Everyone was buzzing about the rough, the dreaded rough, the
heinous and monstrous rough, 5 inches officially but sometimes looking more
like a dozen--ravenous, insatiable rough, a form of grass so severely impairing
a golf swing that it was more like an animal.
Woods
never got close to leading the tournament, much less winning. I followed him
some on the first and last days, and he was spectacular. No one has as much
club speed, and when he strikes a ball, it whistles, rockets out into space on
a line and then, astonishingly, rises, as though hitting another gear, some
kind of warp drive, before parachuting to Earth uncannily close to where Woods
wants it to go. His problem was that the U.S. Open, particularly Congressional
Country Club's blue course, rewards conservative, risk-averse players. The way
to win is to shoot pars--on the fairway, on the green, two-putt for par, go to
the next hole. Woods played conservatively, rarely using his driver; but, for
all his genius, he's not the straightest golfer in the world, and he ended up
in the spinach (isn't it fun to use sports clichés!) too often. That he didn't
putt well ensured that he wouldn't be a factor. He finished tied for
19 th , and then told the press that "the suffering's over," that the
course had "humbled me big time." He was still a superstar--in fact, the Sony
computer bumped him to No. 1, past the fading Norman--but you could imagine
that he was on his way to becoming just a golfer. (And, eventually, a broken
man.)
The final day I was appalled that the only
people leading the Open were plodders and mopers and grumpers and nobodies.
They were men without color, literally wearing gray and beige and brown. The
final four of the day were tied at 4 under par going down the back nine, and it
was obvious, watching them labor away, unsmiling, that this was just an
endurance test to see who could avoid crashing and disintegrating on national
television. You had to root for perennial nice-guy Tom Lehman, who'd led after
three rounds of the Open for the third consecutive year. I could not bring
myself to root for Jeff Maggert, as his name bothers me, sounding too much like
a taunt--Maggert! Maggert! Also he'd committed the sin of winning a pile of
money on tour, $3.6 million, while winning only a single tournament. Ernie Els
alone among the final four had won an Open, but was a vanilla man,
plain-looking and apparently without any emotions whatsoever. And finally there
was Colin Montgomerie, a multiple failure in major tournaments, surely the best
player in the world never to have won one of these things.
First, Maggert destructed.
He got on a bogey run that wouldn't quit, and he grimmed his way right out of
the tournament. Then Lehman hit into the rough by the 16 th green and
lost a stroke. The next hole, the 17 th , we all watched in
gut-wrenching horror as Lehman hit his approach shot into the pond. Nice guys
finish third.
Lehman
said afterward, "I feel an incredible amount of pain."
Just before Lehman's disaster, Montgomerie had made the
crucial mistake of the tournament. He and Els were on the 17 th
green, tied at 4 under. Montgomerie had a five-foot putt. He waited for the
group on the nearby 18 th green to finish. He waited and waited.
Minutes passed. Sometimes a person in life is faced with a crucial decision, a
life choice, a yes-or-no question, a moment when action must be taken
decisively without pause or excessive contemplation. Everyone watching thought:
Hit the putt! Just walk up and hit it! Montgomerie wandered around the green,
waiting for total silence. Tommy Tolles, a golfer finishing on 18, made some
gestures as though he was going to throw his ball in the lake, and the crowd
cheered him on, which got Montgomerie flustered again. The man just did not
want to hit the putt. Because he knew it wasn't going in. He knew he was about
to crash.
Finally he walked up and
almost half-heartedly tapped at the putt, which missed, and he lost, and when
it was over he cried.
