Whenever I watch a golf tournament on TV and see a player with a comfortable lead going down to the 72nd hole, and the announcers say, “You can double bogey here and STILL walk away with the championship,” I often imagine that would be too much. to good to be true to bring some drama out of the situation.
In 1999, we had more drama than we expected at a major, when Jean Van de Velde, who was absolutely in command at that year’s British Open, had the biggest collapse golf has ever seen. Putting in a brilliant performance right down to the last hole, his second shot ricocheted almost across Scotland until he finally landed in the thick rough that had been the enemy of the players all week. In fact, he was lucky he didn’t find himself in the drink in that drink, though he compounded his problems by knocking him overboard in his next drink anyway.
Of course, it was the abnormal conditions that made such an ending possible. Many players complained about the conditions of the Carnoustie golf course. Tiger Woods called it “unfair”. John Daly, a previous winner of the event, which carries an automatic exemption, didn’t even bother to play, and it wasn’t because of personal issues.
It’s the wind. It’s the brute. It’s the vegetables that don’t bite. It’s the rocks. Water. The bunkers. It’s a lot of things that players seem to have an aversion to, in this challenging Major. If the weather and winds don’t cooperate this year at Turnberry, you’ll hear it again. Get ready for it.
The correct answer to that, one that the British would give, is that this is golf. Live with it. Fans in America seem to forget that we didn’t make this game up. The British did it. Sure, the Americans just took the initiative, as we do in many things, but that doesn’t matter. We must not expect the rest of the world to align with us.
Golf people, and certainly here in the US, love to talk about “tradition” and its place within the fabric of the game. The Masters is constantly cited as one of the great bastions of the sport’s tradition on this side of the pond. But you know, the Masters has only been around since 1934. The British Open started in 1860. If my history book is correct, that was a year before the Confederate States of America was formed. You know what I’m talking?