The USGA has received many black eyes
in the past over their choices of venues for this hallowed event and their
setups regarding fairway widths and rough depths. Finally, though, they got it
right last weekend at Pebble Beach. This time the setup was US Open tough
without having to resort to any tricks. Pebble Beach has enough tricks of its
own. Normally, there'd be varying wind speeds of ten to as much as forty mph
blowing in off the Pacific to give players new gray hairs and enough sunshine
to make the greens mean-ass hard. But neither happened . . . which should have
turned Pebble Beach into a pussy cat . . . which it wasn't. The USGA has always
been accused of trying too hard to protect the sanctity of par golf. Its goal,
apparently, was to have winners shoot around even par. This year, at a very
benign Pebble Beach, Gary Woodland won at minus 13 with another thirty who were
also under par, but the USGA didn’t need to feel that they’d been too easy in their
setup. They weren’t. The under-par players all played quality golf on a course
that still managed to bare its teeth despite the soft greens and calm breezes. The
rough was so rough that we saw Ian Poulter actually stub a chip from just above
a greenside bunker, sort of a reverse whiff. And his next shot went only a
foot. Rory tried to smash one out of some waist-high fescue that nearly ripped
the club from his hands, the ball going about ten feet. But it seemed like for
every example of ugly results there were an equal number of magic chip-ins and
hole-outs from the fairways. This Open was one of the best, most exciting ever
contested on one of the best, most picturesque golf courses in the world.
I and many other golf fans were rooting
for Tiger to produce another of his magic moments, but it never happened. Well,
it didn’t happen for the first sixty holes, with a Tiger who hit more bad shots
and bad putts than any of us could believe. It was like he was totally
indifferent to what he was doing, nothing very bad but also nothing very good,
pretty pedestrian, in fact. But on Sunday, he birdied six of the last twelve
holes to shoot a respectable 69 for a T-21, and show me and the other Tiger
fans that the old Tiger could still growl. It gave us something to hope for in July’s
Open in Northern Ireland.
Other observations?
That really heart-warming clip of Woodland
and Amy, the young lady with Down syndrome who, in January, played the
sixteenth hole in a practice round in the Waste Management with Gary Woodland.
She hit the tee shot, the chip onto the green, and when Gary asked her if she
wanted to putt it, she said, “I got this, Gary,” and knocked it in. What a
really neat story.
More about the pins, leave it in or
take it out when putting. Fewer and fewer are opting to leave it in, with
Bryson DeChambeau and Adam Scott the main ones to leave it in. I also noticed
that the USGA doesn’t seem to have a policy about what is or isn’t a standard
pin. In some tournaments, the old lightweight pins are used; in others, the new
fat heavyweights are used. In this Open, the fat one was there, but in last
weekend’s Canadian Open, the skinny one was used. If you can’t tell the
difference on tv coverage, the heavy one is black and white with the bottom
foot or so a skinny black; the light pin is usually all white, the same
diameter from top to bottom. I’ve said before, the light pin can be more help
than hindrance, but the heavy pin the opposite.
Am I the only viewer who’s offended by
all the spitting that so many of the young players do? It’s not the little shot
you see coming from baseball players; that’s what I call spitting and I can
sort of live with it. The young golfing gunslingers like Dustin Johnson, Justin
Thomas, Kevin Kisner, Tiger Woods, and even Gary Woodland will often and too
often on camera let a long drippy gob go, and I just shudder at the sight. If
they all want to be gunslingers from the past, they should all carry a spittoon
in their golf bags. In the ancient days of baseball, many players kept a big
wad of snuff in the cheek and would periodically emit a nasty, brown string of
tobacco juice and spittle, but back in those ancient days, we didn’t have tv
cameras with extreme facial close-ups, so we were spared most of these yucky
sights. I still like to think of golf as one of the last of the gentlemen’s
sports. Not so much now with all the slobbering going on.
The prodigious distances these young
bucks now hit it also amazes me.
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