Never in modern golf history has the final hole of a major
championship produced such carnage, such incomprehensible carnage,
as the U.S. Open’s 72nd hole did at Winged Foot on Sunday.
Phil Mickelson’s final-hole collapse resulted from
incomprehensible recklessness. Jim Furyk’s hiccup was due to
incomprehensible hesitance. And Colin Montgomerie’s demise was just
plain incomprehensible.
Furyk forgot, as they say, to “dance with who brung him.”
Mickelson’s mistake was to ditch his steady date and dance with the
same unattached bombshell who had broken his heart time and again.
And Monty? Monty forgot everything he knew about dancing.
Not to put too harsh a point on it, but for all the modern
equipment and improved physical fitness in today’s game, the golf
world apart from Tiger Woods has rarely looked so ugly and so
bereft of, well, of real winners. Only time will tell if
Sunday’s champion, Geoff Ogilvy, has the right stuff for sustained
excellence — but except for Mickelson at the Masters in 2004, most
of this decade’s non-Tiger major winners were either fluke-ish
journeymen or the beneficiaries of others coughing and gagging
badly down the stretch. Where, apart from Tiger, is the Tom Watson
making birdies down the stretch, the Lee Trevino chipping in, the
Gary Player charging from nowhere, the Ray Floyd sinking his teeth
into a title like a pit bull and refusing to let go until the title
is good and dead?
At a British Open, Davis Love and Thomas Bjorn, Sergio Garcia
and Vijay Singh shoot their own kneecaps so unknown Ben Curtis can
win. At two PGAs Justin Leonard coughs blood so that, respectively,
Rich Beem and Singh can take home the Wannamaker Trophy. Retief
Goosen’s two U.S. Opens were nice, but he had to rely on Stewart
Cink three-putting from three feet in one and on Mickelson
three-putting from five feet in another.
And we still await the day when somebody, anybody does
to Tiger what Watson and Trevino so often did to Jack Nicklaus or
what everybody in the universe seemed to do to Greg Norman (on
those occasions when Norman wasn’t doing himself in, as he
did at least once in all four major tournaments): Step up and
snatch a championship from the favorite rather than just
hang on for dear life and have somebody else give it away.
SUNDAY JUST ADDED TO THE STRING of bizarrities that actually began
with the British Open in 1999, when Jean Van de Velde
triple-bogeyed the final hole to give the win to the unknown Paul
Lawrie. Since then there have been the Cink and Mickelson
three-putts, the Leonard flame-outs, a few falterings from Phil, a
yip-fest from Freddie Couples and a couple of gaggings from Ernie
Els (to go with a British Open Els won only when others limped
home).
All of which set the stage for Sunday’s excruciating finale.
With Singh and Padraig Harrington already victims of collapses even
before the final hole, the usually unflappable Furyk was the first
to make the 72nd hole into a Funny Farm. A man of strict routines,
Furyk’s habits on the green are well known. He studies the putt
from all angles, steps up to the ball as if to stroke it, then
backs away entirely for one last look, and finally steps up to his
final stance again, stares daggers at it for a final long
heartbeat, and then, like a metronome, makes a confident stroke.
And so he did all day Sunday except when, faced with a sidehill
three-footer to finish at +5 and just one back of Phoolish Phil, he
threw away his routine.
He studied the little putt. Check. He settled into his
stance. Check. He backed away for another look.
Check. He settled back into his stance again.
Check. And then he threw the metronome away.
He fidgeted. He took a half-step back, and settled again. He
pulled up again and stepped sideways, and took another
practice stroke. He started to sidle back into his stance, thought
better of it, and took yet another practice stroke. By
which time probably three-fourths of the viewing audience was
saying: “Hit the bleeping thing, already, Jim!”
Dance with who brung you, Jim. Stick to the routine that has
always worked. You don’t make side-hill three-footers when
your whole routine is discombobulated. Instead, you stub the putt
and watch your chances die.
Then it was Monty’s turn, and Monty from the fairway is a
lock-cinch for par. Entire Ryder Cup’s have rested comfortably on
his iron play and his putter, and his five previous near-misses in
majors owed more to others’ triumphs than to any bad mistakes of
his own. But there was Monty, after a long wait for some Singh
adventures, changing his mind at the last minute from a six-iron to
a seven. Okay, fine: Adrenaline was pumping, so maybe it made
sense. But what made no sense at all was that he changed clubs
almost as part of the same motion with which he stepped into the
shot itself. No return to his usual routine once he grabbed the new
club; no chance for practice swings or slow-motion waggles to get
the feel of the shorter club’s different weight. Just a rushed,
chunked spasm of the sort you might see on a muni course in
mid-winter.
And then came the tough pitch shot — 35 feet away, fine; just
do the typical Monty thing of lagging the next putt near the hole
and hoping it drops. Who knew Monty would turn into a Mickelson
clone and bust the thing 12 feet beyond the cup? The one thing
Monty always had been good for was a sort of phlegmatic
practicality, as if to say, well, so I’ve made a mess of
things, let’s not compound the error with another one.
But he did compound the error, he did charge the hole like a
bull seeing red, and of course he did end up three-putting into
double-bogeyville and costing himself any hope of redemption.
AND THEN THERE was Phil. The new Phil, the Phil full of calculating
efficiency that finally had replaced the reckless, 0-for-broke kid.
The new Phil who trickled putts to the hole rather than jammed them
into (or, too often, well past) the cup. The new Phil who played
the percentages instead of trying to play the hero.
Not exactly.
Unable to hit a fairway since, it seemed, the Mesozoic Era,
Mickelson nevertheless used driver off the tee. Okay, maybe he felt
his four-wood was no more dependable than his driver. Whatever.
It’s what came next that made Mickelson vaudevillian and
VandeVeldian. Faced with a choice between sensibility and
sensation, he chose to try sensation — but instead was left
insensate. Needing only bogey for a tie, he played as if he needed
birdie for even the barest chance of triumph. What he got, of
course, was double-bogey, and defeat. He tried to dance with the
bombshell, as he had tried so often before in his career, before he
supposedly got smart — and, as had so often happened before, he
was left bereft.
Mickelson could have tried an easy pitch back to the fairway,
then used one of his famously acclaimed wedge shots to try to get
near enough to make a putt for par. Make the putt, he’s the
national champion. Miss it, and he still is in a playoff.
What should have made that safe choice so easy for him is that
he had fallen victim to others using it against him not once, but
twice. It was in the 1999 U.S. Open that Payne Stewart led
Mickelson by one on the final hole. When Stewart missed the
fairway, he didn’t try to be a hero. He pitched out to the fairway,
hit his short iron to the green, and sank the 20 footer for par and
victory as Phil stood on the same green watching.
At the 2001 PGA, the story was much the same. Competitor David
Toms, one stroke up on Mickelson, missed the fairway on the 72nd
hole. Rather than going for the green, he laid up. Then came the
wedge to 12 feet, and the par putt for victory. Safe. Smart.
Effective. Three words that have yet to apply to Mickelson’s whole
U.S. Open career.
Anybody can fail to pull off a good swing at the right time.
That’s what Monty had done from the fairway. That’s a physical
error, but no sin. The cardinal sin is what Phil did by going for
broke, what Monty did by bull-rushing his first putt, and to an
extent what Furyk did by ignoring his routine. The cardinal sin is
to start thinking abnormally. The cardinal sin is brain-lock. And
the result is horribly painful even to watch.
——————
Notes: Americans looking for a silver lining from Winged
Foot won’t find one. Of the top 30 finishers, only 10 were
American. Of those, only two — Sean O’Hair and Aaron Oberholser —
are less than 32 years old.
——————
Quin Hillyer is executive editor of The
American Spectator. He can be reached at hillyerq@spectator.org.
