Anybody besides me enjoy yesterday? What a wild, wacky week of golf, with enough surreal details to keep everyone on their toes. At the same time it answered perhaps the one lingering questions about the freckled lad from Holywood... We'd seen him lose the chase pack from his rear view mirror, but we hadn't seen him gut one out on a Sunday when he didn't appear to be firing on all cylinders...
Has anyone heard of the Homer in the Gloamin'? This was the Four-ball in the Gloamin', as least for the last hole, as the PGA of America proves that you can lead Ted Bishop to water...oh heck, you know the rest. I'm barely into my second 'graph and I've already hit double-digits on the metaphor count.
Here's Dave Kindred summing up things for us:
What they should have done, there in the gloaming, was load up the Wanamaker Trophy and
drive that beauty down the 18th fairway to Rory McIlroy.
Why make the kid wait?
We knew about his gifts. Now we know about his guts.
The first three majors he won, he won walking in the sun. This one was a walk in the scary dark.
No doubt that 3-wood into No. 10 will be shown a few million times in our lifetimes...let's see what Kindred does with it:
Waiting down there, he'd done a hero's work already. He had answered every question on theHow To Become An Immortal test. Under siege by a legend and a phenomenon (Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler), with the world's best reaching for his throat (contenders from South Africa, Austria, Sweden, Australia and even France), with nine players once separated by only two shots, when a kid might have had trouble taking a breath let alone drawing back a 3-wood . . .
Wait. That 3-wood. It is not nearly enough to speak of that shot as a 3-wood. On the 590-yard par-5 10th hole, it was the goodgawdalmightiest shot of McIlroy's young, happy, charmed life. It was a low, screaming, hard-running shot that traveled 281 yards and quit rolling only when it was 7 feet 4 inches from the flagstick. Make that putt, it's an eagle. Make that putt, he announces to Mickelson, Fowler and all with ears to hear that, suddenly, the game is on.
He made the putt. Of course. Heroes do that sort of thing when it must be done.
Yeah, up until that point it felt like Rory was running low on petrol, unable to summon the magic of the last few weeks. But when the putt went down it dispelled any linger doubts, at least for this viewer, of the ultimate outcome. And let's remember that Rory was the only player to reach that green in two, and of course he did a little better than just reaching it...
We'll all likely agree that the sequence with the final two groups on No. 18 got quite surreal, and the PGA of America seems to have an issue in learning from experience. We went through this at Baltusrol in 2005, with afternoon thunder storms in the forecast they refused to move up the tee times and were rewarded with the dreaded Monday finish. Facing the same issue yesterday, they made the same decision and kinda, sorta got away with it, though I would argue that it was only Rory's birdie putt on No. 17 that took them off the hook. If Rory only had a one-stroke lead and needed to birdie No. 18, I'm guessing that the peg doesn't meet the ground until this morning.
Bob Harig had this from the maelstrom:
"It changes things a little bit," Fowler said. "Obviously, there is no waiting. Phil and I waited on the tee for a good amount of time and had to hit tee shots. In a way, [McIlroy and Wiesberger]never got out of rhythm as far as hitting the golf shots. I don't think it really changes it much. We were allowing them to hit the tee shots and we weren't expecting the approach shots to come."Mickelson stopped short of criticizing the situation in a television interview afterward but was clearly agitated on the green. "It's not a big deal either way," he said.
"The guys let us play up with our drives, and they didn't need to do that. They could have just left us on the tee box there and just play normally," McIlroy said. "But they showed a lot of class and a lot of sportsmanship doing that. I thanked Rickie and Phil in the scorer's area, and reiterated what I said in my speech out there on the 18th green.
"It was a classy move by them, and if they had not done that, we might not have been able to get it all done because it was really getting dark out there."
So, This is Major™, except when it's, you know, Mickey Mouse.
And what of that driver off No. 18 for our hero? Didn't that, you know, bring the water into play? I found that quite Van de Veldian, but like the original the imitator got away with it....just barely. Obviously their paths diverged on the second shots, but if you're gonna play for a par in the gloamin', isn't driver kinda, what's the word I'm grasping for, stupid?
Obviously you can't have a great weekend of golf without a supporting cast, and Phil, Rickie and Henrik all threw their best at Rory. It presents a dilemma for those of us with strong golf course design opinions, because Valhalla is at best innocuous from a design perspective, but seems to be a canvas on which the great players can summon their best. Throw out Mark Brooks-Kenny Perry if you will, but the combination of 2000, 2008 and 2014 is quite impressive, not just for the show ponies but for the actual shotmaking involved.
So, what else do we need to discuss? First, there was a little moment that I particularly enjoyed, as the CBS producers allowed the camera to linger on Henrik Stenson on the fifteenth green. Playing partner Mikko Ilonen had by then last contact with the leaders, but in the background his ball clearing the bunker lip was visible, and it ended up stiff. Wouldn't want to show a great bunker shot, would we now?
And lots of other bizarre moments to review... First up, we all saw Jason Day's all wotld par on the second hole on Saturday. For anyone who missed it, here's a couple of GIF's of Captain Spaulding the African Explorer:
It was an amazing four, no doubt, but perhaps most amazing is that David Feherty took grief for helping Day find his golf ball. Sheesh, what's wrong with folks.... Here's how Feherty responded:
“I got some crap on social media about it, that I shouldn’t have been helping him,” Feherty said, shaking his head. “And then I caught some flak from the Northern Ireland people asking me why I should help Jason against Rory. The reason is because I would help anybody. That’s how we do this in this game. That’s the spirit of it.”
Not only is that the spirit of our game, but Feherty was the only other person available to help Jason search, and that includes his caddie.
How do you know that your trophy is too damn big (I know, they're compensating for something)? Well, this might be the first clue:
Kick save and a beauty...
And this was kind of bizarre, in a twenty-first century kind of way:
As CBS went to a commercial during break late in the delay it showed a clip of McIlroy inside the clubhouse. At the very end McIlroy picked up his iPhone and tapped in his passcode. Within mere seconds Twitter was abuzz with the fact you could tell his passcode was 4589, which happens to be his birthday – May 4, 1989. (Note: Europeans record dates differently than Americans and list it by day, month, year.)
Rory tweeted before his round that the passcode had been changed and that he had some golf to play.
Of course Tiger and Bubba treated us to their own specific brand of nonsense earlier in the week. Fresh off his disdain for the long drive contest, Bubba made it clear on an open mic that he's too delicate a flower to have to play in the rain. I'm not going to give it too much credence, except to note that this is the third straight major where Bubba has been notably off his feed. So, what could go wrong at Gleneagles, where it hardly ever rains?
As for Tiger, I'm willing to chalk the whole July-August death march up to the back surgery, I just don't understand why he was there? Did he really think he could keep up with those guys, including the twenty club pros, given the state of his game?
Probably the most interesting development is from Shackelford's Monday Morning Drive appearance, in which he hinted that Mark Steinberg somehow reached out to Butch Harmon after Butch's comments that Tiger should not have been playing on Friday. This will have the Twitterverse on Defcon 5, but riddle me this, Batman? As we discussed a few months ago, Harmon sought the approval of his stable before taking on Brandt Snedeker. If that's the protocol, wouldn't he need Phil's approval before re-engaging with Tiger, and how do we envision that conversation going?
No comments:
Post a Comment