AS I WRITE, the US Open golf championship shows little sign of coming to a conclusion on schedule and, indeed, the talk is of it going on for a long time yet. In the true perverse traditions of the game, the intermittent and violent rainstorms which have plagued the Bethpage showpiece have done nothing to diminish its fascination.
Indeed, as the event slid on into its third, or it might have been its
fourth round – I'm no longer sure of anything – the scoreboard was a
strange list featuring players, some virtually unknown, others dimly
remembered, who had somehow survived t
he raging torrents in which
favourites were either struggling or had already foundered. We should be
getting used to this sort of thing, for it happens quite frequently.
Championships have something of a record when it comes to attracting testing weather conditions and the wonder is how often they manage to get finished against what appear to be insuperable odds. Muirfield, for example, has a sort of climatic Bermuda Triangle of its own, and the message seems to be: steer clear of Saturdays. As recently as 2002 – Ernie Els's championship – the third-round field ran into a wall of wind and water which left the likes of Tiger Woods (round in 81) and Colin Montgomerie (84) less than enchanted. On the Sunday, Tiger had recovered sufficiently to sign off with a 65 while Monty ripped off a 75 with the air of a totally brassed-off man.
For me, the highlight of that particular Saturday was provided by Duffy Waldorf, the American who looks as if he gets dressed on dark mornings with the lights off. As Saturdays are a "day off" for daily paper people, I stayed in my digs and worked on a piece for the Monday. Before I got down to it, I switched on the telly to catch up with events on the course. It was an appalling scene and out of the gloom tramped Duffy, soaking wet, waterproofs gleaming and looking something like a very big seal. You felt like throwing him a fish.
He was out in the worst of it and was well over par for the five holes he had played. As I watched, he flailed at his tee-shot on the sixth, lost his grip on the club which must have been like a bar of soap by this time, and the ball, barely struck at all, whipped low and left and into what was either a small hillock of high grass or a bush of some sort. The visibility was poor. At this point, I decided to bid Duffy a fond farewell, wished him luck, switched off the telly and got on with my work.
Consider then, my astonishment when, some hours later, I switched on again, just in time to catch Waldorf finishing in 77, which, given the way he'd been shaping when last seen, was little short of miraculous. It would almost have been worth going out in the rain just to see how he did it. He'd opened the championship with rounds of 67 and 69 and he shot another 69 on the Sunday. His final total of 282 left him a mere four shots short of making the play-off a five-man affair.
Pride of place in the swinging-in-the-rain stakes, however, has to go to Sandy Lyle. The Saturday morning weather in the 1987 Open at Muirfield prompted the following inspired lines from Dai Davies, the distinguished Golf Correspondent of the Guardian: "More than 25,000 people attended the third day's play of the Open Championship on Saturday. This either indicates a mass outbreak of temporary insanity in the East Lothian area, or a severe lack of anything else to do."
As I drove to the course that morning, my immediate thought was that play couldn't possibly be going on. How the rain ever reached the ground was something of a mystery, for it appeared to be travelling horizontally, driven by a cold wind howling in from the north-east. Amidst all this misery, Lyle, never averse to clambering into full waterproof gear, positively revelled. Had there been lightning around, he, like Ajax, would have defied it. As it was, he did the next best thing and shot a 71 which it is doubtful that anyone else in golf could have matched. The weather settled as the later starters set out, but then that's the way of things with links golf.
Bobby Locke recalls a practice round over the Old Course at St Andrews in which he had to play every hole into the wind. Having battled against the wind all the way out, the tide turned as he was playing the eighth and ninth holes and hostilities were resumed on the way home.
There's a bit of luck about how things work out and the winners tend to get what's going. When Peter Thomson was in hot pursuit of his third successive Open at Hoylake in 1956, torrential rain had already sent many potential challengers splashing out of the championship before he walked down the first fairway on his second round. Suddenly, the sun broke through, the skies cleared and he smiled the smile of a man who knows he's home and dry.
The full article contains 889 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
