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 August 2006 Back to Table of Contents Back to Archives Main Page Section: Life and Leisure Fairway Play By Biff Henrich In June I attended the U.S. Open golf tournament at historic Wingfoot Country Club in Westchester County, NY. The National Championship. I have been to big time sporting events before, but golf is different. I went to the Masters golf tournament once, but just for the practice rounds. This was the actual tournament. Big boys playing for big green marbles.
Golf has a reputation for its pastoral setting. On television the announcers speak in hushed tones and songbirds are often heard in the background. When a golfer is preparing to hit the ball, the course marshalls hold up paddles that say, “Quiet,” and the crowd respectfully clams up. The reality is that the course sounds like a big air conditioner. It’s loud. There are huge tents for corporate use, for luxury ticket holders, for merchandise and food — all accompanied by massive air conditioning trucks. They drown out the real birds. The TV birds are piped in. Golf fans are unique among sports fans. Most of them play the game and think they have some extra insight into what’s happening in the competition because of that experience. It may be because they do play that they relate to professional golfers differently than other athletes. They call them all by their first names right to their faces. They refer to Phil, Tiger and Monte like they are old friends from the hood. Rarely do fans refer to hockey players by their first names. Most couldn’t answer the question “What is Rod Brindamour’s first name?” You would get the stare that says, “Is that a trick question?” Last names are better for heckling and golf fans rarely heckle. Fans view team sport athletes as performing feats unattainable by them or anybody they ever knew. Golfers of any age can get a hole-in-one. That is a perfect swing and a perfect score and probably makes for a perfect day. Pro golfers can’t do better than perfect. WingFoot is a lush old course lined with big, fat, full trees. A luxurious forest. A U.S. Open course is always set up to be an extreme test of golf. The rough is over your ankles and the fairways narrow, making them difficult to hit even for the pros. The single thing that grabbed my attention from the first morning was how many bad shots these guys hit. In the practice rounds it seemed like every shot was within a tight range of acceptability. The U.S. Open plays mind games with the golfers. The pros look at this course the way the rest of us look at every other golf course every day. It’s a challenge with hidden dangers in every branch and bounce of the ball. It intimidates them into second guessing their strategy and forces mental errors. Just ask Phil and Monte after they collapsed on the last hole to lose the tournament. The first morning we were sitting at the top of the grandstand of the eighteenth hole when Stewart Cink sailed a ball over our heads behind the stands. Way right of his target. I can do that. Regularly. Go get ‘em Stew. A short while later, I was standing in the trees to the right of the eighteenth fairway and Thomas Bjorn flared one off the tee into the open trees. He made the smart move and shot toward the fairway so as not to lose any more ground. Problem was he hit a tree and the ball went further right past the crowd into a neighboring rough. People then scurried around to get a better view of the hole. Mainly to see Bjorn’s playing partner Phil, go up the fairway. I stood still in the middle of all this and Bjorn walked straight at me through the crowd, who is basically ignoring him. He had no idea where his ball was and I simply extended my left arm straight out and gave him some guidance. He gave me the look of self-disgust that all golfers have mastered and goes to his ball where he proceeds to hit it toward the hole. A good shot except for the tree. A different tree but with similar results. Talk about identifying. I could have given him some pointers if he had just asked. I certainly have more experience with this type of shot. There were other sightings of this mortal behavior. Guys airmailing shots out of a bunker, not moving a ball out of the rough or putting it off the green. The great Wingfoot made them move through the game with less certainty than they might have on other days and on other courses. Like us. Of course, this doesn’t mean these guys stink; they don’t. They play in the stratosphere while the rest of us walk. It merely demonstrates that they are capable of hitting the errant shot nearly as often as most of us hit magnificent shots. Mirroring the ability curve. This is why we like them. They’re almost like us.
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