One of the quaint things about tournament golf is that there are no Jumbotrons on the course. News travels by word of mouth. Big news travels in shock waves.
The fans waiting for Tom Watson near the ninth green Thursday knew something had happened, knew something good had happened, but they didn’t know if this particular good something had happened to their 53-year-old, gap-toothed man.
They had heard the roar coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the eighth hole, Watson’s 17th of the day, but roars at golf tournaments are notoriously unreliable. A roar could mean Colin Montgomerie had split his pants and revealed red, white and blue boxer shorts. A roar could mean anything.
So the fans stared at the scoreboard near the ninth green and nervously waited. The scoreboard operator, a man with a keen appreciation for the dramatic, waited and waited before … waiting some more … before finally slapping a big, red 5 on the board to indicate that Watson had chopped another stroke off par.
A birdie. A crazy, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me birdie.
The crowd made its own roar, sent an all-points bulletin to anyone willing to listen to the news that the old man was tied for the lead at the U.S. Open. And here he came, pretty in a pink shirt, marching up the ninth fairway to meet his noisemakers. He put his second shot into a bunker, blasted out and made a short putt for par and a 65. That’s how you do it, kids.
A 5-under 65. Co-leader of the U.S. Open after one round.
“Will wonders never cease?” Watson asked afterward, and the answer to that question, of course, is no, they never will. That’s what turned a soft, forgettable first round at Olympia Fields Country Club into a lovely memory. That’s golf, where a 53-year-old man who should be on closer terms with Social Security than sub-par golf remembers how he used to play the game.
“I am the guy I used to be,” Watson said. “I don’t have to remember. Maybe it’s for only one round. Let’s find out.”
Yeah, let’s find out. What a story it would be–Watson, one of the game’s all-time greats making one last stab at greatness and doing it for his caddie, Bruce Edwards, who is in the early stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
There were tears between the two men on the golf course because they knew something special was happening. So did the crowd that rumbled along with Watson, picking up believers along the way. On the 12th hole, he holed a 171-yard 6-iron for eagle. Now what, exactly, was that? Muscle memory from his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s?
OK, that’s understandable, a one-time thrum on the heartstrings. But then on No. 7, Watson rolled a 45-foot birdie putt toward the hole and watched it slam on the brakes at the edge of the cup.
Time seemed to stand still. The ball hung there so long you could have rotated the tires on a golf cart. And then it obediently fell into the cup because that’s what it was supposed to do.
Unbelievable, improbable and anything else you’d like to call it.
“I have a vertical leap of about 8 1/2 inches,” Watson said. “I think I reached it.”
He won the U.S. Open once, in 1982. His previous best round in an Open had been 65 in 1987. Somebody explain Thursday, please.
Well, you could make the argument that this was the 103rd U.S. Open and Day Spa. Many of the golfers raved about the sanctuary the place offered from the headaches of everyday life, including bogeys. Surely Watson benefited from the tame conditions.
This is the only place where two guys shoot 65, as Watson and Brett Quigley did, and the U.S. Golf Association feels worthless and weak. There were enough players under par that the guys who shot 70 and above had to go through grief counseling. “It was nice and quiet,” Ernie Els said of the conditions.
Nice and quiet. How wonderful.
“It played very reasonable,” Padraig Harrington said.
Yes, a very reasonable U.S. Open.
“The rough is less penal,” Justin Leonard said.
Less penal than a white-collar prison, really.
There aren’t too many requirements at a U.S. Open: deep rough, tilted fairway lies, unfair pin positions, sheet-metal greens and griping golfers. One round into this thing and the tournament is 0-for-5.
But along comes Watson, who made the most of all he was given.
Maybe the course was soft, and maybe he’ll fall apart later. Or maybe, as he said Thursday, he remembered this course from playing the 1968 Western Open here as an amateur. Or maybe, if you have a beating heart inside you, it was because of a golfer and his caddie of 30 years.
“If I shoot 90 [Friday], I won’t care,” Watson said.
We won’t either.
