Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons,
Wise men never try.
— from Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” as performed in “South Pacific.”
THE U.S. Open should be appreciated and enjoyed as no other sporting event short of those that include self-mutilation, cannibalism and two-for-flinching.
Brother, if you don’t think of golf as a sport, as an athletic endeavor, the U.S. Open should open your eyes and shut your mouth.
If a decent amateur were given a chance to play a U.S. Open-ready course, every round for the rest of his life, he might sign on in a flash, thrilled for his good fortune. Woo-hoo!
Within a month, he would quit golf.
To understand how U.S. Opens differ from other tournament golf, even other majors, consider that tee shots hit just an inch into the rough — not a horrible shot under normal circumstances — are horrible shots, generally condemning the player to nothing better than a bogey, provided he can find his ball.
During U.S. Opens, caddies and players trudge down fairways then veer into the rough, their pleading eyes searching for those in the crowd who may be able to shorten their hunt (and diminish their shame) by pointing to the ball or its approximate location. I’ve seen that with my own eyes.
Frank Nobilo, a PGA Tour winner from New Zealand and now a valued analyst on the Golf Channel, briefly was tied for the final-round lead in the ’96 Open at Oakland Hills, where the cut was — good gawd! — nine over. That’s right, nine over par after 36 holes was good.
After each round, Nobilo recalled by phone the other day, he didn’t know whether to leave by car “or ambulance. Once a year you should be pushed to the limit. That’s The Open. It should extract every last drop from your game, force you to play well through your entire bag. It should severely punish bad shots and still reward the good ones.”
Yeah, it’s hard, the hardest golf on earth. A lot of folks think it’s ridiculously hard, thus ridiculous. But that’s likely because they have been conditioned to think of golf in terms of how-many-under-par will win, in terms of conquering and fist-pumping, as opposed to the best score winning. In the U.S. Open, the best survivor wins! Top of the scrap heap, Ma!
“The winning score should be just that — the winning score. Why put a number to it?” Nobilo said. “The number should be irrelevant.”
Amen, amen to that! Put the ball in the hole in the fewest shots under any circumstances and you win. That’s bad? That’s great!
If you’ve become ESPN-conditioned to look for triple-doubles, call for “walk-off” homers and only recall 90-yard punt returns, The Open ain’t for you.
If you can understand and admire a strategy that for four days rewards skill and patience, you have come to the right event. And you’re a discriminating dude, at that!
My great fear for The Open is that the USGA will pander to modern marketing conventions and move it more in the direction of the Home Run Derby and slam-dunk contests.
“This is an age of instant gratifications. We’re supposed to grow excited by birdies, low scores. The Open should not be part of such a thing,” Nobilo, 49, continued. “I may sound like a broken-down golf pro, but in this day and age I sense a philosophical change, that the USGA will get away from what makes the Open the Open, to manufacture lower scores.
“The Open should always be the most stringent test. The course should be set up to be very difficult, not stupid, but difficult, almost borderline stupid. We should never want that changed.”
To that end, wherever Opens are played, they should be alike. They should be very difficult, like Ivy League educations and listening to Joe Morgan.
Opens not only should favor the accurate, but those who can take both a punch and a joke, a cruel joke. The player who can find satisfaction and consolation in making a two-putt bogey surely realizes that somewhere on the course, at the same time, others are trying to save double bogey.
Golfers look and act differently after completing a U.S. Open round; they can’t sit up straight, half of their shirt hangs out. They don’t look well. They ask for aspirin. They need a cot.
Same with their caddies. They become cut men. They finish bent, beaten. Unlike Sherpa guides, however, the caddies must push on; there’s no hitching back to Timbuktu unless the cut is missed. Otherwise, it’s see ya on the range in the morning!
“The Open should always be the event that pushes the limit,” said Nobilo, “the one that exposes the flaws — least number of mistakes wins.”