Oregon Magazine

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The Tournament God Forgot

Posted July 20, 2008 -- On the far away coast of Great Britain there is a place called “Southport.” And there, in this Dickensian land of spires, spear-tipped iron fences and zillion-window-paned breakfast nooks, stands a building that looks like a ship that was blown up on the beach by one of those nasty storms that boil the nearby Irish Sea. Imagine that the Danes are extra-terrestrials from the planet Mogo where all the residents are blonde architects with blue eyes, and that one of these snuck in one night and swapped his blueprints for those the local golf club committee had planned to use for their clubhouse.

Bangers and pastys, biscuits and tea. Fish and chips and, as one poet said, Mick Jagger’s lips. (The latter his reference to the walls of the sand traps.)

It was in the nineties on Saturday, July 19th, in New York City. And a hundred and ten in Scorpion Flats, Arizona. But, in England, in the middle of summer, the participants in the British Open golf tournament are wearing shirts with sweaters over them and t-shirts under them. While actual Iron Men, statues made of metal, stand in the tidal flats staring seaward, living iron men and women garbed in hooded coats stand applauding an ancient mariner of the links as he walks up the 18th fairway. He is an Australian by the name of Greg Norman -- known affectionately across the planet as The Great White Shark -- who is the oldest man to lead a major championship after 54 holes since Julius Boros. In fact, I think Norman is older than Boros was at the time.

Most of you -- hell most golfers -- have never even heard of Julius Boros, who played golf so far back that the club shafts were made of wood.

With one day to go, The Shark is leading the British Open at, of all places, Royal Birkdale Golf Club.

For the non-golfers, there are two basic types of golf courses. The one you think of as a golf course, like the Masters at Augusta, Georgia, and the kind called a “links” course. The traditional links course is located near an ocean or sea. (Think of a sea as a small ocean.) The landscape at Royal Birkdale is made of bumpy dune humps covered with saw grass, gorse and hardy, poor-quality lawn grass that looks like it is mowed by goats. A links course in Oregon would have the occasional twisted, gnarled, wiry coastal pine. The trees at Royal Birkdale look like stunted maples.

Perhaps a better way of putting it would be: the flora of a classic links course consists of bull-headed plants which would be welcomed into a plant street gang in Detroit.

And, walking along this one, as I am writing this, comes the Aussie, hitting balls in a wind off the salt brine that would eat holes in thick parchment and clean rust off an old crankshaft that has been leaning against the back wall of the garage for twenty years. The national flags at the clubhouse are standing straight out, their outside edges shredded as they snap like whips. The flagpoles sitting in the green cups are bent over like a ham radio antenna on an SUV going sixty miles per hour. A golfer swings and his hat flies off, landing thirty feet away. A man putts on a rare perfectly flat and level patch of green. The ball stops two feet from the cup. The man walks toward it. The wind starts it rolling, again, and down the hill it goes. What on any normal golf course would be an upcoming two foot putt is now a chip shot from off the green.

Impossible playing conditions. You could tee off with a nine-iron on a par three and have the ball boomeranged back by the wind, right into your own forehead.

So, you call a meeting of all the saints, and Thomas Aquinas can’t make it due to a torn ligament he got doing a really difficult sermon at Winchester Cathedral. Who’s going to be your headliner?

Thus we have the 2008 British Open at Birkdale. Rain, monsoon winds and a missing saint.

With Tiger Woods out for the rest of the year on the injured reserve list, some unexpected names pop up on the leader board. One of these said that if he won the famed British Open “Claret Jug” this Tiger-less time, they should put an asterisk next to the inscription of his name. But, this guy is a young guy. You’d expect a young hitter to make a mark if Babe Ruth got benched. You wouldn’t expect a dinosaur to do it. Yet, there the Shark is, with one day to go. A man who was winning tournaments when some of today’s golf hotshots were shorter than their golf clubs.

There he is, the Ancient Aussie, wrinkled by the years , but still tall and lanky, stalking the dunes in that windstorm, dredging golf balls out of rough made of grass three feet deep and on to fairways that in places are less than forty feet wide, then chipping up to greens guarded by Middle-Ages sand traps that have waist-high walls made of sod bricks, for God‘s Sake..

The thing is, I have played the game. Just as an amateur, of course. But, as a fan of the game, I know of no other professional tournament location where eight over par could be the winning score. You could build a friendlier golf course in Hell.

But here, on this Saturday, on the course that God forgot, a man far past his prime stalked the fairway like the predator for which he is named and finished the round in the lead of the greatest championship in the sport on Earth.

(4:17 A.M. PDT, Sunday 7/20 -- Watchimg TNT off the satellite, one is tipped to the approach of Norman's tee time by the theme from the movie "Jaws." )

Links:
http://www.opengolf.com
http://www.britishopengolf.co.uk/

(LL)