As is always the case when a professional golf event is being contested on a Pete Dye course, it is as much as much a matter of the players versus Dye as the players against the field.  You can fill in the blank yourself because the possibilities are endless as to what will come off of their lips as they head to the courtesy cars each day at this year’s PGA Championship at The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island.

The PGA at Whistling Straits in 2010, The Players every year at Sawgrass, the Women’s U.S. Open at Blackwolf this year…just to mention a few…..the list goes on and on.  In all cases it is more than simply a test of golf…..it is the challenge to survive and avoid personal humiliation.  In Pete’s view he would have it no other way. His job is to baffle the best players in the game with big challenges, lots of strategic choices, and punitive results if they don’t pass muster.

This should only be their biggest danger of the day (photo: flicker.Adammart)

The Ocean Course may be the sternest test of them all.  When Pete and Alice built this course on the sandy shores of South Carolina it was not enough just to route the holes along the ocean between the sand dunes. They actually raised the center of the property to make sure the interior holes would have full view of the ocean and full exposure to the ocean breezes.  Add to this their ingenious eye for fashioning real risk and reward holes and this event adds up to a demolition derby in Footjoys.

The course was first built to host the infamous “War By The Shore” version of the 1991 Ryder Cup which brought enmity between the sides to new heights.  As you will recall it wreaked it’s share of psychological havoc on a number of highly successful professionals of the day.  They could put a Memorial Wall beside the 17^th green to commemorate all the rounds that been drowned over the years trying to negotiate that tee shot.  Personally, I think it is a hard par from the drop area.

Pete has since been back a number times to tweak the layout in preparation for the 2007 Senior PGA and once again for this championship.  It certainly has not gotten any easier as a result.

The Dye’s are the masters of deception when it comes to hiding their intent on a given hole.  The Ocean Course is full of this. Fairways that are much more generous than they seem from the tee.  Landing areas confined by fall offs to nastiness that you cannot discern from 220 yards away.  Undulating table top greens that feed off to seas of undulation six feet below the putting surface.  Add to this adjacent waste areas the size of small neighborhoods in Newark (and not a whole lot safer I might add), plenty of native grasses on sandy dunes, and a good measure of marshland from which, as the sign says, you are wise not to even consider trying to retrieve your ball.

Pete has gone so far as to introduce a mysterious new grass-Paspalum-in the green complexes that the pros have never played on.  This stuff has a sticky character that will arrest the progress of a rolling ball and make using the bump and run recovery up the side banks of these platform greens a very low percentage shot.  Tiger, among others, has expressed that given the number of times you get short sided on a wind blown approach managing this grass will be a significant factor in keeping your scorecard in tact.

Adam Scott in an interview early in the week gave a blunt assessment when asked his impression of the course, “The front nine is a really nice, playable golf course, and then the back nine is not.”

Typically the PGA set ups lead to a score of about 10 under plus or minus a few blows, but this year it will totally depend on the weather.  The course has been softened considerably by rain almost every day.  Good news is that the greens will be holding.  Bad news is the course, which can be played at 7700 yards, could play very long.  Besides the obvious issues of thunderstorms interrupting play, there are generally strong winds associated with these low pressure systems.  The wind will be the major factor in determining whether these guys can hit the precise shots required to negotiate this house of mirrors.

The post round interviews should be very entertaining indeed.

August, 2012

Like the cyclists in the velodrome at the London Olympics, Keegan Bradley drafted the back nine in the wake of Jim Furyk’s apparent wire-to-wire victory pace passing him on the last leg on the way to a 64 and a stunning come from behind victory in the WGC Bridgestone Invitational.

Playing in the final group with Jim Furyk who set a torrid pace with birdies on the first three holes on Sunday, Keegan just kept himself within sight of the leader until they turned the back nine.  Starting with two birdies on the back and a scrambling par on 12 Keegan had that look in his eye that he was not going to be shaken off the leader’s pace.

The key moment was probably at the 16th hole. Louis Oosthuizen who was two back at the time pulled the Tiger Woods Houdini flop shot from the spinach behind the green to make an unlikely birdie and get within one of Furyk.  Furyk playing with the confidence that had built his the lead through 69 holes would not be outdone, he make a 25-footer of his own for birdie to maintain his position.  Keegan then made a statement, making a 15-footer on top of Furyk to stay within striking distance one back.

With a one-shot lead, apparently Furyk failed to heed the warning message screened on his side view mirror coming down eighteen. When they both failed to hit the green in regulation it was Keegan who made a miraculous up and down par from a plugged lie in the green side bunker and Furyk who blinked taking two shots from off the green to get on and two more putts on the way to a disappointing double bogie and a two-shot swing.

As we saw with Keegan at last year’s PGA, this young guy has a knack for making big putts.  He was first or second in all three of the putting stats this week averaging just 26 putts a round over the four days.  As to the final 15-foot par putt that forged him into the lead he said, “I didn’t think for a second I was going to miss it….I knew exactly how it was going to break….I just needed to hit it hard enough….and it was dead center”.

Steve Stricker played some outstanding golf himself shooting 64 on Sunday.  Putting like the Stricker of old he birdied four of the last five holes in a final sprint that grabbed a share of second place.

With only the PGA Championship next week between them and the eight automatic Ryder Cup Team assignments, Keegan consolidated his grip on a valued position moving from 9th to 4th on the list.   Both Stricker (moving from 13th to 10th) and Furyk (moving from 15th to 11th) have positioned themselves for a final push next week.  Finishing outside the top 15 this week, Rickie Fowler, Brandt Snedeker, and Dustin Johnson all have serious work to do if they want to avoid begging for a captain’s choice.

The FedEx Cup Playoffs with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow are less than a month away.  Serious jockeying for improved position in that race is going on and Furyk and Stricker both  moved up significantly to get into the top 16.  Keegan made the biggest move of all from 26th to 7th after today’s win.  There will be a whole lot of listening for footsteps behind them as this qualifying race heads down the final stretch.

August, 2012

This warning is seen around rural Ireland where gravel tends to build on the narrow roadways from shoddy construction and wear and tear. It is an admonishment to drivers to beware because traction and control can be lost when navigating these surfaces.

With the WGC Bridgestone Invitational and the PGA Championship over the next two weeks, there are a number of players who need to heed this warning as they try to consolidate their grip on the roadway in an effort to make the Ryder Cup Teams or position themselves to feast on the $32 million available in the four FedEx Cup Playoffs  events starting later this month.  Failing to carefully negotiate this competitive terrain could leave them stranded off to the side of the road with the emergency flashers blinking.

Jim Furyk, who is currently wallowing at 15^th in the Ryder Cup Standings and 25^th in the FedEx Cup race, got everyone’s attention with his opening round 63 at Firestone yesterday.  His seven birdies and an eagle thrust him to the front of the pack in Bridgestone Invitational.  Keegan Bradley who is hanging on by his fingernails to a 9^th spot on the Ryder Cup list relied on a hot putter to make seven birdies to offset four bogies on his way to 67 and a T-9 going into Friday’s second round.  Dustin Johnson and Steve Stricker at 12^th and 13^th in the Ryder Cup list respectively, will need to do better than their one and two under scores from day one if they are going to grab a secure spot in the Ryder top 8 and avoid having to solicit Captain DLIII for a captain’s choice on the squad.

Tiger Woods, in an event that he has won 7 times since 1999,  continued to show the inconsistent form he has displayed all year.  He managed to guide his ball between the shoulders of the roadway yesterday hitting 65% of the fairways and 78% of the greens.  But his putter, or maybe his green reading eye, let him down big time with 33 putts including a gagged 3-footer on the 18^th hole for his third bogey on the back side on the way to a mundane par round and a T-31 to this point.  He has good company in the mediocre pit with Rory, Graeme,  Kootch, and Rickey Fowler all on that number.

So much will be decided over the next eight weeks-Fed Ex Champ, Player of the Year,  Stewards of the Ryder Cup, and much more.  How the top players do at Firestone and Kiawah the next two weeks will have much to say about their chances pursuing the treasures at the end of this road.

August, 2012

Apparently there are no suspended particles because the scoring through the first two rounds in the Evian Masters has been nothing shy of pure!

In a tournament where 15-under generally wins the day Stacy Lewis is already 12-under through two rounds.  Her 9-under performance on Thursday which included 7 birdies in a row was bubbling over the top.  She is back on simmer with a complimenting 69 today and leads the field by one shot.

Other notables are scorching the Evian Masters Golf Club as well.  Inbee Park of South Korea shot an 8-under 63 with a balance of 4 birdies on each side in today’s round.  Paula Creamer shot a 67 to go with her fine 68 and is T-3 with Inbee.  Beatriz Recari had a 66 today and So Yeon Ryu, the U.S. Open champ, found her travel legs after a lackluster 73 on day one and shot 7-under to get herself into the mix for the weekend. Lots of other proven competitiors are within 7 of the lead including Se Ri Pak, Karrie Webb, Jiyai Shin, and Azahra Munoz.

The rough is not what it was last year and the hot weather must have the balls bounding to support this low scoring.  It seems we will be watching a shoot-out on the shores of Lake Geneva on the Golf Channel this weekend.

July, 2012

What we witnessed at the Open Championship this year is hard to fathom.  Ten to fifteen mile an hour winds turned the last day into a slapstick circus act that included final round pie-in-your-face performances by Tiger (+3) who double wall-balled it out of the bunker on #6 on his way to a triple bogie, Sneds (+4) with back-to-back double bogies on #7 and #8, and Gmac (+5), who grew up with the winds of Northern Ireland as his teacher, befuddled by the with wind, carding 7 bogies over the last 18 holes.

But the biggest pie, the grand daddy of them all, was saved for Adam Scott who stood on the 15^th tee with a four shot lead and four letters already etched on the Claret Jug and inexplicably played the final stretch four-over-par to lose to the Big Easy by one.

Ernie must have a regular Saturday foursome at Lytham.  He was second in the Open Championship there back in 1996 and third when it returned in 2001.  His play all week showed total mastery of the complicated driving script, especially on the difficult back nine.  32 on Sunday-four birdies over the last nine holes-capped a 7-under performance on the back nine over the four days.  That lapped the field for the inward half.  The crescendo created when he buried his birdie putt on 18 with authority to post 7-under for the championship clearly unnerved Scott who was half way down a vortex to infamy.

That trip for Adam was slow and agonizing-more a series of fender benders than a full blown crash and burn.

He missed a short one on 15 to make bogie, made a contortionist’s escape from a bunker on 16 only to miss another short one to make bogie.  From the middle of the fairway on 17 he jerked his 170-yard approach into the fur back left of the green.

His playing partner McDowell remarked afterward, “Half of England is to the right of that pin and he missed it left…..the alarm bell started to ring.  I thought, ‘Hold on, we’ve got a problem here’”.  The result was his third bogie in three holes and he was now tied with Ernie sipping iced tea in the clubhouse.

Maybe the least understandable choice was on 18 tee where, needing par to make a playoff, Scott abandoned his strategy of playing iron off this tee in the first three rounds  to avoid the bunker constellation in the driving area and pulled a three wood to try to set up a more aggressive approach hoping to make birdie and win the championship outright.  The three wood did not slide to right as intended and left him in one of those revetted nasties with no shot at the green.  He managed to play a third shot to 10 feet but the par putt never threatened the hole and the last chapter of this sorted tale was now in ink.

Ernie Els, a four time major winner, was as graceful in victory as Scott was in defeat.  Among other supportive condolences Els shared with Scott afterward he said, “I’ve been there before.  I hope he doesn’t take it as hard as I did.”

Bill Dwyre of The Tribune Newspapers said in his article, “Champions come along every day.  Compassionate ones do not.  On Sunday at the British Open, Ernie Els was there for everybody.”

That is true but there is a small lorry full of skeletons being FedExed to Adam Scott this morning.  He will need  a big closet and a very short memory to overcome the disappointment of this one that got away.

July, 2012

It won’t be a big wind at The Open Championship on Sunday, likely about 15 m.p.h. out of the southwest, but it will be enough to inject some interest into the outcome of today’s festivities.

For the first time all week the links at Lytham will play like a links and all those bunkers and high rough that the players have been so successful in avoiding in the prevailing stillness will be reaching out and grabbing balls whose direction is being influenced by the crosswinds.  The key today will be holding the ball against those winds to mitigate those influences and keep the ball out of bother.

The other thing we will see is balls running out through the greens, especially when the approach is downwind.  Making up and downs from off these greens is going to be essential to the guy who prevails.  Today will not be the dart shooting contest we witnessed the first three days, it will take patience and creativity to navigate the safe corridors of play narrowed significantly by the wind.

By the end of the day there will be heroes and there will be hounds.  Those with the humility to take the indignity the links throws their way and stay focused to the task at hand will be the ones contesting for that claret jug.

July, 2012

Apparently the pep talk Steve Williams gave Adam Scott on the driving range before the first round at The Open Championship today worked, Scott found himself at the main console in the control room at Lytham St. Annes with the lead after shooting an inter-stellar 64 today.

Williams advice was to play the first round with a sense of urgency as he has done in later rounds of the majors this year. Scott said, “It’s what I haven’t done the first rounds of majors this year….to play today like it was Sunday and there was no tomorrow”.

If not for an errant 2 iron into the cosmic hay on the final hole that led to a bogie, Scott’s round of 8 birdies, including 5 in 6 holes on the back nine, had him looking at 63 which does not happen very often in a major.

Success at Lytham is about controlling your tee ball and staying out of the 200+ bunkers that make this course look like a piece of very moldy swiss cheese.  He hit 71% of the fairways and 72% of the greens which is a formula for success, especially with lethargic greens that are only stimping about 10.  Scott has a swing to die for and the pedigree to win majors so no one should be surprised at this performance.

The benign conditions kept many of the big name fly boys on the leader board which will  make for an intriguing leader board this weekend. Seven major winners are among the top 12 scores after the first round.  Three dozen players shot rounds in the 60’s today including Eldrick Woods,  Paul Lawrie, Zach Johnson, Brandt Snedeker, Bubba Watson,  Graeme McDowell, and Rory Mcilroy.

Rory had it going pretty well until he plunked a teenager on the head with his tee ball on the 15th and the ball caromed out of bounds leading to a double bogey.  After giving the boy a signed glove on which he wrote “Sorry” Rory joked later “He could have headed it the other way and it would have been in the fairway”.  Rory rebounded with birdies on two of the last three to stay in touch with the leaders.

This is the Open Championship so the wind and the rain, all but absent today, will have it’s say over the next few days and that will change everything.  When that happens, as Scott says, he is “just going to have to knuckle down to handle that.  But I’m confident.  My ball striking is good.   I think I can  get it around no matter what the conditions are.”

If Scott is to win this major championship and “go where he has not gone before” he will need to heed the experienced guidance from Spock on the bag and get a few good breaks to help navigate the hidden space bumps The Aussie Enterprise will undoubtedly encounter along the way.

July, 2012

The Scottish Open, returning to the links course at Castle Stuart for the second time, is a major preparation for next week’s Open Championship at Royal Lytham and St. Anne’s.  Unlike last year’s event which was played in a rare Scottish typhoon requiring full snorkel gear and a wet suit, it looks like it will be more normal Scottish weather will prevail for this year’s event.

(Click here to see the startling images of last year’s tidal event)

Luke Donald, last year’s winner in the 54 hole event, leads a field of top players from around the world who will use this for an Open tune-up.  Phil Mickelson, Padrig Harrington, Ernie Els, Martin Kaymer, and Louis Oosthuizen are among those major winners in the field this week.

Padrig speaks for many of them when he said, “I like to play links golf before the Open…It’s a distinctly different form of golf than what we regularly get…..there is no substitute for playing competitive links golf.”

Castle Stuart is one of the few new links golf courses opened in Scotland recently.  It is the handiwork of the accomplished Gil Hanse, an American designer of all things, who recently won the designer derby and got tapped to design the course in  Brazil that will host the introduction of golf to the Olympics in 2016.  Castle Stuart got strong reviews from those professionals who slogged through the event last year.  Hopefully drier, firmer conditions will give everyone a chance to play it as it was designed.

After the first round it looks like the wind was not blowing.  Francesco Molinari torched the course with a 10 under par 62 to take the lead by three.  Luke Donald and Martin Kaymer both shot 5 under 67’s and are in a tie for 12^th.  Good scores abounded-it looks like it will take under par to make the half way cut this year.  Mickelson is at plus 1 after his first round so he will have work to do to make the weekend play.

Knowing how chameleon the weather can be on the links of Scotland it is anybody’s guess what the Scottish golf gods will have in store for the players over the next three days.

July, 2012

An overused phrase on the PGA Tour but totally applicable when Steve Stricker plays the John Deere Classic at TPC Deere Run.  He has won this event the last three years and if he wins it again this year I think they may just have to change it to the Sticker Invitational.

Last year he won the event in electrifying fashion on the last hole extricating himself from a brutal stance in a fairway bunker and then making a bomb putt from off the green for the winning birdie.

(Click here to see read the moegolf account and see a video of his amazing shot)

In Thursday’s opening round Stricker did not disappoint.  After shooting lackluster par on the front nine he answered with 30 on the back including four birdies and an eagle on #14, jarring a wedge from 80 yards out.  His 65 positioned him nicely a couple of furlongs back of Troy Matteson who shot a sizzling 61 out of the gate.  I like Stricker’s position coming around the first turn.

July, 2012

The last time the U.S. Women’s Open was played on the Blackwolf Run courses in Kohler the participants felt about as welcome as General Custer’s troops at Little Big Horn.  The compilation of Pete Dye’s River and Meadow Valley courses took no prisoners even though some of the best in the game were very willing to surrender.  The score that got to the Monday playoff in 1998 was 6 over par-that remains the highest 72 hole score of a winner in a women’s major in 36 years.

If you have ever played the River Course at Blackwolf Run you can understand how stern a test this was for these women.  Windy conditions, deep rough, and humongous undulating greens made for high anxiety for the best players in the world.  Among the 40 rounds of those finishing in the top ten that year only two rounds were shot in the sixties.  On that final day only one person in the top ten shot par and there were two 76’s and a 78 in that group-one of those 76’s was by Se Ri Pak who made it to the playoff.

Randall Mell relates an anecdote in a Golf Channel article that characterizes the difficulty the course presented that week.  Meg Mallon made a quintuple bogey nine on the opening hole the first day and never recovered.  She said that Pete Dye came up to her at a dinner function there and said, “Meg, if I would have taken a 9 on the first hole I would have shot myself.”  Her response was “Actually Pete, I was thinking about shooting you!”

The two unlikely protagonists who survived the brutal test to get to a playoff were a pair of 20-year-olds.  Se Ri Pak was a rising star, a rookie professional who had won the LPGA Championship in May two months earlier.  Jenny Chuasiriporn was an amateur and a junior at Duke, a pretty unheralded entity going into the Open.  Only one amateur in history had ever won this championship.   Who can forget the look on her face when she made that 40 foot double breaker on the 72nd hole to force the 18 hole playoff.

Jenny took the lead early making birdie on 3 of the first 5 holes.  But reality roosted on the sixth and she made a triple bogey.  It was nip and tuck the rest of the way and tied going into the very challenging finishing hole from the River Course.  Se Ri blinked hitting a snorgle hook into the hazard adjacent to the fairway on 18.  What followed was one of the most riveting and ethereal moments in U.S. Women’s Open history.

Se Ri walked up and saw that her ball was in the hazard but it was not in the water-it was perched precariously on the side bank and was theoretically playable.  With Jenny on the fringe in regulation Si Re decided, against the advice of her caddie, that her only chance was to go shin deep in the water and try to extricate her ball from the hazard without a penalty.  The thousands present held their collective breath knowing just about anything could happen on this swing.  She managed to get the blade of her wedge on the ball and advance it clear of the hazard short of the green.

It turned out this shot helped her salvage the tying bogey on the hole and sent them back to the 10th tee for sudden death to decide the championship.  It took two more holes before Se Ri made about a 15 footer for birdie to finally end the Cinderella story of an amateur winning the U.S. Open.  In many ways that shot, the drama that it entailed, and the riveting playoff that ensued put the U.S. Women’s Open back on the radar screen of golf fans all over the world.

This victory by Pak opened the floodgates of possibilities for Korean born women to make it on the LPGA Tour.  Se Ri went on to a Hall of Fame career winning 25 LPGA events including 5 majors and this win stoked the imagination of a generation of young Korean women who have followed her to success on the women’s tour.  In this year’s return to Blackwolf Run the U.S. Open will have over 25 Korean women in the competition.  Korean women have won three of the last four U.S. Opens and currently 10 of the top 25 ranked players in the world are from Korea.

The experience jettisoned Jenny Chuasiriporn into the limelight of women’s golf  but she never reached the same level of success in her professional golf career.   She quickly concluded she needed to walk away from golf and decided to pursue a career in an equally daunting profession.  She went back to grad school and got her master’s degree as a nurse practitioner.  Jenny now works in a cardiac intensive care unit helping people with post-surgery problems, chronic disease, and end-of-life care.  For her that magical weekend 14 years ago is just a pleasant, distant memory. She is content that she has found her calling and through her profession of choice can really “make a difference in people’s lives”.

The two 20-year-olds who created the drama that unfolded that weekend went decidedly different ways but together the perseverance they displayed altered forever the perceptions and aspirations of the women who will compete this week for the U.S. Open title at Blackwolf Run.

July, 2012