LOOP - At one point, I believe when Tom Watson was a shot up on the 71st hole of the Open Championship at Turnberry, Mike Tirico commented on the importance and the specialness of this situation. We live in an age in which we try and compare every situation to another situation, but there just isn’t anything you can compare this to. Golf is unique, and this Open was unique in it. Watson was one par away, one 8 footer away from doing something unthinkable. For so long in the 70’s and 80’s, when Tom Watson was still Tom Watson, he made his living on those putts, because the great ones always do. He made a weak, scared, nervous stroke and was forced in to a 4-hole playoff with Baldy Cink.
59-year-old Tom Watson carried around the burden of the Open lead all week after his shocking 65 on day one. Cink makes one putt on 18 and putts himself in to the lead for the first time all week. And then the disaster that was the playoff came. It could have been fatigue, it could have been nerves, it could have just been that the magic ran out for Watson, but after about three swings in that sudden death you could tell that midnight had struck on this possible miracle on the links.
The fact is, sometimes sports just break your heart. It’s happened to me twice this year. Listen, Stuey, we get it, you’re a grinder and you haven’t won a major. You deprived us of a top 5 sports moment of all time perhaps, and certainly in golf. The Boondock Saints killed for less. I have trouble believing that Cink’s immediate family was rooting for him to win in that playoff. It was a great Open, but it obviously could have been so much more. In the press conference after Cink had raised the Claret Jug, Watson was just painfully, brutally, and gracefully honest. “It would have been a hell of a story,” he said. He talked about how it hurts like it always had. Once a competitor always a competitor.
There are two specific events that this made me look back on, even though, as I said before, you can’t compare this to anything in the history of this game or of sport in general: Roddick v. Federer at Wimbledon, and Mickelson at Winged Foot. Everyone wanted the American at Wimbledon, everyone wanted him to win that marathon, and everyone wanted Phil at Winged Foot (chafe you, Phil). Instead, the Swiss robot took home his 5th title at the All England Club, and Geoff Ogilvy fell in the US Open as he was probably driving home from Mamaroneck. Both have certain aspects in common, but this trumps them all. A bigger story, a bigger disappointment, and maybe the most painful could-have-been I’ve ever witnessed.
He was playing for every golfer on the wrong side of their prime, every athlete hanging on to a sport longer than they should, and any older person anywhere trying to feel young again. It was one hell of a run, one hell of a week at Turnberry. I hope it reminds people that special moments in sports can come from anywhere, and that special moments in golf can come from someone other than Tiger Woods. We love you, Tom.
Suck it, Cink.
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