He and Candace had been walking into town for dinner each day since their arrival. On the first night, they both ate Indian food for the first time in their lives, then the next couple of nights they went to a local pub. On Wednesday, though, hoping for an easy way to have dinner and relax before the tournament began, they went to the house that IMG had rented for the week near the golf course.
They each got plates of food and sat down. A moment later, Mike Weir, then also an IMG client, sat down across from them. As with Durant, Weir had never met Curtis before. Curtis introduced himself and then Candace.
“Congratulations on the Masters,” Curtis said. “That was great playing, especially down the stretch.”
By now Weir had become accustomed to strangers bringing up the Masters win to him. He laughed, said something about being lucky to pull out the playoff, and thanked Curtis.
“So,” Weir said, settling in with his food. “What brings you guys over here? Did you come for the tournament?”
Curtis smiled. “Well, actually,” he said, “I’m playing in it.”
Weir was mortified. “Oh God, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know…”
Curtis waved a hand. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just a rookie. Why should you know?”
Even so, Weir felt bad. “I had no clue at all who he was,” he said. “Obviously we’d been in some tournaments together, but I guess I’d never crossed his path because I just didn’t know him at all. I honestly figured they were golf fans or something like that.”
Weir certainly wasn’t the only one who had no idea who Curtis was at that point. “If you had asked me to pick the guy out of a lineup, I never would have had a chance,” Jim Furyk said. “I might have vaguely recognized the name as someone new on tour, but I can’t guarantee that either.”
The PGA Tour is divided into three tiers each week when pairings are made. First, there are what the players call the “TV pairings,” threesomes of players who are recent tournament winners, major champions—the big-name stars. They always play in the middle of their wave (there is a morning wave on Thursday–Friday that tees off between 7:15 and 9:15 and an afternoon wave that goes between noon and 2 p.m.), guaranteeing that they will be on the golf course for the bulk of the telecast when they play late. That’s why Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are almost never in the same Thursday–Friday wave. TV wants to ensure that at least one of them is a part of the broadcast each day.
The second group is made up of players who have had some success on tour—they’ve made the top 125, won at some point in their careers, or been name players in the past. They get most of the early tee times.
Third is the group of guys who have just made the tour out of Q-School or the Nationwide Tour, and sponsor-exempt players who aren’t named John Daly. They get the last of the tee times, often fighting darkness early and late in the year when the days are shorter.
What this means is that a rookie like Curtis might never be in the locker room or on the range or in the players’ dining room at the same time as people like Weir, Furyk, and Joe Durant. The only way for a rookie to cross paths with the stars is to play his way into a grouping with them on the weekend.
Curtis had already been paired with Vijay Singh three times, the first at Bay Hill, where Singh complimented his ball striking but suggested Curtis work more on his short game; the most recent at the Western, where Curtis had played his way into the British.
The players Curtis was closest to at that point were other rookies, most notably Andy Miller, the son of Johnny Miller, and Ty Tryon, then a teenage sensation who had made it through Q-School at age seventeen.
“It’s funny that Mike [Weir] felt so bad about that,” Curtis said, laughing, years later. “If I know half the rookies who come out by the end of a given year, that’s pretty good for me. I thought it was cool just to sit and eat dinner with him.”
Of course, the really cool stuff had not yet begun. Curtis had a late tee time the next day. Even with a field of 156 players, the British Open still sends everyone off the first tee on Thursday and Friday, which means that tee times begin at 6:30 a.m. and don’t finish until 4:15 p.m. The Royal and Ancient can afford to do this because there is so much daylight in July, especially in Scotland, where casual golfers can often be seen finishing rounds at eleven o’clock at night.
Curtis killed time in the morning reading and watching the tournament on TV—coverage of the Open Championship in Great Britain is almost round the clock. His tee time wasn’t until 3 p.m., so the day really dragged. By the time he reached the first tee, he had seen Tiger Woods pull his opening tee shot so far left that Woods never found his ball. Curtis was pumping a lot of adrenaline and was extremely nervous. His tee shot on number one also sailed left but not to the point where he was in serious trouble. Still, he started his first major with a bogey five.
The day was breezy—the winds were around twenty miles per hour—but Curtis had caught a break with the late tee time because it had rained all morning. Woods, after his terrible start, had scrambled back to shoot a two-over-par 73. The lead at day’s end was held by a Swede named Hennie Otto, who shot a three-under-par 68. In all, only five players broke par. Seven others shot an even-par 71. That meant that Curtis’s one-over-par 72 put him in decent position.
“Once I settled down, I was okay,” Curtis said. “The wind was about the way it had been during the practice rounds, and I knew no one was going to go very low.”
Two players who had won majors in the past—Davis Love III and Greg Norman—were just a shot behind Otto, whom no one expected to be in serious contention by Sunday. They were right: Otto shot 76–75 the next two days, then rallied with a 69 on Sunday to tie for 10th place. Love and Norman were a different story. In fact, the last time the Open had been played at St. George’s, Norman had shot 64 on the final day to pass Nick Faldo and win the championship. It was the first and only time that Norman outplayed Faldo on the last day of a major when both were in serious contention. Even at age forty-eight, Norman was still a threat.
Curtis wasn’t thinking about any of that. He was thinking that now he had a very good chance to make the cut. He backed up his solid play on Thursday with another 72. At a lot of weekly tournaments on tour, two over par for 36 holes will leave you slamming your trunk in the parking lot and heading for home. Not at the British Open. At 144, Curtis was three shots out of lead, which Love now held. In fact, only two other players—S. K. Ho and Denmark’s Thomas Bjorn—were ahead of Curtis, who was tied for fourth with six other players.
Bjorn hadn’t won a major, but he had been close. He was thirty-two years old and had played on the European Tour throughout his career. In 1997, he had become the first Danish player to make a Ryder Cup team, and in 2000 he had finished tied for second in the British Open and alone in third at the PGA—tournaments that had been part of Woods’s “Tiger Slam,” when he won four straight majors beginning with the 2000 U.S. Open.
Bjorn actually had a distinction that was more unusual than winning a major: he had played with Woods in the final group of the 2001 Dubai Classic and had beaten him when Woods—shockingly—dumped a ball in the water on the 18th hole, giving Bjorn a two-shot victory. Bjorn was a highly respected player in Europe, someone well liked by players on both sides of the Atlantic.
“He’s just a classy guy,” said Love, who had gotten to know Bjorn playing against him in two Ryder Cups. “Obviously he’s a good player, but he’s also one of those guys who understands that the Ryder Cup is a competition, not life and death. I always enjoyed being on the golf course with him.”
In all, Bjorn had three top 10s in British Opens. He was clearly a player who appeared ready to take the next step and become a major champion. Now, after rounds of 73 and 70, he was very much in position to try to take that step.
There were a lot of big names still in contention going into the weekend. Sergio Garcia, who had unofficially taken Furyk’s spot in the top-three-players-who-had-never-won-a-major category a
fter Furyk’s win at Olympia Fields, was in the group with Curtis at 144. So was Kenny Perry, who had finished 1–1–3–1 in his previous four tournaments. The third-place finish had come at the U.S. Open, and the case could be made that Perry was also one of the best players in the world without a major title.
But that wasn’t surprising because majors had never been a priority for Perry. In fact, this was only his third British Open. He was an American player who would often skip the event even though he was exempt. Perry was forty-two and had pieced together a very solid career that was actually getting better as he got older. He’d had one serious chance to win a major at the 1996 PGA Championship in Louisville, Kentucky, not far from his hometown of Franklin.
Since it was a home game for him, Perry had prepared and played hard and finished on Sunday with a one-shot lead on Mark Brooks. Unlike most players who faced the possibility of a playoff, especially in a major, Perry accepted CBS’s invitation to sit in the 18th-hole tower with Jim Nantz and Ken Venturi rather than go to the range or putting green to stay loose.
One reason Perry said yes was simple: he’s a nice man. But climbing up to the booth and sitting there for twenty minutes was clearly a sign that he just wasn’t as focused on winning as he needed to be. Try to imagine Tiger Woods talking to anyone with a possible playoff ahead of him. Nantz even asked Perry during a break if he wanted to go warm up, and Perry said no thanks. Only after Brooks had birdied the 18th hole—a par-five, so it wasn’t a huge surprise—did Perry leave the tower to get ready for the playoff. He then hit an awful tee shot on the playoff hole (it was still sudden death back then) that led to a bogey. Perry lost to Brooks’s par.
Since then, Perry’s tie for third at the U.S. Open—seven shots behind Jim Furyk and never in contention to win—was his best performance in a major.
There were other big names lurking not far behind, especially with 36 holes to play. Woods and Singh were at 145, four shots behind Love and one shot behind Curtis at 144. Ernie Els, the defending champion, was another shot back after recovering from a disastrous opening 78 with a 68. It was a tightly bunched field going into Saturday, which is known on tour as “moving day,” because players who are well back can take advantage of the relatively mild conditions early in the day and put up low numbers that move them into contention.
Curtis would again play very late in the day, since he was only two groups from the final twosome of Love and Ho. That meant another long wait, but he had almost become accustomed to it at that point. Saturday was similar to the first two, a breeze freshening as the afternoon wore on. And, sure enough, several players out early in the day put up low numbers, but most not as ably as three-time champion Nick Faldo, who was having a late-career renaissance at age forty-six. The previous year he had needed an exemption from the USGA just to get into the U.S. Open and had backed it up by finishing fifth, all the while wearing an “I Love NY” cap that won over the New York crowds.
Now, after barely making the cut right on the number at 150, Faldo went out early in the morning and shot 67, which put him at four over par for the championship. With only Love beginning the day in red numbers under par, that certainly put Faldo into contention.
Curtis, paired with Hennie Otto, again got off to a nervous start, missing the fairway at number one and making a bogey. “I just couldn’t hit that fairway,” Curtis said. “It was as if it was invisible. I couldn’t find it.”
Once again, though, he settled himself down. Like most links courses, Royal St. George’s goes away from the clubhouse for nine holes, then turns and comes back toward it. The model for all British golf courses is St. Andrews, which was 18 holes when it was built all those hundreds of years ago, because when the designers ran out of room after nine holes going in one direction, they turned and built nine more holes heading back toward the town.
“If you’re going to get the golf course, you really have to do it in the first seven holes,” said Love of Royal St. George’s. “There are two very reachable par-fives [the fourth and seventh] and short par-fours. What you really want to do is make sure you par the first, make your birdies on the next six holes, and then hang on for dear life coming in.”
Curtis hadn’t parred the first, but he did birdie the par-five seventh and steadied himself. While all the attention was focused on the name players around him, he quietly pieced together a third straight solid round, managing to par the almost impossible 18th hole to finish the day with a one-under-par 70. By the time the dust had settled that evening, Curtis was tied for third place at one over par and in very distinguished company.
Bjorn had shot 69, which made him the only player under par for the championship. He was at 212 (one under) and led Love (72) by a shot and five other players by two shots. Those players were Woods, who had finally played like Tiger Woods and shot 69; Singh, who also had shot 69; and Perry (70) and Garcia (70). All four of those players were ranked in the top 20 in the world, led by Woods at number one and Singh at number three. Garcia was 10th and Perry 18th. The fifth player at 214 was Curtis, who had risen to number 496 in the world after his performance at the Western Open.
With so many big names bunched near the top as the sun set that evening, Sunday was shaping up to have a great finish. That was certainly what ABC, which has televised the British Open forever, wanted.
Bjorn and Love would be in the final group or, as they call pairings in Europe, the final game. Woods and Singh would be directly in front of them, with Garcia and Perry teeing off one game before. The fourth-to-last twosome to tee off would be Curtis and Phillip Price, who, like Bjorn, was a European Ryder Cupper, though without Bjorn’s résumé. He was a thirty-six-year-old Welshman, who had won three times in Europe. He hadn’t played much in the U.S., though he had finished second to Woods in the NEC Invitational in Akron in 2000. If American golf fans knew the name, it was because he had beaten Phil Mickelson three-and-two in a Ryder Cup singles match the previous year at the Belfry, helping the Europeans beat the Americans for the third time in four Ryder Cups.
When Curtis saw that he was paired with Price, he was delighted, even though he didn’t know him at all. “I figured if I was with one of the big names, we’d have a lot of people following us, but everyone would be focused on the star—whoever it was,” Curtis said. “That can be a problem sometimes when you’re the ‘other guy,’ because people start moving as soon as they hit or putt out, and it can get distracting.
“I really didn’t expect a lot of people to be paying much attention to us. The way that golf course is set up and with the way they spread the pairings out [eleven minutes apart even in twosomes], you can get out there and feel almost as if you’re out there alone. That was fine with me.”
He and Candace went through what had now become their daily ritual on Saturday night: walking to the local pub for dinner, then making their way back to the room. Candace noticed that Ben was quieter than usual. She wondered if he was nervous about what was to come the next day.
“As we were getting ready for bed, I said to him, trying to almost sound casual, ‘So, what do you think is going to happen tomorrow?’ ” she remembered. “He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he just looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to win.’ I had never heard him say anything like that. It really caught me off guard.”
Curtis can still remember the look on Candace’s face. “I could tell I freaked her out,” he said. “I didn’t say it for effect or to sound tough or anything; it was just the way I felt at that moment. I knew I was playing well. I’d been very steady and sound the entire week—starting with the practice rounds I played. I liked the golf course. I knew some of the other guys didn’t. I just had a feeling I could win if I did one thing.”
That one thing was hit the first fairway. He hadn’t done it all week. He certainly wasn’t alone in that because the fairway was both tight and rolling. If your tee shot went anywhere near the rough, it was bound to end up there. “All I focused on from the time I left the golf course on S
aturday was hitting that first fairway,” Curtis said. “If you hit the fairway, you’ve got a wedge or, at most, a nine-iron into the green.
“I’m not someone who sits around doing a lot of visualization. I’m not real good at it anyway. But that night I just kept trying to picture myself on the first fairway with a wedge in my hands. It felt weird trying to do it. Looking back, I probably had no idea what I was doing. But I was in this kind of zone that I guess you get in when you’re going through something you’ve never gone through, and you have no idea what to do or what’s going to happen next. I felt like I was floating in a way—just in this place that had nothing to do with where I’d been before or where I was going next. I honestly don’t think I snapped out of it until we were back home.”
Floating around in his zone, visualizing the first fairway over and over, Curtis slept soundly and packed in the morning. He and Candace planned to stay at a mostly empty IMG house on Sunday night so they could get up early the next morning, drive to London, and catch their flight back to Cleveland. There was a lot to do—their wedding was now less than five weeks away.
They were at the golf course by eleven, which was early for a 1:25 tee time. But they had planned to meet two of Ben’s cousins who had flown over from Ohio to watch him play. The four of them had breakfast, then Ben made the short walk over to the locker room to get ready.
“I was really anxious right about then,” he said. “Candace had gotten really quiet after I said I was going to win, and walking into the locker room felt strange because it was so empty. The last day of a major, no one hangs out in there. Guys come in and head for the range, or when they’re done, they come in, clean out their lockers, and head out—usually in a hurry.
“I saw Phil [Mickelson] in there and realized he was already finished playing, and I hadn’t been out to the range to warm up yet. He had a friend with him, and they were planning to take off to fly home by one o’clock, which was before my tee time. That sort of made it hit home just how late I was playing.”
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