The Patch

by John McPhee

  Most of the entourages walking with the golfers and caddies number about twelve—marshals, scorer, standard bearer, R&A rules official, forward observer, and so forth. Woods and Darren Clarke come around the shed with an entourage two and a half times the usual size, starting with extra marshals. Clarke is out of bounds by the hotel. Woods is in the hay. He blasts out, goes into more hay. His third shot ignores the green. It crosses the cinder path, crosses the asphalt road, and stops a club length from the stone wall. Woods conjures a high parabola that sits down close to the hole. Jerris calls it “the ultimate cut shot, a parachute shot.” It saves a bogey, but not a major.

  Comes Rory McIlroy around the shed, and his second shot is so close to the stone wall that he can only hit his next one away from the green. In the wild winds of the second round, the Old Course rebuked him with an 80. Now he takes a double bogey—on his way, however, to a 69.

  A time comes when the groups that like clockwork appear around the shed have stopped appearing like clockwork around the shed. The spectators in the grandstand by the green stare at the shed as if to make things happen, but nothing happens; the shed seems to have more past than future. As if the seventeenth, across time, had not developed within and around itself enough unusual hazards, a railroad ran up it until fifty years ago and was not out of bounds. The shed had been built for storing coal and curing golf-club hickory, which the trains dropped off. Only golfers are overdue now.

  Vijay Singh appears around the shed. The Big Fijian is deliberate. Read: slow. He takes his time, and yours. He has also taken home as much as ten million dollars in a year. He is a Masters champion and a P.G.A. champion (twice), and has won the FedEx Cup—a résumé that has not made him overly selective about where he plays. He is as professional as it is possible to be, signing on for more tournaments worldwide than almost anyone. Golf pays well, and Singh may take his time but he is on hand to be paid. Even with his easygoing liquid swing, he bogeys the hole.

  From this same grandstand perch, the eighteenth tee and the great home fairway are right in front of us as well, where the Swilken Burn, straight-sided and in cross section no less engineered than the Los Angeles River, leaves town in ampersand fashion on its leisurely way, across the eighteenth and the first, to the sea. Player after player, released from the seventeenth, explodes up the final fairway—par 4, three hundred and fifty yards—and lots of them drive the green. Birdies gather. And while the guys on eighteen go up the killing ground, Louis Oosthuizen and Mark Calcavecchia, playing in our direction, hit off from the first tee, each about to bogey. They are the last twosome—No. 1 and No. 2 halfway through the championship—but Calcavecchia will disintegrate today, taking nine strokes on the fifth and finishing in 77. Not so Oosthuizen, who is expected to crack but will not. Seeming less tense than a length of string, he walks down the first, his caddie beside him.

  Oosthuizen’s caddie is a black South African nearly twice his age—one of few black caddies on the European tour. His name is Zack Rasego. He lives in Soweto, has worked for Oosthuizen for seven years, and was once Gary Player’s caddie. Frustrated by missing so many cuts in recent weeks, Oosthuizen decided that he needed a fresh caddie, and so he told Zack Rasego that after the Open the two of them would be parting ways.

  * * *

  AT THE ANCIENT TRACK’S REMOTE END—where the Old Course makes the turn—are five tees, five flagsticks, and three greens, collectively known as the Loop:

  It is a sequence of holes so hallowed in the game that Amen Corner, at Augusta National, has been compared with it, but while the Loop is far more complex geometrically, as golf goes it is less difficult. Birdies are to be made, just lying there for the taking, unless the wind is blowing hard, which it nearly always is. This prow of the linksland is much like the bow of a ship in the winter North Atlantic.

  In the experience of David Fay, the executive director of the United States Golf Association, the grandstand above the 10-8 green in the Loop, which also looks over the crisscrossing fairways that lead to 11-7, has “the best view in all of sports.” He may not have consulted with Spike Lee. He may have avoided Jack Nicholson. Nonetheless, the place is breathless in every meaning of the word, as the cold wind bends the simplest of shots and penetrates every layer of every fabric armed against it. If you are in the top row and the wind is coming over your back, seagulls hang motionless and stare into your eyes, a club length from your face. It’s a Brueghelian scene against the North Sea, with golfers everywhere across the canvas—putting here, driving there, chipping and blasting in syncopation, but being too smart to loft a wedge lest the ball be blown to the streets of St. Andrews a mile and a half away. When we turn around, the rest of the course is visible, all the way back to the masonry of the medieval town: golfers and galleries stopping and moving, moving and stopping—it’s like watching a Swiss astronomical clock reacting to the arrival of noon. The dark marching lines of the galleries cross fairways in hooded parkas, in rain pants—serious, this. They are much grayer, these Scottish cognoscenti, than, say, a gallery in California. They are mainly from Edinburgh and Glasgow, in addition to the locals from Fife, and they appear to be of an age with the parents and grandparents of American galleries.

  As course design, the X point in the Loop, where the eleventh and seventh fairways cross, may have been thought out by the same ram and ewe that caused West Fourth Street to wander all over Greenwich Village and eventually intersect West Twelfth. Jerris remarks that when Bobby Jones played through the Loop in his first Open, in 1921, he hit across the X, went into a bunker, came out ripping up his scorecard, and walked off the course. In 1958, he was made a freeman of the Town of St. Andrews—the first American so honored since Benjamin Franklin.

  Morning on the Loop, Round 4, and a chill wind is blowing.

  On-course radio: “There really isn’t any wind to think about now.”

  Jerris: “Not in their trailer.”

  Vijay Singh makes the turn, strolling around the Loop. Think sixty minutes to go through a revolving door.

  Ryo Ishikawa, three under par, hits to fifteen feet on the tenth, and holes the putt. He is eighteen years old. A few months ago, in a tournament on the Japan Golf Tour, he shot a 58. From St. Andrews, tied for twenty-seventh, he will take home four million yen. For thirteen years, the bright aura of Tiger Woods put the field behind him into relative twilight. Woods was like a screen saver, or some sort of curtain or scrim, veiling what else might be seen. Now and again, directors clicked on Phil Mickelson and others, but the focus of narrative attention was Tiger Woods, cameras buzzing his every stroke like horseflies. Now that the scrim has been removed, not the least of the dividends is the montage of young and outstanding golfers—like Ishikawa, like Oosthuizen—going by. The German Martin Kaymer, twenty-five, will gross $186,239 in a tie for seventh, as will the Americans Sean O’Hair, twenty-eight, and Nick Watney, twenty-nine. Rory McIlroy will tie for third despite his 80 in the second round, and he will collect $394,237. Before the 80, McIlroy had played nine rounds of tournament golf on the Old Course at St. Andrews, among which his worst score was 69. In May, at Quail Hollow, in Charlotte, he shot a final-round 62 to win $1,170,000 and beat Phil Mickelson by four strokes. Five years ago at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland, where the Open was once played, McIlroy shot a 61 and set the course record. He was sixteen years old. And Rickie Fowler, aged twenty-one, comes into the Loop dressed in hunter orange, blaze “orange from head to toe—shoes, pants, belt, shirt, hat, bracelet, necklace, it’s my school colors, I went to Oklahoma State!” Radio Free Fife says he “looks like a prisoner.” So far this year, Fowler’s first full year on the tour, he has twice finished second and has won more than two million dollars. He will add $87,839 today, as he ties for fourteenth, like South Carolina’s Dustin Johnson, aged twenty-six, and the Korean Jin Jeong, twenty; but Jeong will get nothing—he’s an amateur.

  Out in the Open are old guys, too. Here John Daly comes into the Loop with an entourage of twenty-one people. Daly�
��s habiliments change daily. He now has stars on his right leg and stripes down his left leg—red, white, and blue. Red jacket. White cap. When Ian Poulter, of Buckinghamshire, appeared in clothes derived from the Union Jack, it was said that he looked as if he were about to be buried at sea. Jerris says Daly is dressed for a Princeton reunion, but I would put him in any town’s parade on the Fourth of July. He shot a 66 in the first round. He is now one over for the Open. On the seventh, he hits an iron off the tee to lay up short of a bunker, then a dare-the-wind wedge to twenty feet past the hole, then a lagged putt and in for a par. The grandstand is wild for him. “He plays fast,” Jerris says. “Scots like that. They play faster than we do.” After Daly drives off the eleventh tee and nears the end of the Loop, there’s a mass exodus from the grandstand.

  * * *

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Jerris and I split up—he to stay on the course, I to go into the Media Centre. After Tiger Woods scored 67 in the first round and went to the Media Centre for a press interview, the crush of spectators outside the tent was so heavy that hundreds were gridlocked on foot, compressed, unable to move. A Scottish voice in the crunch asked, “And what did he end up shooting?” To which a Scottish voice replied: “His missus.” To the extent that there is any crush outside the tent now, it is caused by the media crowding in to watch the climactic holes of the 2010 Open on the BBC feed.

  The Media Centre is sixty yards long and thirty yards wide, or enough to provide desk space, Internet access, and free food to five hundred journalists—not to mention swiftly distributed transcriptions of all player interviews, the common source for essentially every line of dialogue that goes out into the print world. The atmosphere is less bookish than bookie-ish. Along one side is a full-field scoreboard that resembles a tote board in an off-track betting parlor. It is not electronic, though. Its many numbers are changed by hand by women on sliding ladders. At either end is the BBC—golfers in action on silent screens about the size of sheets of plywood. Heavy rain on the tent roof can be so loud that nobody would hear the audio anyway. It helps to have an on-course radio around your neck. My assigned space is between Peter Stone, of The Sydney Morning Herald, and Brian Viner, of The Independent. In our immediate surroundings are The Detroit News, the Tokyo Shimbun, The Augusta Chronicle, The Charlotte Observer, the Golf Press Association, Desert Golf Magazine, and a line of laptops from the Associated Press. As the Open nears its end, more people are in here than have been in here at any other time all week. When those British runners in Chariots of Fire came off the beach and jumped a fence and headed toward the first tee, they ran right through the Media Centre, in a manner of speaking.

  Stewart Cink, the defending champion, finishes the eighteenth one over par. Tied for forty-eighth, he will barely make it home to Georgia with $21,130. After a three-hundred-and-fifty-six-yard drive that stops two feet from the flagstick, Tom Lehman eagles the eighteenth ($87,839). Meanwhile, the on-course radio is impressed enough with Louis Oosthuizen to jinx him into the Valley of Sin, the Principal’s Nose, and the Swilken Burn. He is “totally relaxed,” “looks unstoppable,” “looks very solid indeed,” and has it “just the way he wants it to be—a one-horse race.”

  Gradually, as I listen to the radio and watch the tote board and the television images, dawn cracks and I come to realize that the BBC is the only feed that the on-course radio commentators have. They are not out there, as imagined, rolling around in some mobile home with windscreen wipers and video-cam monitors. Like all the other journalists in five or six media, they are doing their reporting from inside this tent.

  Paul Casey, who is English and almost thirty-three, is with Oosthuizen in the final pairing, having begun the day eleven under and four strokes behind. If the Open championship is to result in any kind of duel, most likely it will happen here. But while they match each other hole for hole, they walk along chattering, joking, laughing, failing to act as if a drive here or a chip there could be worth more than a few hundred thousand pounds. My pendant radio says to me, “It’s all going to start to happen down in the Loop.”

  Down in the Loop, Oosthuizen bogeys the eighth while Casey makes par. Grandstand and gallery, the crowd waxes partisan with a Great British roar. It seems loud enough to crack concrete, but perhaps not loud enough to crack Oosthuizen. Casey, with the honor, now drives the ninth green—three hundred and fifty-seven yards—again detonating the crowd. Oosthuizen looks down steadily at his glove, now tees up, drives, and also reaches the green, but closer to the flagstick and on a better line. Casey putts for eagle. Misses. Oosthuizen putts for eagle and the ball rolls in. There is a red spot on Oosthuizen’s glove. He put it there to help him concentrate. He continually glances at it as if it were a coach.

  Again chattering and joking, Oosthuizen and Casey come to the twelfth hole, where Oosthuizen’s drive carries five mid-fairway bunkers and rolls out between islands of gorse, leaving only a short pitch to the green. There is an aggregate acre of gorse. Casey goes into it. R&A marshals plunge into the bushes, searching—a brave thing to do among the concertina spines. Playing yesterday with Oosthuizen, Mark Calcavecchia also went into gorse. He played a provisional ball, but after he was told that his ball had been found he picked up the provisional and went to play the found ball. It wasn’t his. Penalized stroke-and-distance for the lost ball and another stroke for lifting the provisional ball, he ended up with a 9, and it was ciao, Calcavecchia. Now, standing idle in the cold wind during the search for Casey’s ball, Oosthuizen pulls on a sweater. If nothing else can affect his momentum, maybe it can be frozen. After Casey’s ball is found unplayable, Casey takes a drop, with a stroke penalty. Radio Free Fife says, “It smells like a 7.” Whatever the smell of a 7 might be, Casey very quickly is in a position to describe it. His shot flies over the green. Oosthuizen birdies with a fifteen-foot putt, and the duel is over; but before he can bury the corpse Oosthuizen still has to drag it twenty-four hundred yards. Walking up the eighteenth fairway, his final drive just off the green, and seven strokes ahead of the entire field, Oosthuizen at last permits himself (as he soon tells a tentful of reporters) to think that he has won his first major, and to say to himself reassuringly, “I’m definitely not going to ten-putt.” He also reports that, walking up there, he thought of Nelson Mandela. This morning before coming to the golf course, Oosthuizen learned on the Internet that this is Mandela’s ninety-second birthday.

  Michael Brown, the chairman of the R&A’s championship committee, thanks the Town of St. Andrews for the use of the golf course. Oosthuizen receives the Claret Jug, his name engraved upon it. Waiting for the press to finish assembling in the Media Centre, he sits on a stage, holds the trophy like a book, and reads it.

  Medium: “When did you know you weren’t going to choke?”

  Oosthuizen, grinning: “That’s pretty mean, saying ‘choke.’”

  Medium: “It seemed remarkable that you and Paul were chatting away when there was such a big prize at stake.”

  Oosthuizen: “We have a lot of fun on the course. It’s still just a game you’re playing. Otherwise, it’s going to be quite miserable.”

  Between them, Oosthuizen and Casey have just received more than a million pounds. It was the only game in town.

  At eight under par, Casey has tied for third with Henrik Stenson and Rory McIlroy. At nine under, Lee Westwood is second (half a million pounds). At sixteen under, Oosthuizen becomes one of the few golfers in history to win a major by seven or more strokes, a list that includes Nicklaus and Woods. A list of those who did not includes Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and Bobby Jones.

  Medium: “You had a temper at one time. It boggles many of us to see how calm you are. Did you get any help to get over that?”

  Oosthuizen: “It’s just a matter of growing up, really.”

  Oosthuizen’s caddie, Zack Rasego, interviewed by on-course radio: “What’s it like to caddy for him?”

  Rasego: “It’s a mixed bag, to be honest with you.”

  Radio: “Wh
at is your drink of choice?”

  Rasego: “Whisky.”

  Radio (aside): “He’s in the right place.”

  He is also secure in his job, Oosthuizen heaping praise and gratitude on him for many things, from his reading of putts to his bolstering advice down the stretch (“You’ve hit your driver so well—just hit it”). Rasego’s share of the prize is eighty-five thousand pounds.

  Rasego: “It’s good to win for South Africa on Nelson Mandela’s birthday today. It’s a fantastic day for us.”

  Oosthuizen: “What he’s done for our country is unbelievable. So happy birthday to him once again.”

  This is the extent to which Oosthuizen was troubled by St. Andrews’s remorseless wind: “The thing is that wind, to me, it’s a nice wind to use a little cut up against.” Growing up in the Cape winds, Oosthuizen, son of a struggling farmer, was trained and educated at the expense of a foundation set up by Ernie Els, who did not make the cut in this 2010 Open. In Open history, Oosthuizen is the fourth Open champion from South Africa. Ernie Els was the third. Before him, Gary Player won it three times. To encourage Oosthuizen and to offer him advice, Gary Player called him this morning, and spoke with him in Afrikaans.

  The first Open champion from South Africa was Arthur D’Arcy (Bobby) Locke in his plus-fours and with his hickory-shafted gooseneck putter winning the Open four times.

  Medium: “Do you know much about Bobby Locke?”

  Oosthuizen, with jug: “Unfortunately, I don’t. Yeah, unfortunately, I don’t.”

  In 2009, Bill Tierney resigned as the men’s lacrosse coach at Princeton and became the men’s lacrosse coach at the University of Denver. He had won six national championships at Princeton, and now he was making, in every respect, including geography, a spectacular jump downscale. I had come to know him well and needless to say regretted his departure, but my interest in the game particularly had to do with its growth—its spreading out from Eastern enclaves—and this was the best example yet.