by Shane Ryan
He made the putt, and the fans tried to rally him, but he had dropped to -1 for the tournament, eight shots off the lead. His chances, slim as they were, had come to an end, and everybody knew it. He looked a little crestfallen, and Kaymer patted him on the chest with the same sympathy he’d shown Spieth at the Players Championship.
Fowler picked himself up quickly, though, and here you could see the difference between him and Spieth—it’s not in Fowler’s nature to sulk or complain. The tournament was lost, but Fowler bore that reality with stoicism and grace as he fought on through the back nine.
As the leaders walked to the fifth hole, Phil Mickelson finished his day with a bogey to sink to +7—another U.S. Open dream deferred for the six-time runner-up.
—
I walked with Philip Kaymer, Martin’s brother, for a while, and he told me that no, he wasn’t nervous, and that the unidentified animal among Martin’s club covers was a beaver that had lost its teeth. Mystery solved.
Erik Compton made birdie on the fifth hole, and when Kaymer missed his own birdie chance, he had just one challenger left to vanquish before he could bag his second major title. On the seventh, faced with a dicey pitch over a bunker after pulling his approach left, Kaymer again let caution be his guide, putting to the right of the bunker and essentially accepting bogey rather than flirting with disaster and the sand. His mind must have been back at the Players, and the 15th hole, when he turned an easy win into a nervous finish when he tried to play too perfectly into the green. Compton fought back to -4 with a birdie on the ninth, and for the first time all day, the deficit had hit four shots.
The margin waffled back and forth between four and six over the next four holes. Compton needed something special, but when he bogeyed the 11th and 12th holes, it gave Kaymer, now at -8, the chance to close the door for good. On the 13th, with the tees moved up to make the par 4 almost reachable off the tee, Kaymer drove into the right bunkers, played up softly from the sand to leave himself a birdie putt of about twenty feet underneath the hole, and sunk it. One hole later, on the long par-4 14th, he hit a metal wood off the tee, barely reached the green on his approach, and poured in a twenty-eight-footer for birdie to reach -10.
He pumped his fist, and allowed himself a small smile. With his nearest competition eight shots behind with four holes to play, it was finally over.
—
Compton and Fowler finished tied at -1, the only two players other than Kaymer to beat par. It was Fowler’s second straight top-five major finish, and the latest demonstration of how his game had rounded into complete form under Butch Harmon. The finish was a triumph for Compton, too, who had prevailed under the toughest possible conditions to show that he belonged with the best players in the world, third heart and all. “It felt like a sacred place,” he told NBC, taking one last glance at Pinehurst.
But the championship belonged to the German. He holed a fifteen-foot par putt on 18, leaned back in an expression of relief, and hugged his caddie. The fans roared. He had whipped their young American, but it’s hard not to appreciate greatness of that magnitude. And of course, he was the toast of his own country—at least until noon the next day, when Die Mannschaft kicked off their World Cup campaign against Portugal, and Germany entered a monthlong soccer fever that culminated in the biggest championship of all.
For now, though, it was all Kaymer. His face went up on all the German websites, and he had struck another blow for German golf. In America, they cheered in the stands, along the ropes, and beneath the white arches of the clubhouse veranda. The day had been more stressful than Kaymer let on, but now he could wave at them, and laugh, and disappear down the stairs to sign the winning scorecard.
—
Kaymer was restored to his former glory, just like Pinehurst, but the stress and the heat had taken their toll. The time for enjoying the victory would come later—at the moment, exhaustion set in, and his work wasn’t finished. The ceremonies and the interviews dragged on, and at the very end of his final press conference, someone asked the question he hated more than any other: What about those swing changes?
He answered calmly enough, at first, but he had reached his breaking point. What happened next was the closest I’ve ever seen Kaymer come to losing his temper.
“So why is that? So why do you change?” he asked the room, a hard edge creeping into his words. “So you have to answer all of those questions, and you don’t want to answer those questions all the time. You answer them once or twice and then that should be enough. But people keep going and I keep answering and answering. ‘Why do you change if you win a Major, you become number one in the world?’ And it’s annoying. You don’t want to talk about that all the time….And, you know, I don’t want to be rude to people, so that’s why I kept answering. But I want to say that’s enough. I think we talked about it many times before and now I’m sitting here with the U.S. Open, so there’s no change.”
Mercifully, then, they let him go—off through the glass doors, into the Carolina night. And somewhere in that darkness, the Kaymer Wave of 2014 crested and broke.
17
BETHESDA, MARYLAND
Congressional; Tiger’s Return, Jason Day’s Dystopia; Reed and Rose
“I feel old.”
—TIGER WOODS
The greatest golfer since Jack Nicklaus sighed as he sat behind the microphone in a jam-packed media room in Bethesda, Maryland, on the grounds of Congressional Country Club. He fielded questions with a forced smile. Did he believe he could win, in his first tournament back from serious surgery? Well, yes, but it would be hard. Had he changed his swing to protect himself from further injury? A bit, here and there. Was he truly pain free?
“Other than the headache of coming in here?”
We laughed at the tepid joke, bound by duty, but our hearts weren’t in it, and his wasn’t either. After boasting about how fast he had healed, thanks to an army of physios and nutritionists and surgeons and shamans and God knows what else, Tiger admitted that he wouldn’t even be playing at Congressional—now with a brand-new sponsor in Quicken Loans—if it wasn’t his tournament, benefiting his foundation. Business aside, he would have targeted the British Open for his return.
That Tuesday, the truth became clear long before he stepped on the course: This would not be a triumphant return. He had barely even begun to take full swings, he lacked his former explosiveness, and until recently he’d been forced to stand on the back of moving golf carts during rounds, because it was too painful to endure the bumps when he sat down.
Watching Tiger was to see a living, breathing paradox. As he compared himself to an aging Michael Jordan—“I’ve got a fadeaway now,” he said, with a halfhearted grin—his shoulders seemed to slump with fatigue. While he bragged about his healing powers, his body language told the real story—Tiger wasn’t ready, and shouldn’t have been playing. Around the media room, two schools of thought emerged. The first gave Tiger the benefit of the doubt, and assumed, on the basis of his greatness, that he’d find a way to rise to the occasion. The rest of us, looking at the situation dispassionately, saw the facts: There was no way in hell he was making the cut, and he’d be lucky not to aggravate his damaged back.
Tiger shot 74-75 and missed the cut, but he managed not to hurt himself. That would come later.
* * *
“There’s an old joke—um…two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life—full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”
—WOODY ALLEN
In stark contrast to Tiger’s performance, in a sparsely attended presser later that day, Jason Day looked back on a difficult year with his usual honesty. After the win at the Match Play Championship over Dubuisson, he thought he had a real chance to rise to the world number 1 ranking and conten
d at majors. If you watched the patterns of Day’s life, though, you might have predicted what was coming around the bend. A fluke ligament injury in his left thumb—painful enough to make him flinch at impact, which is death to a golf swing—led to a withdrawal at Bay Hill, a cortisone shot in Columbus, a reaggravation at the Masters, and subsequent rehab that kept him out until late May. He managed a backdoor fourth at the U.S. Open, well behind Kaymer, but even with that top-five finish, his year felt like a letdown.
In his time off, Day would watch golf at home, and each new Sunday delivered a hard reminder that he was far from the course. He became moody on those days, as his fellow pros fought for a win. I asked him about the contrast—life on Tour can be a circus, with never-ending obligations and very little downtime, but I suspected it didn’t seem quite so bad from the other side of things.
“It’s just funny,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re out here, you’re like, ‘Just leave me alone.’ But then you’re by yourself on the couch alone, you’re like, ‘I want to get back out there.’ It’s kind of like a double-edged sword….I was playing a lot of things over in my head, a lot of negative things.”
It’s the kind of vulnerable sentiment Tiger would never share—the million little headaches that dog them from week to week pale in comparison to the big depression of missing out entirely.
Professional golfers can sometimes embody the old ladies in the Catskills from Woody Allen’s bit—kvetching about the day-to-day problems, getting tied up in petty angers and complaints, and rapidly losing sight of the fact that they play a game for a living. But the minute it’s gone, they come face-to-face with the horror of the abyss. Life without golf, away from the rush of competition, can hit a player hard, and that’s the dystopian future Day and Woods had to contemplate in their time off.
In contrast to Day’s honesty, it’s hard to know how Tiger tangled with those moments. Ever since Charlie Pierce wrote a story in GQ about Tiger making a racial joke, way back in 1997, he’s been a closed book to the media. All we get is accidental glimpses—his fierce anger, or the slew of dirty text messages he sent to his mistresses. Most revealing of all was a text he sent to porn star Joslyn James, which showed his deep fear of being exposed and gave us a hint of how he must have felt less than a month later, on Thanksgiving:
“Don’t Fucking talk to me. You almost just ruined my whole life. If my agent and these guys would have seen you there, Fuck.”
Then there are the times when he tries to get media figures fired for criticizing him, as he did with Brandel Chamblee, who essentially called him a cheater, or Dan Jenkins, who wrote a satirical conversation with Woods that Tiger thought would be misinterpreted.
Aside from these dramatic exceptions, we get very little emotional honesty from Tiger. Maybe humility and perspective just isn’t possible for him—after all, he grew up with a father who repeatedly told people that his son would be the next Gandhi. And maybe his tremendous ego, bolstered by years of unbelievable results, makes him somewhat delusional in the twilight of his career. Maybe he really did believe he could win at Congressional, or that he could catch Nicklaus with eighteen majors.
But watching him on the stage that Tuesday, he looked like someone who had been worn down by the sheer magnitude of his own life. I think he knew, at least intuitively, that the ride was coming to an end. He’ll never be capable of assessing himself honestly and taking a broader view of life—he’s too wrapped up in his own mythos, even after the crash—you get the sense that it will be difficult for Tiger to handle his descent into mediocrity.
More than anything else that day, I wondered about his happiness—is he capable of stepping outside himself, and the larger-than-life realities that being Tiger Woods entails, and experiencing joy? Or does he just waver between grim satisfaction and anger, depending on his results?
Tiger would never be Day—by this point, his life has become too constricted. By the same token, Day could never be Tiger, because how many human beings can exist at that exhausting level, even for a year? The hyperbolic greatness that Tiger has achieved requires unflinching self-belief and a sacrifice of some basic humanity—especially in the modern technological bubble—while Day’s ability to retain a more nuanced, healthy mind-set may limit what he can achieve on the course.
And the real puzzle is this: Would either of them change places, if they could?
—
Congressional Country Club, a few miles northwest of the nation’s capital, has been home to presidents, captains of industry, and four major championships. Rory decimated the Blue Course to the tune of -16 at the 2011 U.S. Open, but it generally plays difficult, and players in 2014 met the most challenging version of the track since the Quicken Loans National—formerly the AT&T National—began in 2007.
It didn’t show its teeth right away. Patrick Reed, finally rounding back into form after a midseason slump that coincided with the birth of his daughter Windsor-Wells, posted two straight 68s to grab a tie for the thirty-six-hole lead. Others lingered close behind, with a 65 from Justin Rose setting the low mark on Friday.
The rough grew thicker over the weekend, and the bentgrass greens sped up in the heat. For the first time, it began to look like a U.S. Open course, and the scores followed suit. Reed made two straight bogeys to end the front nine on Saturday—and missed a slew of makeable birdie putts on the back nine—but the fact that he even had a chance at birdie put him above the competition. He fought back to -6 with a birdie at 16, and made an excellent sand save on 17 to preserve his lead. The one great round of the day belonged to Seung-Yul Noh, whose 66 vaulted him to -4, and a spot in the final group with Reed, two shots ahead.
After the round, I asked Marc Leishman, also at -4, whether he’d prefer to be in the final group or the second-to-last group in his situation, when his score would be the same either way. Was it better to have the leader in your sights all day, or to avoid the spotlight and sneak up from outside of the final pairing? His answer was the equivalent of a shrug—“I’m pretty happy with the position I’m in, to be honest, second last. Not a whole lot of attention…it doesn’t worry me either way.”
When I asked Reed to put himself in Leishman’s shoes and ponder the same question, he didn’t hesitate: “I’d definitely be in the last group.”
Another bit of evidence, maybe, in the endless mystery of what separates the very good from the great.
—
The Congressional clubhouse is a stately, arresting Spanish Revival mansion with red-tile roofs and umbrella-dotted balconies that overlook the 18th green and its small lake—a body of water fed by Cabin John Creek, a tributary branch of the Potomac. The hole makes for such a dramatic venue that it was changed from the 17th to the 18th before the 2011 U.S. Open. Eastern red cedars with their pale blue berries spring up around the clubhouse, and give way to sycamores, dogwoods, and crimson king maples, along with a spectacular Norway spruce behind the 16th green.
Outside that clubhouse on Sunday, in the minutes before the day’s final tee time, Seung-Yul Noh chipped and putted by himself. No caddie, no media, no fans—just a lone golfer, and his unreadable thoughts.
Reed emerged moments later in his Sunday best—black pants and Tiger-red shirt, complete with Tax Slayer and Callaway logos. In his presence, Noh almost seemed to shrink. Reed had held a fifty-four-hole lead three times in his career, and all three times, he’d gone on to win the tournament. He valued his reputation as a closer, and at this early stage of his career, it formed the basis of his identity.
Reed’s meltdown began on the 10th, a downhill par 3 over the lake, when his tee-shot splashed lightly in the water. The fans standing on the stone wall above him groaned, and Reed smashed a tee box with his club—an unpatriotic move, considering there was a picture of the Capital rotunda engraved on each marker.
“Not a top-five shot!” yelled a loud voice from the gallery, and Reed’s face flushed red.
From the drop zone, Reed hit into the right rough, dropped an empha
tic “fuck!”, and made double bogey. On the 11th, he pushed his drive hard right—there was now a definite trend of him missing in that direction—and proceeded to hit a fairway metal over a small arched footbridge and into the creek. By the time it was over, he had another double bogey, and dropped all the way to -2. Meanwhile, Noh failed to get out of a bunker, and made double bogey of his own. That was just the start of the carnage. The two players seemed to be following a mutual collapse accord, and they weren’t alone—eyeballing the leaderboard, you only had to think someone’s name, and voilà, they dropped. Reed and Noh had it the worst, though; by day’s end, the man in red had shot 77, and Noh came in at 8-over on the back nine alone.
I followed Reed until the 13th, and made sure I was in the media flash area when he left the course. Noh came ahead of him, nodding politely to the media. As expected, Reed followed under a black cloud, seething with barely contained fury. As he signed his card, a Tour official asked if he could step out and talk to the media. He grunted an unfriendly no. “But they’re all assembled right here, Patrick.” Same grunt—no way.
Justin Rose—a kind of cipher, but one who carries himself with inscrutable politeness—would go on to win the tournament in a playoff. What I’d remember most about Congressional, though, was Reed, and our first indication that he may not be the second coming of Tiger. He answered two questions for TV, signed a couple of photographs, and then disappeared with Kessler and Justine. He cuts an intimidating shape when he wins, but that day, stomping off into the distance, he gave off a very different impression. He looked like a spoiled, churlish boy playing dress-up—the kind of kid who throws a fit when he doesn’t get his way.