Erin Hills send golf into rough
All of which made the disappearance of the world’s best players especially hard to explain.
Dustin Johnson, Jason Day and Rory McIlroy, the top three-ranked players in the world, all missed the cut, and Jordan Spieth was never a factor on Sunday.
Throw in the fact that Phil Mickelson stayed home in Southern California to attend his daughter’s high school graduation, and by the weekend this was a tournament starving for star power.
Mickelson was especially missed. Even at age 47 he is the most entertaining golfer in the game, and his quest to finally win a U.S. Open, after six second-place finishes, is always a compelling storyline at this tournament. Furthermore, those extrawide fairways sure seemed made for his erratic driver.
Put it this way: if he’d had half that much margin for error at Winged Foot 11 years ago, Mickelson would have waltzed home with the win rather than making double bogey on the 72nd hole and famously saying, “I am such an idiot.”
In any case, by Sunday Rickie Fowler was the biggest name on the leaderboard, and he’s a star largely for his appeal to young fans as the Puma guy who wears loud colors, including his Okahoma State-orange pants on Sunday.
Fowler hasn’t won a major yet, but his brand is such that so you can bet the TV folks at FOX were hoping he at least took Koepka and whoever else to the wire.
But Fowler couldn’t make a run on Sunday, nor could Justin Thomas, an overnight sensation after shooting 63 on Saturday, and fairly early on the back nine the tournament was coming down to Koepka, the little lefty Brian Harman and Japanese star Hideki Matsuyama.
However, Matsuyama finished an hour ahead of the other two, Harman began to falter a bit, and Koepka then seized the moment with those three straight birdies for a brilliant finish.
In doing so he sure looked like a star in the making. It was only his second-ever win in the U.S., in part because it took Koepka years of playing around the world on lesser tours to finally make it to the big stage of the PGA Tour.
Obviously he has all the shots, so maybe this is just the start for him, and over the next few years he’ll be that Next Big Thing whose name brings people to the TV. n Sunday, however, he was just the guy who won by four strokes and made it look easy, which left me and, I’m guessing, a lot of people hoping that when the U.S. Open comes to Shinnecock Hills in the Hamptons next year, it brings back the misery. And drama. And star power.
Any order will do.
O