Don’t blame the course
USGA erred, but so did golfers
By five minutes to five o'clock, the champion of the U.S. Open, Shinnecock Hills, had gotten the secondround leader Dustin Johnson against the ropes and was hammering him with body blows that threatened to knock him all the way off the leaderboard and course and into the sixth fairway at Southampton Golf Club next door. Johnson had come into the day 4-under par and was already 5-over through seven holes of the third round. So not only had Shinnecock happened to Johnson. The Open had. And the idea that everything that happened on Saturday to Johnson and the other best golfers still in town was the USGA's fault or the golf course's fault doesn't tell nearly enough of the story.
The wind blew again on Saturday at Shinnecock, harder than they thought it would, though not as hard as it did on Thursday. The greens got insanely fast, there were certainly a couple of really bad hole locations, especially on No. 15 and No. 18. But the idea that whole course was unfair or that the USGA somehow shamed Shinnecock is ridic- ulous.
By the way? The USGA admitted it made mistakes afterward. But if you really do believe that they ruined the course or the Open and were out to embarrass the golfers you were watching the wrong scary movie on Saturday.
"(The wind) blew harder than we thought it was going to blow,” Mike Davis, the big boss of the USGA, said afterward. “The greens got fast, and it was too much for the wind we had. At 15, you were seeing shots well-played, and they weren't rewarded. We would say it was a very tough test, but it was too tough this afternoon.”
It was tough, but not impossible. And even the top guys could have done better with the course and the conditions and the setup than they did. It all started going wrong for Johnson on the second hole, on his way to a 77. No. 2 is an uphill par-3 of 250 yards tougher than weekend traffic on Route 27 on a Hamptons weekend. His ball ended up on the dirt road to the right of the green, a bad miss that was nobody's fault but his own. Johnson, who had shown such great touch and feel and imagination in the first two rounds, seemed to have saved himself by just putting the ball on the green. Then he 3-putted. Two hours later, he wouldn't be leading the Open anymore. Now he starts the last day in a 4-way tie.
You thought at the start of this day that if Johnson could shoot another under-par round he might run away from the thing. But he had gone the other way. Shinnecock started pistol-whipping him the way it had Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson, whose idea of raising a white flag on his 48th birthday was running and hitting a still-moving ball on No. 13. He looked like a guy being chased out of town by a golf course on which he had finished second in the Open 14 years ago.
“I've had multiple times where I've wanted to do that,” Mickelson said. “I just finally did.”
He nearly got Shinnecock in '04 until a double bogey on the 71st hole when he was chasing Retief Goosen. Shinnecock got him on Saturday. It got Woods and Spieth and McIlroy on Thursday and Friday. Everybody wanted to blame this on the golf course. Right. At the same time Johnson was shooting 41 on the front nine on Saturday at Shinnecock, the defending champion, Brooks Koepka, trying to become the first man since Curtis Strange to win back-to-back U.S. Opens, was 1-under through 11. If the course was so completely unfair how was Koepka doing that at the time? Or does everybody think the Open should be what it was last year in Wisconsin, when Koepka shot 16-under and won?
Somebody has to explain how the golf course was lost when Tiger Woods made seven on No. 1 on Thursday from the fairway. Or how it's the golf course's fault that Ian Poulter made seven on No. 8 on Friday with a 7-iron in his hands from that fairway? And somebody explain why Dustin Johnson's wide-right miss on No. 15 with an iron in his hands off the tee was the fault of Shinnecock Hills, or the USGA.
Before it was six o'clock at Shinnecock, nobody on the leaderboard, none of the former major champions on the first page was under-par. Now the lead is 3-over. Dustin Johnson is the No. 1 player in the world and freakishly good at golf when he is on his game, the way he was on Thursday and Friday. I love watching him play and would love to see him win a second Open on Sunday. But most of his wounds on Saturday were inflicted by Johnson on himself, not Shinnecock Hills, all the way to a 3-putt on No. 18.
So Tony Finau, who could win today, and Daniel Berger, were lucky enough to go out early and shoot a couple of 66s. So things got harder and meaner as the day went along. So they all didn't get to hit 400 yards and hit to greens softer than a comforter and never be punished for missing a fairway. The USGA made mistakes. The guys on the course made more.