WALKING AWAY SCOTT-FREE
Rio Games not a major deal for Aussie
The return of golf to the Summer Olympics in 2016 after a 112-year absence was a great idea, except for two things: the format and the professionals.
A 72-hole, stroke-play tournament is going to make some of the inclusionary picks from obscure golfing nations at the bottom of the 60-player fields (men’s and women’s) look like weekend hackers.
But worse than that, for many of the pros involved — definitely on the men’s side, and no matter what they may say publicly — the Olympics are just not that big a deal.
That’s why no one should be either surprised by — or critical of — Adam Scott’s announcement Wednesday that he would not be playing in the Olympic tournament due to personal and professional commitments.
It’s a significant blow for Australian hopes, but hardly a fatal one.
There is no team medal being awarded and the Aussies can simply go down the world rankings list, without fear of embarrassment, and name Marc Leishman, who nearly won the Open Championship at St. Andrews a year ago, to join Jason Day as their entries on the men’s side. Anyway, more power to Scott. It has been said before and bears repeating that the Olympic Games should be contested by athletes for whom the gold medal is the highest achievement possible in their sport — a goal worth sacrificing years of one’s life to attain, which many do in sports that have no comfy bed of dollars to fall back upon.
What the Games should not be is an inconvenience, an obligation, a lukewarm addition to an already crammed schedule in a sport where there are more sought-after championships.
Hence, the Olympic men’s soccer tournament is for under-23s, because for the elite-level pros, everyone knows there is nothing greater in the sport than the World Cup.
Well, it’s equally true in golf, where anyone who tells you he would rather win an Olympic gold medal than a Masters, a U.S. Open or an Open Championship is selling something.
You will be familiar with the debate, if you’ve wondered how seriously the tennis luminaries are into it, or whether those quadrennial Dream Team hoopsters secretly would rather be elsewhere during the summer break.
The argument stops, of course, in Canada whenever hockey is mentioned, because (a) we feel we’re supposed to be the best in the world and the Olympics gives us the chance to make that statement, and ( b) for many of the European stars who play in the NHL, the Olympics, not the Stanley Cup, was always the pinnacle of their aspirations while growing up.
So even if some have changed their minds about that, there’s little question that an Olympic hockey gold has a cachet all of its own, possibly even greater than a Stanley Cup.
Scott’s decision, then, is surprising only in the sense that he’s the first elite golfer to make it (not counting Vijay Singh, who would only have been in anyway because he was representing Fiji).
Shoe-horning the Aug. 8-14 Olympic tournament in the midst of a 17-week marathon that already had three golf majors, Jack Nicklaus’s tournament, a World Golf Championship, three FedEx Cup playoffs and the Tour Championship was asking a lot of the pros.
Not to mention Royal Banksponsored stars such as Day, Ernie Els, Jim Furyk, Matt Kuchar, Graeme McDowell, Ryan Palmer, Brandt Snedeker and Graham DeLaet, who are honour-bound to also play the RBC Canadian Open the week after the British.
For Scott, a recently new father and one of the sport’s class acts, the break is about more than just family time. He has said all along that he didn’t consider the Olympics on the same level as the majors or even the FedEx Cup. Imagine a star in any other sport being that honest.
Even so, he probably would play if he were representing Australia in a team event. He has proudly flown the flag in every Presidents Cup he’s qualified for and after his 2013 Masters win, he proudly took the green jacket back to Oz and damned near swept a winter’s worth of major events there, including a runaway win of the World Cup with Day as his partner.
But the Olympics is not a team event. It’s not even match play, which would at least give some of the no-hopers from Third World golf countries a slugger’s chance at an upset.
Instead, it’s just a golf tournament, with a small and relatively watered-down field and a golden bauble at the end of it for some road-weary traveller.
In a perfect world, the first Olympic golf champion since Canada’s George S. Lyon in 1904 would be somebody whose wildest dreams could never have imagined that gold medal.
But it will probably be someone who has a plane to catch the next morning for Greensboro.