Lancaster loses often, but keeps his humour
Neal Lancaster, who started playing on the PGA Tour a few years before Jordan Spieth emerged from the womb, stood behind the 18th green at Glen Abbey and pondered his place in golfing universe.
“I don’t really think age matters if you stay in shape,” Lancaster said in his gap-toothed, North Carolina drawl.
He patted a modest pot belly before he unfurled the punchline. “Which, I’m not in shape.” Lancaster is 52 years old in a sport in which many of the best players in the world are less than half his age. Yet there he was on Thursday, managing to crack a smile of half-satisfaction after an opening-round 68 at the RBC Canadian Open. The score wasn’t nearly good enough to put him atop the field, not after 22-year-old Argentinian Emiliano Grillo fired an eight-under par 64 to seize the first-round lead by a shot over Americans Vaughn Taylor and Brian Harman. But on a gentle day made for scoring that saw the leader-board jammed with 60-somethings, Lancaster’s 68 was enough to put him — a selftaught, Southern-born country boy — tied for 17th and firmly in the mix among the uber-coached, country-club young bloods.
“I taught myself, and then I started taking lessons 15 years ago. It kind of messed me up,” Lancaster said. “For six holes today I was thinking about my golf swing. Then I said, ‘I’m going to quit thinking and I’m going to start playing.’ ”
Such is the easy charm of one of the most memorable characters in the recent history of our national championship. Lancaster will always be associated with 2002, when he arrived at the 72nd hole at Angus Glen with a two-shot lead, only to make a double-bogey that forced a playoff that was promptly won by John Rollins. The loss hurt — heck, it hurt to watch.
But just as unforgettable was Lancaster’s unguarded, unflinching performance in the post-tournament press conference, where he elevated honest self-assessment into an honourable art form.
“I blew it . . . I choked . . . I played like a blind man . . . Folded like a cheap suit.”
He said all of those things, and more, eventually.
He also said this: “I guess I know how Jean Claude Van Damme, or whatever his name is, felt.”
Lancaster, of course, was never playing with as big a lead or as much at stake as Jean Van de Velde, the infamous Frenchman who took a three-shot lead into the 18th hole of the final day of the 1999 Open Championship and somehow exited without the Claret Jug. But certainly, not unlike Van de Velde, Lancaster has found some perspective on his biggest career miss with the help of time and occasional parental guidance from his father, Charles.
“He said, ‘Son, just be thankful you weren’t driving a race car or flying a plane because you sure woulda killed a lot of people,’” Lancaster once said.
The modern schools of sports psychology demand of their students seemingly constant positivity. But Lancaster comes from a different, less coddled place. Whether or not his out-and-out embrace of negative self-talk has been effective — well, that’s debatable. His only PGA Tour win came in a rain-shortened, 36-hole version of the Byron Nelson Classic (the “Half Nelson,” as it came to be known). But Lancaster has earned more than $6 million in career prize money while making more than 350 cuts on the pro tours, all this while his relationship with the game seems to have constantly resided on the border between love and hate.
“I told my dad about five years ago. I said, ‘It’s probably time to retire when you enjoy going out to dinner on the road more than you enjoy playing.’ That’s how I felt at the time.”
A similar feeling gripped him late in his front nine on Thursday in Oakville. He was speaking of the moments surrounding back-to-back bogeys on holes No. 7 and 8.
“I almost gave up,” he said. “I went, ‘Oh, here we go again. Same old stuff. Back to even par. The weather’s perfect. Everybody’s going to tear it up.’ But it’s all mental. I said, ‘Just go play golf.’ And I finally loosened up. And then I started hitting good shots.”
He did, indeed, finishing with two birdies and an eagle on his final nine.
“We all get too uptight out on this tour. We should just relax and play the game,” he said on Thursday. “That’s what we did when we were kids, and loved it. Now, there’s so much money involved, we take it as a business. And it’s still a game. If we can just play it as a game . . .”
On Thursday he spent some time admiring the graceful swing of his playing partner, 23-year-old Japanese champion Ryo Ishikawa.
“I couldn’t play like that. His just looks beautiful out there,” Lancaster said. “And I’m out there slapping it around like a hockey player.”
Lancaster was in good spirits Thursday. Travelling to Canada remains a pleasure for him — “Love it up here,” he said — even if his commercial flight from Raleigh, a connector through Philadelphia, took some 13 hours all in. And if there’s mental baggage in tow, he copes.
“Yeah, 2002. I gave it away,” he was saying Thursday. “It happened for a reason. You never will figure out the reason. Guys out here will never figure out a lot of things. It’s a game, and we all try and make it too hard.”
He has played occasionally on the Champions Tour, and, barring a victory, this could prove to be his Canadian Open swan song. He said he received a medical extension on his exempt status some years ago — he has had neck surgery and shoulder surgery and a back problem, to name a few of his ailments — but only a few tournaments remain on his docket.
“I’m just trying to catch lightning in a bottle one last time,” he said. “You know what I mean? If I can go out (Friday) and not think about my score and just play . . . It’s hard. We get to thinking about our scores. We just need to get out of our way and try and play, try and enjoy it. A lot of us don’t enjoy it.
“But heck, I’ve been fortunate. I’m 52 years old and I’ve played golf my whole life . . . Maybe the golf gods could bless me with one this week. It’d be great.”