REED IN THE LEAD
CAM COLE COLUMN: Patrick isn’t golf ’s golden child but he shares the U.S. Open lead.
UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash.
Jordan Spieth’s wire- to-wire win at the Masters has already proven that nice guys needn’t finish last.
Now, another hoary adage is hanging by a thread after 36 holes of the 115th U.S. Open, with Patrick Reed and Dustin Johnson also up at the top of the board.
It’s the one that goes: crime doesn’t pay.
Plenty of golf left, of course, and on a hard-boiled Chambers Bay-cum-Space Mountain layout, it’s certain to get even more off-the-wall on the weekend.
Still, the prospect of golf’s 21-year-old golden child locking horns with two miscreants on the scale of the controversial Reed and the suspiciously secretive Johnson — even if no one else climbed into the picture before Sunday’s final round — would make for a morality play that even haters of Fox’s erratic first attempt at major golf coverage might tune in to see. The gory details are unnecessary, but the Reader’s Digest version, if you don’t know, is that Reed was expelled from one college program and suspended by another after allegations of stealing and cheating, respectively, had to apologize for a gay slur after microphones caught him calling himself a “f---ing f---ot,” and just generally alienated PGA Tour colleagues and pretty much all of Europe with his surfeit of attitude.
Johnson has merely taken a long leave of absence from the Tour ( read: suspension, unannounced) to seek professional help for “personal challenges” (read: reportedly failed drug tests, never admitted, and possibly adventures of an amorous nature).
Next to them — heck, next to anybody, practically — Spieth is a saint. But as anyone who’s followed the Tiger Woods era is aware, the golf ball doesn’t know from purity of heart. It goes where the best striker sends it, and so far, that man’s identity is very much up in the air.
It could be Reed, who rolled in two downhill, sidehill monsters for birdie and eagle at the 11th and 12th, added another at the 16th and looked as though he would get it to the house with a one-stroke lead over Spieth, but three-putted the 18th for 69 and instead begins the third round tied with the young Master, who shot a morning 67, and — just like old times in the Ryder Cup — they’ll be paired together, in the final group.
“Just too many bogeys,” Reed said. “I need to clean that up.”
It could be Johnson, who started Friday sharing the lead with Henrik Stenson, had it alone for quite a while, but bogeyed 14, 17 and 18 to fall into a third-place tie at four-underpar with South Africa’s Branden Grace, whose round was keyed by a 35-yard (yes, yard) eagle putt at the eighth hole, followed by a birdie at the ninth.
Stenson stumbled to a 74 and groused afterwards: “It’s pretty much like putting on broccoli.”
Johnson didn’t make many, either, but he also put himself in bad positions down the stretch. He drove it into the deep fairway bunker at the 18th and couldn’t save par. “It’s the one place you can’t hit it on that hole. I knew that sitting on the tee, I hit a bad shot,” he said. “But I thought I played pretty well today. It played really difficult.”
Considering the last six majors have been won by the solo 36-hole leader, though, this U.S. Open, which has broken the mould in so many other ways, will also break that one.
Spieth’s round was anything but uneventful. As his group walked toward the ninth green, its last hole of the day, Jason Day abruptly collapsed with an attack of vertigo and Spieth rushed over to keep cameramen away from his playing partner and give medics room to work on the world’s No. 3 player.
“I was walking with him, the next thing I know I turned around and I think he got dizzy and slipped and fell,” Spieth said. “So at that point, how can we help him out and kind of clear the scene and try and keep the cameras off and let him just rebound from being dizzy? We were trying to look out for him.”
After Day was helped to his feet and, still disoriented, finished the hole with a bunker shot and two putts for bogey, Spieth had to collect his own thoughts, and calmly ran in his own 10-footer for birdie. “That was one of the better birdies I’ve ever made given the situation,” he said. “I actually got somewhat of a read off Jason’s putt and was able to knock it in.”
He thought he might, at best, be tied for the lead by day’s end. And he was.
What all of them know is that it’s going to get harder now. Maybe much harder.
“Given it’s a U.S. Open, I imagine they’re going to try to bring us back to par,” said Spieth. “So I’ll draw some on Augusta, but … it’s a harder golf course than the Masters played this year.”