The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
The good, and the bad, at Muirfield
IT’S THE annual edition of Open Championship “Good Week-Bad Week”, otherwise known as lazy journalism by an exhausted golf writer… Good week for … really nice guys. Our Scottish Open champion and now Open champion — “Castle Stuart was a big win but in seven days it has gone down (the pecking order) considerably” — is, using the standard cliché of the moment, one of golf’s Marmites. It seems you really do either love him or hate him.
For every person who loves Phil Mickelson’s family man persona, his perma-smile, his daring ways on the golf course, his incredible politeness and his care and consideration to sign an autograph for anyone who wants one (and adhering to Arnold Palmer’s famous adage, you can always tell it was him who signed), there’s someone who thinks he’s a phony and a fraud.
His nickname on tour, apparently, is the acronym FIGJAM. I can’t use the first word but the remainders are “…I’m Good, Just A sk Me”. Some people have an almost visceral hostility to him.
A lot of this is that he is ying to Tiger Woods’ yang. The pair will always be bracketed together — not in Phil’s mind, he accepts that Tiger is “way ahead of me” and has publicly said several times how fortunate he is to have played in Woods’ era, with greater financial opportunities that Tiger, by and large, created.
But the rivalry and needle between them is genuine. It took three inviting questions before Tiger said something complimentary about Phil in his after round press session on Sunday, which was that “three-under is a hell of a score”.
If you love Tiger it seems you hate Phil and vice-versa. But even if Phil has cultivated the nice guy, family man thing as a mirror image of his rival, he’s pretty sincere about it.
He signs autographs when Tiger doesn’t, and he will make sure everyone has one, no matter how long it takes. When A lex Salmond barges to the front as he comes off the course at Castle Stuart, Phil introduces the FM to his family.
There are loads of stories of Phil’s almost incredible generosity. Like the time he gave his Superbowl tickets to a random kid and his dad watching him play because he wasn’t going to make the game, or how he paid the college fees of the son of an army veteran killed in action. It could all just be fantastic PR. But even if it is, and some of his gestures are so spontaneous that this is highly unlikely, nobody is making him do it.
Bad week for … Lee Westwood, and England’s dreaming.
A ll of Westwood’s many opportunities and failures at majors had been in stark contrast to, for example, Greg Norman’s. Lee was not the architect of his own downfall on any of the previous occasions, barring maybe Turnberry in 2009, when he went for the win when a par on 18 would have got him a playoff against Stewart Cink and Tom Watson.
Sunday definitely was his own failing. A t the start of the day, and on three separate occasions during the final round, West wood had the Claret Jug in his control, no matter what charging Mickelsons and Poulters might have done.
The problem for him now is that it may have been his best chance, and the English media will start to turn on him. Several flew up from Lords on Sunday especially in the hope he would follow Justin Rose, and they can be merciless if disappointed.
Good week for … sun lotion and aftersun sales.
£5 a bottle in the Open tented village. A nd given that we hadn’t had an Open even slightly warm since 2006, nobody was prepared. Even Tiger remarked “there are a lot of very red people out there”.
But the glorious weather also meant a course set-up which was pretty alien to the majority of players, unaccustomed to truly hard running fairways and greens. Part of Mickelson’s achievement was that he, typecast as hamfisted on links, adapted to it best. Bad week for … ticket sales. There’s no excuses here — and the R&A avoided making any by cancelling their traditional post championship press conference — £75 a ticket is just too much. 20,000 fans (£1.5 million worth, and that’s without what they would have spent on extortionate food and souvenirs) absent compared to 2002 gave that message loud and clear.
A nd when you say £75 for all day compares well to other sporting events, be careful that it’s a meaningful comparison. A t almost every other sport, you get a seat and see all the action in front of you. A t the Open you could spend all day on your feet and might see nothing. Bad week for … the R&A. They did OK on the set-up at Muirfield, but they had a quality tableau to work with, and one of the best greenkeeping operations on the planet. The slow play clampdown seemed to work; Sunday’s play was agreeably quick.
But the rest was a disaster. The crowd figures were awful. The response to the single-sex club issue was incredibly badly handled, Peter Dawson’s “marital bed” analogy and obvious frustration on Wednesday being a rare example of the chief executive losing his sure-footedness with the media.
The next day the Prime Minister joined what Dawson called “political posturing” by calling for a change in policy.
The R&A ’s clear hope that this unpleasantness would all fade away is naïve. They risk this being a live issue all the way up to Troon in 2016, the next time an all-male club is host. Good week for … Callaway and Ping. A fter a slow start, Callaway’s top man came through to win the title, giving the company some respite in the club wars. Ping did well also, with the four men in the final groups. Bad week for … Nike. They unveiled a new driver neither of their top names used. They unveiled new hi-tech raingear in a heatwave. Rory only managed to wear half his special new kit, while the Saturday and Sunday ensembles went unused.
A nd Tiger’s major malaise continues. A fter plotting his way into position, he got no response when he needed to step on the pedal in the final straight. A nd his biggest rival, gallingly, tore up from behind and claimed the Claret Jug.
This is becoming a fully-fledged trend. The PGA at Oak Hill, where he will have to use his driver, doesn’t seem like an obvious place for it to end.