At U.S. Open, strong winds could deliver blow to players
PEBBLE BEACH — Not to dismiss the ankle-high, golf-ball-gobbling rough at this week’s U.S. Open, but the world’s finest players can cope with tall grass.
Narrow fairways count as a nuisance. Slick greens? Deep bunkers? Those are minor annoyances on the relative scale of challenges for savvy tour pros.
Here’s what torments golfers, and messes with their minds, more than anything else: wind.
Twenty-seven years ago, right here at Pebble Beach, howling winds ap
proaching 40 mph nearly blew every player in the 1992 U.S. Open out to sea. By one account, only one of the last 30 players in the final round hit his tee shot onto the green at No. 7, a 107-yard par-3.
Or flash back to the 2002 British Open at Muirfield, with Tiger Woods chasing the Grand Slam. He shot 70-68 to move into contention, until rain and heavy, gusting, wicked winds led to a third-round 81.
“Those were the hardest conditions I’ve ever played in,” Woods once said.
Even tamer winds can mystify Woods. Just watch him anytime the wind is swirling as he prepares to hit an approach shot. He flips a few blades of grass into the air. He gazes at nearby trees. He consults his caddie. He searches for flags fluttering in the distance.
Woods suddenly becomes tentative and indecisive, his carefully calculated game plan reduced to exasperating guesswork. In these moments, Woods and other players sit at the whims of Mother Nature.
“I think wind is the biggest factor,” Justin Rose said of the various challenges tour pros face. “A golf course can play so differently with the wind direction switching.”
Jason Day recalled playing alongside Bubba Watson in the 2011 British Open at Royal St. George’s. The wind defied physics by Day’s memory, blowing rain under his umbrella and directly into his face.
Every now and then, Day successfully solves the wind. More often, he loses the battle.
“I think there’s more times it tormented and conquered me than the other way around,” he said.
Day and the 155 other players in this week’s U.S. Open take comfort in knowing they probably will not endure any epic storms. Even so, fog engulfed Pebble Beach for Wednesday’s practice round, bringing along chilly temperatures and strong winds.
The forecast for the next four days calls for wind of 10 to 15 mph. That’s enough to force players to think about it.
Rose, who won the 2013 U.S. Open, welcomes breezes in this range. They tend to separate the golfers who are playing well and those not quite on their game, vulnerable to another factor in the equation.
And wind messes with players on more than full swings. Putting also becomes more complicated on windy days.
“I can have a putt from here to this water bottle,” Justin Thomas said, motioning to the bottle about a foot away. “And if the wind is blowing this way at 20 mph, and then all of a sudden it stops or blows the other way right when I hit the ball, I’m going to miss it.
“That’s physics. It’s not going in.”
This helps explain why wind bothers players so much: It’s capricious and unpredictable. They can formulate a strategy, from which clubs to use on tee shots to which side of the green to leave their approach shots, but they usually can’t plan for the wind because it changes so abruptly.
Witness the final round of this year’s Masters. Four players in contention — Francesco Molinari, Brooks Koepka, Tony Finau and Ian Poulter — plopped tee shots into Rae’s Creek, in front of the No. 12 green.
That’s why Rory McIlroy — who knows all about windwhipped, seaside courses from his upbringing in Northern Ireland — prefers Pebble Beach to inland layouts such as Augusta National.
“I would think it’s much easier to play in wind here at Pebble than, say, at Spyglass,” McIlroy said. “You’re in the trees (at Spyglass) and it’s swirling, so a low shot is going to do something completely different than a ball up above the trees.”
There aren’t many trees at Pebble Beach, so McIlroy just needs to hope there’s no encore to 1992. Tom Kite won that U.S. Open, shooting evenpar 72 in the final round. Kite, who grew up on the windwhipped plains of Texas, used a 6-iron on No. 7, where he famously holed his chip shot for birdie.
And, most impressively, he conquered the wind.