As U.S. Opens Go, This One Ranks Right Behind the 8 Ball

BIRMINGHAM, Mich. —  Nobody won the U.S. Open here Sunday.

Plenty of people lost it. They took turns.

Golf was set back 100 years. It was the worst golf I ever saw in my life by guys who were sober.

I don’t know about you, but in my circles, guys who play like these are known as “the load” in the locker room and you duck them on the first tee so as not to get them for partners.

Ben Hogan must have been covering his eyes. If you saw such fat backswings and choke strokes on the tee at home, you’d reach for your wallet. It looked more like the truck drivers’ flight at Montalvo than the, by God, United States Open. You were tempted to tap these guys on the shoulder and say, “Pardon me, is this a scramble or are you guys playing at full handicap?”

The winner didn’t win it, he inherited it. Andrew Stewart North just thinks he won the 1985 National Open.

Listen, do the guys you play with have this rule where you can’t wait for a ball hanging on the lip to fall in the cup? You bet they don’t. Why, in my crowd, you can do a full Comanche war dance around the hole, rattle the ground, shout--do everything but blow on it. You can wait till dark or the weekend, if you want, for it to fall in.

Well, Thursday, in this la-dee-da tournament put on by these swells, a golfer named Denis Watson hit a shot that hung halfway down in the eighth hole. Denis didn’t jump up and down on the ground, he didn’t beat the green with his driver, he didn’t re-rout other foursomes or threesomes around the green. He just stood there and looked at it for about 35 seconds.

The ball fell. A four, right? Wrong. The USGA says you can only wait 10 seconds over a hanging lie in a cup. Ten seconds! Tunney was down longer than that. Denis Watson got a two-stroke penalty. Instead of his par, he got a 6. He would have been better off if he ran up to his ball and tapped it in, even though it was technically still rolling.

Denis Watson, sports fans, shot a 280, even par in this tournament-- with that two-stroke penalty.

Andy North “won” this tournament with a 279, one-under par. You don’t have to be a CPA to figure out that Denis Watson lost this tournament to a pencil.

But, it will probably best be remembered not as the tournament Andy North won, or the one in which Denis Watson got robbed, but the tournament T.C. Chen lost to a full follow-through.

One of the cardinal rules in golf is, don’t quit on the shot. Finish it up, right?

Well, T.C. Chen, fortune’s cookie in this tourney, came up to the fifth hole Sunday sporting a nifty four-shot lead on the field and looking as if this Open was just another road to Mandalay. He hit his first mediocre shot of the Open, a 4-iron shot that hit a wet, grassy cluster alongside the fifth green. He scuffed another shot into matted fringe.

Then, he took a picture swing at the ball that raised up on the clubhead and tailed left. Which happened to be the direction of T.C.’s follow-through. The ball hit the clubhead again.

Now, when you and I do that, no big deal, right? I mean, a ball has an obligation to get out of the way. I don’t know about you but I double-hit all the time. Sometimes, I even chase after a putt that’s going the wrong way and re-direct it. If my club happens to meet the ball again in mid-air, that’s supposed to be my fault? No way.

In the U.S. Open, they don’t have the common-sense approaches we do. Here, it’s a double-hit and a big no-no. It counted as two shots.

Now, two shots on one swing seems a rather harsh interpretation of the rules, if you want my opinion. But no one did. T.C. Chen took an 8 on the hole. He was to lose the U.S. Open by one shot.

I don’t know how well you know golfers. But I know them well enough to tell you right now that 1985 is never going to be the year Andy What’s-His-Name? won the Open; it’s the year that Fortune’s Cookie crumbled. Any golfer worth his handicap can tell you the year Sam Snead took his blowup on the 18th hole at Springmill in Philadelphia, took an 8 and lost the 1939 U.S. Open. Only a handful know it was Byron Nelson who won it.

Galleries of golf fans know Arnold Palmer blew seven shots in eight holes and the 1966 Open at Olympic in San Francisco. Only the encyclopedias know it was Bill Casper he lost to.

Andy North has now officially won two U.S. Opens. He wins Opens and not much else.

Well, let me tell you something. He didn’t “win” this one, either. Ten years from now, all anyone will talk about from the Oakland Hills Open is that Rube Goldberg shot brought off by the Chinese golfer in the rough at five, and the golfer whose putt plopped in more than 10 seconds after he hit it. The name of the winner will be in Trivial Pursuit. Right along with Lincoln’s vice president. No one will get it. I mean, it was Andy South, right?