After reading through lots of various websites, articles and blogs on this past US Open, I couldn’t find any nicknames for the new double Masters and US Open champion, so please allow me to call him “The Kid”, because at just 21 years old, Jordan Spieth’s not much more than that, even though he’s possessed of a maturity well beyond his years.
That finish must have been one of the most exciting Major climaxes ever, and we had some local South African interest in a Major for the 1st time in a very long time.
The changes in ownership at the top of the leader board were fast and furious.
When I got up at 1am SA time, the world #1 had just lit up the Pacific Northwest with a load of birdies, but then just as I had settled down with some caffeine and a few rusks, so Rory missed a short birdie putt and a par putt in consecutive holes, and that blew his chances. But another backdoor top 10 – just as he did at The Masters – shows that Rory McIlroy is still around, and that he still has the ability to “move the needle” on the last day of a Major.
DJ Dustin Johnson then seemingly had a steady hand on proceedings, but then contrived to drop a few and appeared, to all intents and purposes, to be out of things.
And that was when attention turned to Jordan Spieth and Branden Grace, and they seemed to match each other for a few holes, before Grace uncharacteristically pushed one right and Oscar Bravo at the drivable par-4 16th hole. He then followed that up with a 3-putt and lost 3 strokes in that one fateful hole as Spieth finally rolled in a birdie putt.
But Spieth hastily doubled 17th to bring everyone back into the equation, including the very fast finishing Louis Oosthuizen, and DJ, who was still lurking.
And then everything came down to the ultimate hole. King Louis had birdied it earlier to set -4 as the benchmark. Grace couldn’t do likewise and finished tied 4th at -3 with the also fast-finishing Ozzie Adam Scott, who showed some form that has been AWOL for a while. Spieth hit it close on the par 5 for an eagle chance, but squandered that and led at -5.
And then, the drama came down to DJ, who after birdieing the short 17th to get to 4 under, had hit a massive drive down the closing hole, and eased a 6i to 15 feet away for an eagle chance that would give him the title. His ensuing 3-putt is now history, as is another Major title slipping out of his grasp, and he’ll have the task of picking himself up for St Andrews in just over 3 weeks time.
Here’s my overall take on this 115th edition of the US national golf Open.
1. Jordan Spieth owns 2 Majors now at the very tender age of 21 – I’m trying to imagine my own 21 year old son as a double Major-holder – as well as the 1st 2 Majors of 2015, leaving him halfway to the proper Grand Slam, a one-season jackpot that has never been achieved.
2. Dustin Johnson is one of the best golfers on the planet, with ball-striking skills and distance aplenty, and it must be just a matter of time until he closes a big deal.
3. Branden Grace showed not only patience and skills, but his bulldog fighting spirit under the intense magnifying-glass scrutiny of Major Championship golf, and the golfing world has taken note. The Open Championship can’t come quick enough for him, and I just hope he kicks on even further from here. He sounded confident in all his interviews, and he looks a most likeable man.
4. Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel are still alive!! And possessed of talent in abundance, these 2 Major winners are hopefully back from 3 or 4 years of injuries & mediocrity, and once again, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for them, and for us SA golfing addicts. I maintain that if Louis hadn’t been caught up in the media circus that surrounded his pairing with the duo of Tiger Woods and Ricky Fowler – who shot 80 and 82 respectively – in Thursday’s opening round, that he would have been streets clear of everyone this week, just as he did at St Andrews in 2010. BTW, Louis’ back nine 29 and last 3 rounds 66-66-67 were all US Open records.
5. Adam Scott, with Stevie Williams lugging his sack, is also still around!
6. And – my hero for the week – Jason Day. He gamely battled vertigo from Friday afternoon onwards, and only faded in the intense heat of battle late into Sunday’s final round, and his efforts to keep on trucking in search of his maiden Major must be highly commended. I hope he gets it sorted out before St Andrews rolls around.
7. The World #1 Rory McIlroy, is still there, ready to pounce.
8. And Tiger’s issues continue unabated.
And then there was the golf course. Here’s my (very humble) opinion, to add to the cacophony of others.
I was very disappointed as I’d been following the Chambers Bay story for a good few years now after hearing about it as a future venue for the 2010 US Amateur and this US Open, and not having heard of it before, I went to that great big search engine online and brushed up on my Chambers Bay. What I found were luscious green fairways on a links course setting, with the blue waters of Puget Sound in the background. It looked spectacular, and I was unbelievably excited to see this US Open on TV. Instead what we saw were burnt brown fairways and a barren landscape, and the whole dream was shattered.
Plus, the USGA screwed up the greens!
When there is so much player criticism and media hype about the course and the greens that it becomes one of the main stories of the event, then Mike Davis and his USGA did something wrong. Plain and simple!
Getting the course to run firm and dry is OK. Getting a US Open course to play like a proper Scottish links track is not really OK.
Lots of variation in the teeing grounds is wonderfully OK, but changing pars is not, as it breaks with a tradition that wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing. That this event was the 115th edition of this huge championship says enough for that tradition.
Lots of undulations in the greens are OK to challenge the world’s best, but – worst of all – allowing poa annua infestations to ruin the putting surfaces was definitely not OK!
Poa generally grows faster than other grasses, especially the fescue at Chambers Bay, so it becomes more and more uneven as the day gets longer. Three greens – the 7th, 11th and 13th- had been re-laid recently, and were pure and perfect versions of golden fescue greens, but the rest were fast and bumpy, and drew the ire of too many players to leave people in no doubt that it was not just 1 or 2 disgruntled Pros whining and bitching as an excuse for their bad golf. If this course was designed with the US Open in mind, then they got their planning horribly wrong.
I remember countless events on our local SA Tour, especially during the winter months, when greens became fast and bumpy, and nothing pees off the better putters more than those kind of surfaces that negate their skills.
We saw lots of low-down camera angles that showed the roll, sorry bounce, of the ball on the greens, sorry browns, of Chambers Bay, and to me, that was the biggest problem. Why Fox continued to feed the problem for their new partners at the USGA left me baffled as well, thinking that the ‘powers that be’ were actually delighting in the pro’s suffering.
And then there was Fox Sports TV coverage in general.
They missed countless shots, especially from contenders in the final groups. You knew that a player was just over a green and about to chip, but wouldn’t see him for a few minutes, and then he’d next be shown marking his ball after chipping about 4 feet past the hole. Then they’d go back and show you his chip “from just a moment ago”, but by now we already knew the result.
We saw tons of Joost Luiten and Tony Finau on the final day when they just weren’t factors in the event, but they picked up Louis’ final 9 charge way too late, missing probably more than half of it. Ditto with Charl and Adam Scott.
Their cameramen tried in vain to follow tee-shots through the air and bouncing down fairways, but often they missed everything. Granted though that the dried out fairways made picking up the ball quite difficult.
And what irked me more than anything else was the absence of their poster girl on their broadcast team, Holly Sonders. She’s an absolute babe, and is knowledgeable on all things golf as well, and we never got to see her once!!! Twitter went mad on Sunday as she was apparently wearing a short skirt that didn’t leave much to the imagination. Us normal gutter-minded men needed some feeding in that department. Maybe it was some arrangement with the local Supersport airing, but we never got to see her, or Greg Norman and his anchor Joe Buck in the studio.
I’m sure there’ll be some intense meetings at USGA HQ with the execs from Fox in the coming weeks about the future of their 10 year contract, as Fox were just nowhere near as slick as the other major golf networks. Not too unexpected though!
And yet, despite the greens and the TV coverage, the tournament ended in high edge-of-the-seat drama, so were the USGA that bad? Or did they just get lucky that it came to such a head, and with so many top players in the mix? I can only think that if Joost Luiten and Tony Finau had finished 1st and 2nd, that the Fox brass would’ve been summoned to appear before Congress this week.
Lastly, I expect the USGA to come back to Chambers Bay fairly soon. I see that they’ve already determined future venues until 2023, and they’ve probably invested way too much time and effort, not to mention money, in getting this venue this Major championship, so I think that after a few lessons learned, that they’ll be back in 2024. We can only hope then for slightly greener fairways, but I’m sure there will be different – and better – surfaces on the greens.
Kappygolf 