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Sunday, July 23, 2006
Course does not measure up
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
The Old Course, otherwise known as St. Andrews, has now been joined in a state of Open obsolescence by Royal Liverpool Golf Club, otherwise known as Hoylake, with a bow to Tiger Woods. Harsh, you say, though not just one person’s opinion, but a verdict firmly delivered in the 135th British Open just concluded. Any time a tournament player can win a championship using irons as his major driving weapon, that course does not measure up to what the Royal & Ancient stands for in its Open, considered by a great many as the world championship of golf.
Oh, no, the Old Course will always be included. It cannot be otherwise. St. Andrews is generally embraced as the world capital of golf. The R&A lives there, and as it stands now, has decreed that the Open will be played there every five years, so they might as well line up the claret jugs and engrave Woods’ name on them. The two very old courses are cousins in layout and challenge, and disturbingly out of touch with golf with its latter-day technology and equipment.
“Looking backward is no way to move forward,” Ron Whitten, Golf Digest’s architecture editor, wrote before play began at Hoylake. The acreage has been sneerlingly referred to “as Royal O.B.” by many of Hoylake’s detractors. So the question was, why was the Open returned the course after a 39-year absence?
The property is so confined that the practice ground had to be moved across a street to a municipal course. Much of the inner course was out of bounds, though I saw only one shot actually struck out of bounds, that by Adam Scott on the l8th hole Sunday. I’m sure there were more hit by lesser players, but they were never considered television fare. Curious to me will be the post-mortem reviews of the UK media, printed and verbalized.
This is not to take away from Tiger Woods’ play, only to emphasize his brilliance. His finishing round was a display of near perfection. He hit only one errant shot that led to a bogey, though his train of thought was interrupted several times by distractions from the gallery. His winning score of 270 was the lowest since he won at St. Andrews at 269 in 2000. It was a work of art, though he managed only a par on the par-5 18th hole, an amazing feat of total concentration. It was over long before it was over, though oft times Ian Baker-Finch beseeched the television audience not to go away. He shouldn’t have fretted. Who would have thought of tuning out to auto racing and a world’s strongest man contest?
Sergio Garcia was never better poised to have his run at Tiger. One stroke off the lead as they left the first tee, but by the turn the Spaniard was out of it. He had played the front nine in 29 on Saturday. Sunday his score was a fat 39. He was a much more exciting challenger as a 19-year-old when he went down to the wire with Woods in the PGA Championship at Medinah. He, Jim Furyk, Retief Goosen and Angel Cabrera all got off to dismal starts and were out of it early, and Goosen had been the pre-championship choice of several. Ernie Els lurked, and that’s about as close as he got. Only Chris DiMarco represented the American entourage with unfailing challenge, burdened as he was in grief for his late mother.
Phil Mickelson? If there was any game in him, it never surfaced. He stuck to a big club off most driving holes, was all over the course and missed as many putts as Delaware is wide. “The Americans played very poorly,” Peter Alliss said, and that pretty much summed it up for our side, DiMarco exempted.
Alliss also said that “they may be back here in six or seven years,” referring to the Open. That remains to be seen. It was amazing, if the estimate was accurate, that they were able to squeeze 150,000 spectators inside the boundaries. Safe to say, it was considerably more comfortable from where I sat.
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All is right with Richt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Last month a Florida fan stood in a ballroom at the Cobb Galleria Centre and asked Urban Meyer when the Gators might again play for the conference championship. It was a heartfelt question that used to arise whenever a Georgia coach addressed a Bulldog Club, a question that for the Red & Black has finally been rendered moot.
Georgia has played for the conference title three times in four seasons and has won it twice. The 2002 season was a long-sought breakthrough; last year was simply the re-affirmation. The program that couldn’t rise above Florida and Tennessee in the SEC East has risen above all its brethren in the nation’s toughest neighborhood.
You can make a case for LSU as Georgia’s co-equal, the Tigers having won two SEC titles and part of one national championship over the past five years. But LSU has changed coaches along the way, and consensus holds that Les (Fake Kick) Miles isn’t quite Nick (No Nonsense) Saban. Certainly Miles did himself no favors by taking what seemed to be the better team and losing to Georgia by 20 points in the Dome last December. And yes, Auburn took the best SEC team of the last decade and had that massive undefeated season in 2004, but that was one big year amid an array of slightly lesser ones.
Mark Richt, who’s nothing if not smooth, has built a program that runs as smoothly as a Rolls. (Ray Goff used to ride a tractor. Jim Donnan once drove a steamroller. You get the contrast.) Richt has won the SEC with David Greene and David Pollack and Brian VanGorder, and last year he won it without them. He’s without a No. 1 quarterback at the moment, but history suggests that when one emerges he’ll win big.
Nothing about Georgia bears the hint of a team on the decline. Recruiting moves from strength to strength. Last season stands as a reminder that the Bulldogs have grown stout enough to win big in any given year, not just once when the stars are aligned.
With the new season 6 1/2 weeks away, every other SEC program faces a bigger burden of proof. LSU has to prove Miles can do what Saban did. Auburn has to prove it can get past its latest tempest, the front-page-of-The-New-York-Times academic kerfuffle. Meyer has to prove his spread offense will work in a conference laden with speed. Steve Spurrier has to prove his stylized expertise isn’t site-specific. Alabama has to prove it can again beat Auburn. Tennessee has to prove it can again beat Vanderbilt.
And Georgia? It demonstrably has the right coach, and he seems to be recruiting the right players. This summer has been free of the ring-auctioning of 2003 and the arrests of last year. There’s a greater peace — “peace,” you should know, is about Richt’s favorite word — across Bulldog Nation than at any time since the middle year of Herschel, and there remains for Richt only one thing to prove: That the new king of the SEC can take his team to the national championship game.
Georgia has finished in the top 10 four years running, marking only the second time in school history that has happened. (Presumably, you know about the first.) Georgia has posted the sixth-best winning percentage in the land over Richt’s five seasons, and of the other teams heading that list — Texas, Miami, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, Boise State, Ohio State and LSU — only the Bulldogs and Boise didn’t grace a BCS title game over that span. Boise won’t get there. Georgia will.
For two decades Georgia fans gathered in their Bulldog Clubs and wondered if it could ever again be as sweet as when Herschel Walker stalked collegiate end zones. They’ve gotten their answer, and this new era of good feeling carries an extra benefit. Great as he was, Herschel eventually had to leave. Mark Richt gets to stay as long as he likes.
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