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Sunday, May 20, 2007
Imada misses, but ‘second is second’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Look at it this way. It was like a College Bowl. Drake took on Georgia and Georgia Tech, and Drake handled them both, even though it did run into overtime. Thus, Zach Johnson, representing Drake, began the fourth round of the AT&T Classic three strokes behind Ryuji Imada of Georgia and Troy Matteson of Georgia Tech. In the end it boiled down to a playoff between Johnson and Imada; it was made easy for Johnson when Imada’s second shot found water on the exciting, exhilarating 18th hole.
Zach Johnson was like the “home” team. He had won this telephone classic when it was BellSouth, on this same course, three years ago. Now, it was the AT&T Classic, but it still rang the same, and from the tenor of the cheers and hurrahs, this was his gallery.
Last year, he was second to Phil Mickelson, but Lefty was almost out of sight. He won here with a 13-stroke lead, 28 under par, but second place is still second. Then came Augusta, Johnson boldly faced off against Tiger Woods, and Johnson now owns a green jacket. Three times a winner on the PGA Tour, three times in Georgia, and with any luck at all, he’ll get his chance at another when the Tour Championship is played at East Lake in September.
So there you have the winner. It was a day for scoring. There were 20 rounds in the 60s, and that didn’t include three of the leaders, Matt Kuchar, Matteson and Camilo Villegas, all of whom hung close, but couldn’t break 70. The course was playing like a kitten. If you didn’t score early, you got passed like a buggy on the freeway.
Zach Johnson victory conferences are old shoe in Georgia now. The fascination factor rides with Imada, the Japanese who played two years at Georgia, honing his game with a career in mind. Think of leaving home at the age of 14, traveling halfway around the world to go to golf school. Knowing at that tender age that you were pledging your life to golf. If homesickness beset him, he never admitted it.
“I grew up watching the Masters and the U.S. Opens and all those tournaments on television in Japan, and coming to America was my dream. I knew what I wanted to do, play golf, learn English and one day, play on the PGA Tour,” he said, and here he was. “After high school, I took two years off, not sure which way to go. I played all right in amateur tournaments, then I decided what I wanted to do. I had met Chris Haack [the Georgia golf coach], and I called him, so I came to Georgia.”
And there he finished second to Luke Donald of Northwestern when Georgia won its first NCAA Championship. His Bulldog loyalty was represented in the red shirt he wore on the course Sunday, and he met the situation with remarkable cool. The kid is loaded with savvy, and I use the term “kid” rather loosely. In terms of tour golf, he is a kid, but the “kid” is 30 years old, and this was his closest brush with winning. It all came down to the tee shot on the long and winding 18th hole in the playoff. His drive came to rest in thick grass on the edge of the fairway. Johnson lay clear in the fairway. “Good enough for me to take the chance,” he said.
Imada dwelt quite a time considering the second shot, and eventually settled on the club, then gave it as full a swing as his 5-foot, 8-inch body could put into it. “I’m not going to second guess it. I knew I had to get across the water because Zach was going to make better than par. I should have won it on 17. I had a six-foot [birdie] putt and missed it.”
One disturbing message reached him by television, blaring out of a residence near the 17th green. “I heard somebody yell, ‘Zach, Zach.’ I knew he had made birdie on 18,” and he knew he was in Johnson country.
“I missed the putt, and that’s that. Let’s not talk about all that. Second is second.”
And the thought is registered here that Ryuji Imada will be a winner down the road. The story is the early maturity of a mere boy who knows at the age of 14 what career he will pursue, and brings it off. We shall hear more of Imada, and surely more of Zach Johnson, who has now virtually turned the state of Georgia into his lucrative personal investment.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
Tubby casts off Big Blue shadow
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
You’ve often seen the following in this space during the past 10 years: Tubby Smith shouldn’t have left Georgia.
Well, turns out, just before one of the most deceptively great coaches of our time headed to Kentucky, he had visions of coaching the Bulldogs long enough to become the Vince Dooley of UGA basketball. “Oh, God, yes,” said Smith over the phone from the site of his new employers in Minneapolis.
It’s not like returning to Athens, but two months ago, Smith did what he should have done long ago. He knocked the bluegrass from the bottom of his shoes, and he escaped the suffocating world of the Wildcat Wackos while he still had his dignity and limbs intact. Now Smith works for the University of Minnesota. “You look back, and you’re amazed at how many blue ties and shirts you’ve collected over the years,” said Smith, sounding giddy in maroon and gold these days.
All Smith did for Big Blue was win 76 percent of the time, with NCAA tournament bids every year that produced a national championship, six trips to the Sweet 16, four to the Elite Eight and five SEC regular-season titles. Even so, it was whine, whine, whine by those Wildcat Wackos, still worshiping Adolph Rupp’s ghost and Rick Pitino’s shadow.
Tubby won it all, but it was with Pitino’s players. Tubby can’t recruit. Tubby has a boring offense.
Tubby has to go.
One Web site for Kentucky fans called firetubbysmith.com had a dapper Smith squatting in the midst of flames. To which the Wildcats’ first African-American coach sighed, saying, “There were [racial] things we dealt with, but they were early on, and they were over and done with. There’s always going to be bigotry manifesting itself in some ways with people, but I don’t think it was something I felt was going to be threatening or stop me from doing my job. If somebody makes a comment, it’s probably because of the basketball end of it. I never look at it because of my color.”
Speaking of color, we’re back to maroon and gold. These are the bad old days for Minnesota basketball. Courtesy of last season’s 9-22 record, the Gophers finished ninth or worse in the Big Ten for the third time in the past four years.
Smith is an accomplished miracle worker, though, so maybe Minnesota fans will appreciate Smith as much as did many around the Bulldog Nation during Smith’s two seasons at Georgia.
The feeling was mutual. Soon after Smith walked into Dooley’s office in May 1997 with news that Kentucky was calling, Smith revealed for the first time that he planned to tell the Georgia athletics director that he decided to spend more than a few seasons with the Bulldogs.
“You know, pretty much most places that you go to, you go there thinking you’re going to be there forever, whether it was Tulsa [Smith’s first head coaching job] or Georgia,” Smith said. “I thoroughly enjoyed Georgia. I was coaching my son, G.G., and we had back-to-back 20-win seasons. In fact, it was the first time [the Bulldogs] had ever done that, and when Ron Jirsa took over for me, they won 20 the next year. So it was a great run there.
“I also was going to have my second son [Saul] come play with me, but we took him to Kentucky. Then, working with Coach Dooley, one of the best athletics directors I’d ever been with, makes it a good situation. You just love the place. It had everything you needed.”
This doesn’t make sense. Actually, it does, when you consider this: Dooley has said that he wanted Smith to stay, but Smith remembered that Dooley also wanted what he thought was best for Smith. After all, here was a gifted basketball coach with a chance to leave Georgia, a football school, for Kentucky, a basketball school. “So you go in [Dooley’s office] hoping. I mean, you’re kind of struggling there,” said Smith, who went 45-19 with the Bulldogs, including a trip to the Sweet 16 despite losing eight seniors and five starters.
“You’ve got fans and family and players,” Smith continued. “That’s the most important thing that you just get close to, and it’s a tough decision. But Coach Dooley understood that Kentucky is Kentucky, as far as basketball was concerned, and I think he wanted what was best for me, and that’s hard to separate. And I appreciate that. He gave me a lot of guidance along the way and a lot of support.”
Which brings us to this: Dooley saw that Smith’s eyes were blinded by the word, KENTUCKY. “You’ve been there before [Smith was an assistant coach for two years under Pitino], and Rick and [former UK athletics director] C.M. Newton are very good people and good friends,” Smith said. “You also understand the magnitude and the legacy of Kentucky basketball, and sometimes your ego says, ‘I want to be a part of that.’?”
Sometimes common sense says, you shouldn’t be a part of that.
Thus Tubby’s new wardrobe.
Permalink | Comments (75) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
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