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Saturday, June 16, 2007
Watson learns from Tiger, can’t beat him
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Oakmont, Pa. — Don’t think for a minute that I expected Bubba Watson to win the U.S. Open. Not at Oakmont, of all courses. But he’s making headway. Three years ago he missed the cut and finished 87th. This time he made the final pairing Saturday afternoon, and that’s pretty hot stuff for a guy from Bagdad, Fla. Yokel country to these Western Pennsylvanians.
Better watch your tongue there. That panhandle part of Florida is pretty rich golf country, and taking a few bows. Bubba and his pal Boo Weekley sound like a production out of Hanna-Barbera, the cartoon filmmakers. But Bubba is our main man today. He may sound like something out of Li’l Abner, but Bubba has been to college. He was All-American at Faulkner State Community College in Alabama, then not only made the team, but was a second-team All-SEC golfer at Georgia before he decided it was time to get on with his challenge to Tiger Woods.
As a matter of fact, he didn’t shuffle around and “aw shucks” his way to Tiger; he went straight to the mountain himself. He just walked up to Tiger and asked how about playing a practice round with him. Tiger goes out early to beat the gonkers, so Bubba started showing up early. “I bug him enough, he just lets me play with him,” Bubba said. “I just ask him a bunch of questions, like a little dog nipping at his heels, and see how he ticks, and he lets me do that.”
Tiger hits the ball a long way, but Bubba hits it farther. He hits it farther than anybody else on the PGA Tour. “I blast it by him all the time,” Watson said. “He always talks about his majors and I always talk about how far I hit it.”
Bubba is anything but a yokel. Dresses well, always neat and tidy, firm jaw and neatly barbered. And he’s left-handed, in case I forgot to tell you. Bagdad is not some kind of society center. Doesn’t have a stoplight, just a few stores and a post office downtown, and when Bubba was growing up, he walked to school every morning. His father was a Green Beret, just like Tiger’s, and if you’re into names, his real one is Gerry Lester Watson. He hates it.
Bubba is getting a double dose of language education this week. He and his pal, Boo, were paired with Japan’s Nobuhiro Masuda the first two days, then his partner Saturday was Angel Cabrera of Argentina. All was going well early on. In fact, he held the lead at one time, then came the ninth hole. This is the most unusual hole you’ll find on any U.S. Open course. Part of it is the practice green and the lower part is in play. Here is where Bubba blew a fuse and let the game get away from him. A triple bogey took him right out of it.
He’ll be kicking himself, and should, for he blew his cool, and whatever chance he had to move up. He doesn’t have a swing coach. Fitness is a foreign word to him. He hates running and he hates lifting weights. “I don’t want to change anything. I don’t want to change my body shape. I like things the way they are.”
He might take a closer look at Tiger’s contours. Ever notice those biceps and shoulders on a trim, lithe body?
Well, to get down to it, after a full afternoon of Tiger gushing and a thousand of idiots bellowing, “In the hole,” let’s just get it on and get it over. All those challengers expected to be barking at his heels are out of town or out of it. For Bubba Watson, there’ll be another year.
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Only belt, not tie, will satisfy ex-champ dad Holyfield
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Sunday is Father’s Day. Evander Holyfield is training in Houston. His kids are all somewhere else.
And he beat me to the punch(line).
“I’m sure they’ll call me,” Holyfield said by phone, laughing. “But if I get 11 phone calls, I’ll be on the phone all day.”
It would be nice if that were all he did today.
“Former heavyweight champion, 44, suffers cauliflower ear from excessive wishes. Brain safe.” We could live with that.
Not Holyfield. He has fought 51 times as a pro. It appears he will fight well beyond 52.
In two weeks, Holyfield will meet Lou Savarese in El Paso. Then maybe they can catch the early bird special at Denny’s. Savarese turns 42 next month and is recently back from his own two-year “retirement.”
If nothing else, the danger level appears low for this one. According to the world rankings on Boxrec.com, which is not affiliated with any sanctioning body, Holyfield is ranked 58th among heavyweights. Savarese is 121st. At 125th, you’re legally dead in 17 states.
Now it’s clear why these guys won’t stop: They can fight each other.
We see a red light. Holyfield sees no worse than a flashing yellow, when he sees at all. (“He can’t see the right hand coming anymore,” said Don Turner, his former trainer.)
On this Father’s Day, he won’t put on slippers and a robe, or smile while eating burnt toast, or collapse and veg in a hammock. He’ll just train for another fight.
“Sometimes my kids will say, ‘Why do you have to work on your birthday?’?” Holyfield said. “But this is how I live. It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday. If you take one day off, it can mess up the whole year. I don’t do that.”
We see a finish line. He follows an endless line.
Win this, Holyfield said, and there’s a “95 percent chance” he’ll land a title fight against one Sultan Ibragimov, belt-buckle holder of the lesser known WBO title.
“When I said my objective was to be undisputed champion again, I had it in my mind that it would be the WBA, WBC and IBF,” Holyfield said. “I wasn’t even thinking WBO. But since they’re first, I’ll take it.”
Yes, the man is no position to tell the WBO, “You are beneath me.”
Consider the lack of buzz surrounding his comeback, his title chase and almost everything boxing-related these days. The heavyweight title is fractured into little pieces. It doesn’t account for much on the sports landscape even when whole. The belts are owned by a Ukranian (Wladimir Klitchko), two Russians (Ibragimov and Oleg Maskaev) and a guy from Uzbekistan (Ruslan Chagaev).
In Kiev, this sells.
To reach this pool of heavyweight obscurity, Holyfield wades through the division’s flotsam: Jeremy Bates, Fres Oquendo, Vinny Maddalone, Savarese. He works his way down the food chain of Texas cities: Dallas, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, El Paso. A legend is now a Trivial Pursuit game.
Promoters are trying all avenues to sell this. Holyfield gave a pep talk to the Houston Texans. (They presented him with a No. 5 jersey, an allusion to his quest to be five-time champion.) On June 26, four days before the fight, he’ll be a “bench coach” for the El Paso Diablos, a minor-league baseball team. He’ll probably give another speech and bring out the lineup card.
Projected impact on pay-per-view: negligible.
That’s not a big concern for Holyfield. Soft competition notwithstanding, he’s won three in a row and he says his body feels good. He watches film of training sessions and sees the reflexes returning. It doesn’t matter what anybody else sees.
His kids will come to the fight. The older ones no longer ask him when he’s going to stop.
“Like I tell them, you have to set goals for yourself and you can’t let somebody else determine what you do,” he said. “If I mess up because of something I did, I can live with that. If I mess up because of something somebody else tells me to do, I would have to live with that, too. So at the end of the day, it going to be about how I feel.”
And he’s just not feeling the slippers.
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