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 Daily Report: Saturday
Posted: Saturday June 20, 1998 10:48 AM If you work in the U.S. Open will-call trailer, temptation is never far away. Fans who stall at the Olympic Club gates will stoop low and stop at nothing to score tickets, which at a price of $60 per session ($225 for the week) sold out the day they went on sale a year ago. I chatted with Chris Law, the manager of U.S. Open tickets for the USGA, about freestyle Olympic groveling. "We've heard several bribery proposals," Law said. "We've been offered food, alcohol, baseball equipment. A Giants fan asked us if we needed an autographed baseball bat." A bat might be a good deterrent against some of the brazen folks who have approached Law and Ann McNamara, who supervises the Open ticket office. "I remember one year when a man told us his dog ate his ticket," McNamara said. "We told him to bring in the pieces, and he did." McNamara also recalls a man who left his tickets on an airplane and eventually recovered them from the airline; and a pair of tickets that went through a washing machine but were still recognizable enough to be replaced. "After you work down here a while," McNamara said, "you run out of a sense of humor." MR. BLACKWELL WOULD GET A BANG OUT OF ... Frank Nobilo, wearing an dull-brown outfit that prompted one onlooker to remark, "Hey, it's the UPS man!" ... Payne Stewart, whose knickers were once used as a tablecloth at an Italian restaurant. Or so the snickering in the gallery would have you believe. Said one man, "If he wins he'll have enough money to buy long pants." ... The gigantic logos on some T-shirts in Olympic's merchandise tent. Quipped a prospective shopper, "How come it says 100% cotton when it's 80 percent ink?" OPEN SEASON ON CONTROVERSY ... This year's Open hadn't been all that spellbinding. Tiger wasn't in the hunt, nobody had gone particularly low, Golden Bear Jack Nicklaus wasn't on the rampage against bogeys and rigor mortis. Then, on Friday afternoon, things got interesting. The first controversy began to erupt when Stewart missed an eight-foot putt on the 18th hole. The ball trickled down the linoleum-like slope and ended up 25 feet away. The USGA made a mistake with its pin placement on the hole. The fans knew it. The players knew it. One got a sense that even the USGA was aghast at the windmill-and-colored-balls feel of the 18th green, where approach shots and putts refuse to stop anywhere near the hole. The second controversy surrounded Justin Leonard and Peter Kuchar, caddy and father of 19-year-old super-amateur Matt Kuchar. It seems that Mr. Kuchar isn't quite trained in the fine art of caddy etiquette. When I was watching on 17, the group was getting ready to tee off when the elder Kuchar walked in front of the tee box and under the ropes on the left, presumably to go to the bathroom. Leonard took exception to such indiscretions, later muttering that the distractions he faced on Friday were more inside the ropes than out. Of course, if Leonard had shot 68 instead of 75, you'd have never heard a peep about any of this.
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