| |
|
|
Jean can hold his head high
Posted: Monday July 19, 1999 10:58 AM
By James Lawton CARNOUSTIE, Scotland (SportLive.net) -- There may be an overwhelming temptation now to pin a red nose and a clown's hat on Jean Van de Velde, the well-born Frenchman who snatched farce from the jaws of glory on the 18th hole of the toughest golf course the great names of the game said they had ever seen. But if you had walked this unforgiving terrain with a man whose collapse under pressure was considered at dawn as much a formality as the first gust of wind off the Firth of Tay, you would have a somewhat different perspective, one that stretched way beyond the result of a play-off that in the end might have been dredged from the 33-year-old Van de Velde's soul. Even in a year of extraordinary sport, of Manchester United's surreal European Cup triumph, of Australia's astonishing World Cup cricket victory, the fate of Van de Velde was utterly remarkable. United and Australia were involved in the games we play. Van de Velde embraced all the emotions of life in a short walk across a stretch of Scottish heathland. He came down the 18th fairway a master of his strange and romantic destiny, an obscure French pro who had beaten the best players in the world and a monster course to become the first of his countrymen to take golf's oldest, most prestigious prize in 92 years. He could take six on the last hole and still collect the old Claret Jug - and suspend the reality of a game notorious for breaking down the spirit of even the greatest talents. But in the end it was the psychological equivalent of scaling some remote Highland peak. His tee-shot skipped perilously over a burn. His second bounced against the grandstand, narrowly missed a twist of the burn and rolled into thick rough. Finally, as though drawn by magnet, his ball found the burn from a tentative shot and for minutes that lurched between comedy and tragedy he considered an attempt to chip the ball out of the water. It was madness, of course, and eventually Van de Velde, consumed by adrenaline and desperation that came with the dawning fear he had blown it all, thought again. The moment of decision was reached with his bare feet immersed in water so cold it must have sent a chill to the core of his being. His wife Brigitte, who before her husband set off to defend his five-stroke lead was asked what she would buy with the winnings and replied, "Why, nothing, I think I have everything I want," giggled as her husband climbed out of the burn - and promptly found a bunker. There are times in life when you have two options. One is to laugh. The other is to cry and Brigitte Van de Velde was right to hold the tears. There would be time enough for that when this extraordinary phase of Jean Van de Velde's professional life was over. There would also be a moment of courage which went a long way to redeeming the collapse of a dream. Van de Velde left his bunker shot seven feet from the pin. Seven feet, that is, in literal measurement.
In terms of pressure, in what it required in nerve and a refusal to accept he was trapped in a dreadful conspiracy of fate, it might have been 70. But he sank the putt and he raised his fist defiantly to the grey heavens. We may never know what that moment of tension took from Van de Velde. He looked into his future and for a moment at least he could only have seen the skull of a disappointment that would have haunted him for the rest of his life. As the putt went down, Van de Velde knew that at least he had not suffered the fate so freely predicted from the moment he came into the clubhouse on Saturday night cushioned by five strokes from the conviction that, as a qualifier and the winner of just one tournament, in Rome seven years ago, he would be eaten alive by the likes of Tiger Woods and Greg Norman and former Open champion Justin Leonard. But he avoided that humiliating fate. He hung on, against a rising undercurrent of derision, and went into a play-off which 15 minutes earlier had seemed beyond possibility. Two hours earlier he was, in golfing terms, stone dead. Craig Parry, the resilient little Australian, had pulled back all those strokes and going into the ninth hole the Frenchman was dressed in the ultimately sad clothes of a golfing "choker". While Parry birdied the par-three eighth with a superb tee shot and an easy putt, Van de Velde was critically short from the tee and with his putt. These are the unmistakable signs of terminal loss of nerve but as he left the green, by all evidence a broken man, something remarkable happened. A member of the gallery, perhaps appalled by the derision of a small knot of rowdy, presumably drunken spectators, shouted: "Hold your head up, Jean." Van de Velde sucked in his breath, turned to his supporter, nodded and said: "Yes, I will." He then regained the lead with a magnificent invasion of the ninth hole. He outdrove Parry by 70 yards, floated in to 12 feet and sank the putt. The rest, we fancied as the Frenchman moved inexorably to a three-stroke lead, was a story of resurrection. That of sport's most tragic figure, the man branded a choker. That Van de Velde had this unfortunate reputation was confirmed in the morning by the bookmakers when he was offered at 6-4 to retain a lead that in other circumstances would have been considered huge. Here it was considered as no more secure than a child's sandcastle on this wild shore. And so, in the end, it proved. But do not dismiss Jean Van de Velde as just another golfer who lost his nerve. No one who walked with him this day will forget the way he fought his fate. He had a hundred invitations to slink away. And when the last came, on the 18th green, he turned it away. His regrets are not too few to mention, but they do not include a hint of cowardice. Contents provided courtesy of SportLive.net.
| |||||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. Terms under which this service is provided to you.
| |||||||||||||||||||
