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The Week: Keeping It Real Jonathan Kaye was the antihero in a battle with Phil MickelsonBy Alan Shipnuck
Last week's Canon Greater Hartford Open was less a golf tournament than a PGA
Tour morality play, featuring a duel in the sun between the people's choice,
Phil Mickelson, and the man in the black hat, Jonathan Kaye. The good guy always
wins, and Mickelson did his part by firing a brilliant final-round 64 to shoot
down Kaye by a stroke. The whole thing played out like a cheap Hollywood
thriller, a sop to the Northeast fans who had so desperately wanted Mickelson to
win the week before at the U.S. Open. It would have been a lot more interesting
if Kaye, a 31-year-old native of Colorado, had stolen the GHO. He's a scruffy
character, flawed and earthy and real. He's one of us, and maybe that's the
problem. Golf fans want to cheer for a better version of themselves between the
ropes, especially on Sundays, and therein lies much of Mickelson's
appeal.
Kaye, as we were reminded endlessly last week, was suspended by the Tour for the season's opening two months because of a murky incident at last October's Michelob Championship in which he may or may not have gotten into a beef with a rent-a-cop guarding the players' locker room and did or did not subsequently attach his player I.D. to his zipper in an act that was lewd or unprofessional or rather funny, depending on your bent. This followed a well-publicized incident at the 2001 Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where Kaye responded to a heckler with an obscene gesture. Sergio García did the same thing at the U.S. Open and was celebrated for his pluck. Kaye was saddled with a bad-boy reputation that has been impossible to shake. What seems to really inflame Kaye's critics are not his occasional lapses in judgment but rather his lack of contrition. In this talk-show age, failing to cry in public is an act of subversion. After shooting a second-round 67 to grab a share of the lead, Kaye declined overtures by a columnist for The Hartford Courant to answer the same old questions about his past transgressions. The result was a bitchy column in which the writer hung his laughable indignation on the notion that the fans "deserve to know what -- or if -- he has learned from his suspension." On Sunday night Kaye told SI, "The lesson I learned is people get treated differently out here. If Phil did what I did -- or allegedly did -- nothing would've happened." Mickelson is the anti-Kaye, a slickly packaged product who always says and does the right thing. Lately he has taken to espousing touchy-feely New Age sentiments, saying, "Having an effect on a human being is more important than winning golf tournaments." Kaye, too, understands that winning isn't everything. "I wanted to win the Players Championship so bad," he says, "just so I could grab [Tour commissioner Tim] Finchem and chuck him into the lake. Then I would've jumped in and pretended to be saving him, but really I would've dunked him and held him underwater." Aspiring to change the world is a noble idea, but who can't relate to dreaming about drowning your boss? Kaye's Dilbert-like workplace frustrations continued on Sunday when he had to deal with what he called "borderline heckling" as the fans openly rooted against him. This me-against-the-world vibe was all too familiar. "I'm totally comfortable with who I am and what I am," Kaye says. "I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I say what I think. But I'm learning that I have to be more careful, because people like you a lot more if you act like they want you to act and tell them what they want to hear." O.B. Issue date: July 1, 2002 |
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