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The Week: Time to Get Serious What happens in the second half will define the 2003 seasonBy Alan Shipnuck
The modern golf season has no end, but it does have a midway point -- the giddy, anticipatory week before the U.S. Open. The heat and humility that come with the Open usher in the year's frenzied second half, which is crammed with the major championships that define how a season is remembered. The week before the Open brings the McDonald's LPGA Championship, which is major in every way, thanks to the grueling DuPont Country Club in Wilmington, Del. The game's biggest star, Annika Sorenstam, will again dominate the headlines as she stalks her first LPGA Championship title, but this week we get a double dose of Grand Slam mojo, as the Champions tour's first major of the year, the Senior PGA, kicks off at Aronimink, outside Philadelphia. From now through the end of August, 12 Grand Slam events will be played, including five that make up the Champions tour's Super Slam.
It is this concentration of big-time events that reduces the first half of the season to little more than preamble. And the story lines of this year's first half have been even more muddled than usual. Phil Mickelson has been only the third-best lefty in golf, while the game's most taciturn superstar, Vijay Singh, has issued the most inflammatory quotes. The biggest story on the PGA Tour was an LPGA player, while the spring's most anticipated event wasn't the Masters but rather a protest that occurred across the street. Tiger Woods has played some brilliant golf, but just as notable have been his long absences. Last week he played a Tour event for the first time in seven weeks but was improbably overshadowed by down-home Kenny Perry, who also stole some of Sorenstam's headlines the week before at the Colonial. The majors are supposed to provide clarity, but in this squirrelliest of years, who knows what to expect? History offers few clues. The site of next week's U.S. Open, Olympia Fields, hasn't hosted the national championship since 1928, when Bobby Jones lost a 36-hole playoff to Johnny Farrell. Even the Masters has given us mixed signals. This April the azaleas budded in Augusta, but it was U.S. Open golf that bloomed. Heavy rain made mowing impossible at the National, so what was supposed to be a bombers' paradise was suddenly choked with gnarly rough. Thus the Masters came down to a playoff between two ball-control players, Mike Weir and Len Mattiace, who currently rank 95th and 166th, respectively, in the Tour's driving-distance stats. If the same kind of reverse form holds, the U.S. Open should play like the Masters, perhaps decided by a couple of freewheeling sluggers. Anybody care to watch a Ricky Barnes-Hank Kuehne duel? Of course, trying to pick favorites is folly. Perry is proof that golf defies predictions. Three weeks ago he was a 42-year-old grinder with four career victories and a Q rating near zero. Then he nearly shot a 59 during his runaway win at the Colonial, and last week he was equally overpowering in winning the Memorial, running up a six-stroke lead on Sunday before getting a little sloppy at the end. "This is the time of my life," he says. "I've never played golf like this." The problem is, every month a different player has said as much. The last man to win back-to-back tournaments on the PGA Tour was Ernie Els, who was so overpowering in January that it seemed plausible he might end Woods's reign atop the World Ranking. Since then, Els has been all but forgotten, as an astonishing number of other players (five) have rung up multiple wins. What happens from here is anybody's guess, but one thing is certain -- the season now gets serious. O.B.: Presidential Pep Talk
Issue date: June 9, 2003 |
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