The Mustache Guy Didn’t Win It; Olympic Lived Up to Its History

I told you so.

No way Olympic Club was going to let Tom Watson win a U.S. Open on it.

The John Wilkes Booth of golf courses is in a rut. It’s at it again.

Some Simpson won it. There were two of them in it, Tim and Scott. The one with the mustache won it.

You could have scripted that. This is the course that snatched his fifth Open away from Ben Hogan in 1955 and ripped a seven-shot lead out of the bag of Arnold Palmer on the back nine in 1966. This is not a golf course, it’s a paid political assassin, a king-killer.

Scott Simpson meet Jack Fleck. Say hello to Billy Casper. You guys have a lot in common. While you’re at it, shake hands with the guy who killed the Archduke in 1914.

Tom Watson never had a chance. The only question was, which one of those faceless kids back there was going to close him out.

I mean, Watson is one of the best players in the world, right? Look, he’s won more tournaments than any active player except Jack Nicklaus, plus five British Opens and eight majors altogether.

If ever you had a profile of a guy who would be found lying in the rough at Olympic with a knife in his back, Watson had to be it. Like Jack the Ripper, Olympic can’t help itself.

Let’s see. The guy who beat Watson is this kind of pleasant, steady young man with the mustache and the sleepy look and the swing to go with it, this kind of controlled, easy pass at the ball where he doesn’t try to overpower a golf course, just keep it sullen but not mutinous, as Herman Hickman used to say.

Scott Simpson is Mr. Steady. Scott Simpson is vanilla. White bread. Just play the melody. Don’t make waves.

This was the second tournament he’s won this year but only the fourth he’s won lifetime.

Figures.

He should have been an out price going into this tournament.

It’s not to say he can’t play. He can. So could Jack Fleck when he beat Ben Hogan, even though he won only one other tournament in his entire life. And, of course, Billy Casper was a 50-tournament winner when he overtook Palmer in 1966.

It’s just that you get the feeling that this Bolshevik of a golf course was going to unload on Tom Watson and Simpson just happened to be standing there. The course tapped him. You kind of imagined it saying “Hey, you there, with the mustache and the 9-iron--how’d you like to win the U.S. Open?”

Jack Fleck was a driving range pro when he beat Hogan in ’55. Casper just happened to be partnered with Palmer. You got the idea anybody would have suited Olympic Club’s purposes. There’s just something about a legend that ticks it off.

You see, when a thing happens once, it can be an accident. Twice, a coincidence. When it keeps happening, it’s a trend.

The proposition is very simple: Tom Watson deserves to have won more than one lone U.S. Open. Just as Arnold Palmer did, too. Their records justified it.

No one ever played a golf course any more majestically than Tom Watson did this week. Shades of Ben Hogan. Bobby Jones. Arnold. Jack. The drives flew true and long. The irons were the crispest the game has seen since the young Byron Nelson. The putting was magnificent, the thinking first rate.

How was he to know he was bucking a crooked wheel, a marked deck? How could he tell it didn’t matter what he did, how he played, what he shot? You pictured the course, curling its mustache and sneering to itself “Very cute, very nice--but it doesn’t mean a thing.”

This wasn’t a tournament, it was a hoodoo. Somebody stuck the same pins in the Watson doll as they did the Hogan doll and the Palmer doll. Tony Bennett’s not the only one who left his heart in San Francisco. All of golf has.

This town is a citadel of eccentricity, but it outdoes itself in Opens.

It wasn’t really a question of who would beat Watson, it was just that you knew someone would. Anyone would do. The golf demons of Olympic didn’t particularly care who.

Scott Simpson suited their purposes perfectly.

Scott Simpson is the type of player who doesn’t even know there is a 77 on a golf course. And doesn’t know there’s a 64 either.

Scott is Mr. Steady. Scott is exactly the kind of person to go around Olympic Club and wait for the other guys to blow up.

And if you wait for pressure to get to Scott Simpson, you may find cobwebs forming. Scott on a golf course does not put you in mind of Dempsey going after Firpo or a lion crouching for a zebra. Scott doesn’t go for the course’s jugular, he just jabs it to death, wears it out. He doesn’t figure to shoot a 64 one day and a 78 the next. He fired 71-68-70-68 this week. He’s that kind of monotonous, is what he is. He keeps it in play, plays the cards he’s dealt not what he thinks he’ll get.

As Jack Nicklaus himself said about him on television, “He’s very simple through the ball. His swing results in not much spin on the ball, not much excitement in the shot.”

It’s just there . Usually 5 feet from the hole. And he could make 5-foot putts with a rattlesnake crawling up his leg.

He won the tournament on No. 15 Sunday. He drove it way right off the tee on this par-5. Then he steadied down and carefully placed it on the green. And when you say “steadied down” in relation to Scott Simpson, you are talking about major-league calming.

He didn’t try to put it at the pin at 15, just the green. The fact that he made the birdie putt is beside the point. With Simpson, you just make sure you don’t miss the par putt.

Perhaps you noticed on No. 18, the 72nd and final hole of the tournament. Simpson had a putt where the temptation might have been to fly it at the hole, take a chance to end the tournament right then and there if you make it (Watson was one-shot behind and to have forced him to make a 2 on the 18th hole would have ended the tournament to all intents and purposes). But, to go for the knockout putt might have resulted in the putt going a few feet past and having a possibly missable comebacker for par.

Scott Simpson hit the lag. He made the sure 4. That way, the worst he could have faced would be the possibility of a playoff.

And, we all know who wins playoffs at Olympic. Not Hogans. Not Palmers. So, assuredly not Watsons. You could almost hear the club whispering in his ear, “Just baby it up there, sonny, and sink the par. We take care of the rest.”