After Fast Start, Major Difficulty Is Finally Over

Well, Aesop had it wrong. This time, the hare beat the tortoise.

The tortoise couldn’t putt.

Curtis Strange, a guy who’s always in a terrible hurry, is your new National Open champion. Nick Faldo, a guy who figures if he waits awhile, things will get better, is going home in a barrel, so to speak. He stayed in his shell too long.

The race might not always be to the swift--but the 88th U.S. Open was.

It was a difference in philosophy. Nick Faldo is an expressionless Englishman whose golf game is as phlegmatic as he is. He doesn’t play golf, he courts it. He plays the game with the faint, bored disdain of an aristocrat visiting the slums.

Curtis Strange plays it as if he’s double-parked.

Nick Faldo is a guy who says, “I’ll play these.”

Curtis Strange is a guy who says, “Hit me!” Even if he has 19 showing.

Nick would punt on third down.

Curtis would throw from his own end zone.

Nick Faldo’s game counts on a lot of help from a golf course. He needs a course that responds best to a guy who brings it candy and flowers and romances it attentively.

Curtis drives up to the front door and honks for it to hurry up. He doesn’t even get out of the car.

Curtis plays from all over the golf course--as he did in Monday’s 18-hole playoff.

Nick specializes in the middle of the fairway and center of the green. And two safe putts. He depends on the course to slicker the reckless into wild shots where they bury themselves in hip-high rough or deep water or thick trees.

The course cooperated Monday, to some extent. But Curtis Strange was too good a golfer. He didn’t go around throwing shots off balconies, so to speak. He was daring but not foolhardy, bold but not suicidal.

So, ladies and gentlemen, meet your new U.S. Open champion.

You look at Curtis Strange and you want to say, “It’s about time!” or “What kept you?” He goes to join Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus and Walter Hagen on that trophy. Of course, he also goes to join Sam Parks, Andy North and Scott Simpson. He’s not only joining Byron Nelson, he’s joining Larry.

Still, there’s a sense he belongs. For some time, now, his peers have been conceding that he may be the best day-in, day-out player the game has to offer. He’s so good, most thought he might just be the best player never to win a major. Golf is that perverse.

He got unaccustomedly emotional when he won. Not even longtime and close Strangers realized how desperately their hero wanted to win this major, this Open. He wept as he won, startling a lot of longtime observers of tour events more used to wisecracks than to tears.

“I waited a long time for this,” he told the press in a choking voice after the round was over. “I didn’t sleep much this week after the second round. I didn’t want to face you guys if I lost.”

He almost sounded like the Dickens’ character in “A Tale of Two Cities,” Sydney Carton, who said: “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done . . . “

Said Strange: “This is the greatest thing I have ever done. This is the greatest feeling I have ever had.

“What does winning the U.S. Open mean?” he mused. “It means what every little boy dreams about when he goes out and plays late in the day after everyone has gone off the course and he hits three or four balls and says, ‘That’s Nicklaus. That’s Hogan. That’s Snead. And now--Strange.”

He drew a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover in words for the writers.

The 1988 U.S. Open then was a Strange interlude. We’ve had a lot of strange winners in the past but this was the first with a capital letter.

He has worked hard to climb this hill. This was his 15th tournament win. He has paid his dues.

He admitted that he spent a tormented night Sunday after throwing away the chance to win in regulation by recklessly going for the one-putt that might have nailed the championship down for him on 17. Instead, he threw himself into a tie. He admitted that the lapse might have haunted him the rest of his life if Monday had turned out differently.

The loser, Nick Faldo, who had been called Foldo before winning last year’s British Open, knew the feeling. “People don’t know how hard you work to win one of these (major) things,” he said.

“People say hurtful things just because you miss one or blow one, but only someone who has been there can know what it is to grind one of these things out. An awful lot of things have to go right. You’ve got to get everything just right--dozens, hundreds of things. You have to have your health, you have to have your game.”

For him Monday, a few pieces were missing.

But for the young Virginian, Strange, things fell into place. He was able to hold off the forces of the Empire, which they have a practice of doing in this storied colony where the minutemen also birdied the course.

If it was not a rebuff of the scope of a Boston Tea Party, it was, for Curtis Strange, a blow for liberty of sorts. This Yankee Doodle Dandy went to town riding on a putter and a sand iron. He won from all over the course but he won principally because he handled sand better than a camel and pressure better than a boiler.

Even the terrain came to his aid as it did to the minutemen. Curtis admitted that he had a game plan going into the final round, which had him offsetting Faldo’s dreaded par-shooting by fashioning a 67 or 68. The weather took care of that dangerous strategy, forcing him into a more sensible order of battle.

“The wind took care of that plan,” he conceded. “The wind made it look sloppy out there. We were playing better than it looked.”

The wind made him play the percentage shots he might otherwise have thrown away.

He hasn’t won as many Opens as Hogan, Nicklaus and Jones, each of whom won four. But he has won as many as Palmer and any Nelson. But he has now won his first. It’s the hardest. You can’t win your fourth till you win your first.