‘Fore!’ Becomes ‘Timber!’
Joyce Kilmer loved trees. Birds love trees. Bears, leopards, monkeys and environmentalists love trees.
They’re nature’s glory. They perfume the breezes, cool the air, provide the shade. Little kids climb them. Squirrels live in them. Woodpeckers live off them. They give us fruit and wood. Conservationists cry when one is felled.
Everybody likes trees, right? Palm trees, elm trees, oak, even sycamore and eucalyptus. Who doesn’t like trees?
Golfers, that’s who. Anybody who has ever hit one with a perfect four-iron or a three-wood on its way up is who. Anyone who has ever had to try to make par through one, over one or in the midst of several hates trees. A tree in the middle of a par-five is an abomination to a guy with a golf club in his hand, a subpar round in his grasp or a lot of shots in the press in his pocket.
You walk around this sylvan setting of Medinah Country Club, site of this year’s U.S. Open, this glorious June afternoon and you feel like bursting into a chorus of “In the Good Old Summertime.” Every place you look there are trees blooming, birds singing, leaves shining. A little slice of heaven. A great place to hold a picnic. Somebody bring the potato salad. There’s even an old swimming hole--Lake Kadijah. James Whitcomb Riley would rhapsodize. All you need is a canoe and a ukulele.
If only you didn’t have to par it. If only you didn’t have to try to make a two on the 18th hole. If only you didn’t have to try to make $220,000 through those trees.
The pros will tell you they don’t fear trees. The pros will tell you they don’t fear Godzilla. You’re not meant to deal in negatives when you putt for a living. You blot out the unpleasant. Like trees, sand, water, rough. Pretend it isn’t there. Accentuate the positive. Trees are 95% air, you tell yourself.
Trees are 95% wood. But listen to Severiano Ballesteros, the Spanish grandee of golf, as he meets the assembled sporting press at Medinah. What about the trees? some guy with a notebook wants to know. Ballesteros is not famous for straight play. “I like trees,” quickly shoots back Seve. “I like trees when they are on the side of the fairway. They frame the target. They give you something to shoot at.”
No one brings up the obvious, which is that when Severiano is teeing it up, the trees do not necessarily turn out to be on the side of the fairway but often squarely in the glide path of where Seve hits the ball. He is notorious for winning tournaments out of parking lots, through hotels, under bridges, around oceans and, in a pinch, off railroad tracks. Severiano takes the scenic route. There are some holes he could play by boat.
Nick Faldo is another British Isles player, the defending Masters champion, considered a threat in this Open, but like all Brits, Faldo plays a lot of his golf on the treeless links courses of the United Kingdom. Trees are a new element. And Faldo does not minimize them.
“Where you have a dogleg, you usually have one or two trees,” he explains carefully. “You can take a chance cutting the corner. Here, you have a stand of them. It behooves you not to hit it tight, to hit it right.”
Better a longer second shot than a left-handed shot against the trunk of a tree.
The moral of the story? Bet the trees.
There are 3,700 of them at Medinah. And that’s only the oak trees. That’s 3,700 against 156, not counting the saplings or the flowering wisteria.
Good golfers don’t get in trees, they tell you. All golfers get in trees. In fact, it is considered an immutable law by broadcaster Vin Scully, that, “Good shots hit trees.” Scully holds it to be axiomatic that you never hit a tree with a shank, push, pull, hook, topped shot or slice. You hit it with the best three-wood you ever brought off in your life.
So, somebody in this Open, on the trail of first money, is going to hear the deadly “thwack!” of the good shot hitting one of the 3,700 trees on this course. Someone, cursing under his breath, is going to have to take a stance left-handed, turn the club around, edge himself sideways against a tree trunk and try to sidle a shot back on the fairway.
Picking a winner in an Open is a feckless task anyway. Opens are never won by the chalk. Opens are won by the courses, not the players.
You win an Open by hitting the ball straight, not far. Arnold Palmer won 62 tournaments but only one was an Open. Jack Nicklaus, probably the greatest player in all the ages of golf, won four Opens--out of 32.
Posting a line on an Open is like posting a line on the color of the next car to come down the freeway. It’s not a science, it’s a crapshoot. You have 156 players in this 90th U.S. Open this week--11 of them have won an Open. One of them is 50 years old, one is 45. Three of them have won two Opens. One of them has won only one other tournament.
An Open is hardly a chalk-player’s delight. As the adage goes, an Open wins you. Four times in the past 21 years, the golfer winning an Open was winning his first tournament. One was winning his second tournament ever, and one was winning his third. If you can pick a winner in an Open, you should go immediately to Las Vegas. After hocking the house.
Don’t bet the power hitters in the field. The Open doesn’t respond to the caveman approach. The Open likes to be romanced. Respected. Courted. You come around with flowers, flatter it. You don’t yank it by the hair back to the cave. You don’t play drive-and-an-eight-iron golf. You play par golf. Opens are won by Curtis Stranges, not Seve Ballesteroses. Not bunters, exactly, but not cleanup hitters, either.
Opens are won by guys who keep the balls out of the trees, away from the acorns. The winner will not be some guy who sings, “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree,” but a guy who says, “What trees?”
* U.S. OPEN: Curtis Strange hopes to extend his reign as champion to a record-tying three years. C5
