Augusta’s Still a Part of Europe

A foreigner won the Masters.

And grass is green and water’s wet and the Pope is Polish and there are still bear tracks in the woods and the sun sets in the west.

Like, what else is new? This is the sixth time in the last seven years a European player has won. You would think this course was in Scotland instead of Georgia.

It’s one thing if a Scot or a Welshman or even an Aussie or South African wins--but a Spaniard and a German?

It’s a tradition for the last Masters champion to put the green coat emblematic of victory here on the new winner, and Sunday night saw Herr Bernhard Langer of the Fatherland draping the coveted haberdashery over the shoulders of Senor Jose Maria Olazabal of old Bilbao or San Sebastian, Spain. We go from umlaut to tilde, Achtung! to Ole!

Spain has now won this thing three times in 11 years. Severiano Ballesteros won here twice and scared American players to death at a number of other Masters.

Ballesteros used to play golf like he was fighting a bull. Olazabal plays it like he is making a watch.

Ballesteros won like a guy jumping through a skylight with an Uzi. Olazabal sneaks up on you like a pickpocket. Either way, they made more money out of the New World than anybody since the Conquistadores. Augusta is the new Eldorado.

Olazabal does not play that sword-in-the-teeth game of Ballesteros. He pretty much sticks to the fairway. He is as unexcitable as a butler.

Still, you would have to award him two ears and the tail for his performance in this year’s Masters. He opened with a lackluster 74 but soon put his game back on the tracks.

This is no dilettante who took up golf to give himself something to do between flamenco dances. Olazabal once won a U.S. tournament, the World Series of Golf, by a record 12 strokes, one of the most incandescent exhibitions of golf ever seen on the American tour--61-67-67-67. The Yanks were so rocked by the display that it was freely predicted he would be the next world top player, a distinction the U.S. contingent pretty much abdicated when Nicklaus and Palmer left the scene.

It turned out this new Spanish grandee didn’t have all that much to beat by Sunday afternoon here at the Augusta National. Tom Lehman, who has never won a PGA event, was his closest pursuer. Larry Mize, who won a Masters in 1987 and not much else, was also in the hunt.

Olazabal took to the course with a note from his mentor, Ballesteros, in his pocket and a confident attitude. But before you think Olazabal learned golf from a book or from old Ballesteros videos, be disabused. Like Arnold Palmer, he was raised on a golf course. The putting green was 35 feet away, the first tee was 100 and the ninth green was 60. He had a golf club in his hands right after he threw away the rattle. His first words were Spanish for “Fore!”

Of course, Palmer’s course was in Latrobe, Pa. Olazabal’s was in San Sebastian. To be sure, you need competition to get good at anything. To be the best speller in Patagonia probably will not lead to a literary career. So, Ballesteros brought him to England to get literate at golf.

Everyone has a theory on why the European golfers do so well at Augusta. The reason is obvious: the greens at Augusta are so hard and fast and unyielding, they resemble pre-World War British courses.

Americans are used to drive-and-an-eight-iron golf. You fire shots at watered greens and the ball sticks where it alights. In Britain, where the greens were historically watered only by God and the fairways mowed by sheep, you had to run the ball up to the green--land it short of the putting surface and cannily run it on, gauging how much topspin to put on it. American backspin was not possible.

The Masters’ flint-hard greens do not hold the Yankee game, in which the balls are flung on like darts in a pub to stick where they hit. The Masters rejects high, hard approaches, pushes them aside or onward.

Player after player concedes the Europeans play a more imaginative short game than the Yanks because of this and thus have an advantage at Augusta. This is not so apparent at a U.S. Open or PGA, where the courses are more typically watered by sprinklers and mowed so balls don’t ricochet off a green like a bullet off a tank.

But it was not the agronomy alone that helped Olazabal excel.

The 15th hole at the Masters is a psychopath that is alternately as docile as a milkmaid or as venomous as a puff adder. You had guys shooting 8s (Tom Watson), 10s (Nolan Henke) and 7s and 9s this week. It drowned the hopes of a half-dozen of our greatest shotmakers.

On the other hand, when the wind’s not blowing and the fairway is greasy fast, you had guys (Tom Lehman) hitting nine-irons for their second shots on this 500-yard hole Saturday.

On Sunday, it was in between mood swings. You could attack it, but not insult it. Olazabal came up to it with a medium-good drive--at least straight as most of his are--and a five-iron that looked like disaster. It seemed to be short and it lit on a slope that normally carries it back to the water. This time it didn’t. The ball stayed, precariously but steadily. Meanwhile, Olazabal’s pursuer, Lehman, hit a superlative 190-yard six-iron that was not only safely on the green, but stopped about a dozen feet above the hole. It looked like a sure eagle, which would have recaptured the lead for Lehman.

Olazabal calmly ran in his putt for the eagle, boosting his lead. Naturally, Lehman missed his eagle putt. It’s an axiom of golf thatwhen your opponent runs in a long putt, yours becomes impossible. The hole shrinks, the distance doubles, the putter suddenly feels like a live snake in your hands. Lehman’s putt wobbled past the hole. He was down two shots with three holes to play.

That was the old golf tournament. The Old Country won again. Maybe we should invite the Russians. Give them a whack at the 15th hole and the Masters, a piece of real estate that should be under international jurisdiction, maybe by the U.N.