Alas, U.S. Golf Strikes Back at the Empire

I’m mad as hell at the British Open and not going to take it anymore.

You know, all year long, us hackers who can’t break 100 put up with the PGA Tour with its drive-and-a-nine-iron golf, one-putts, guys shooting in the 60s, hitting five-irons in the still air 190 yards.

We know we have something that will redeem this situation, this orgy of birdies and eagles, and that is the British Open.

That is where these guys will find out, even as you and I, how hard this game is, that it is not all drives and nine-irons.

They find out about the game we play all the time. Bunkers you can’t get out of, approaches that don’t stop on the green, unplayable lies, balls you can’t find (“Anybody see where that went?”), out-of-bounds shots, wet-weather shots. Balls that squirt off the club head at odd angles in the rain and mist and spin sideways into trouble. Our shots do that all the time, even in dry, 80-degree weather.

How about golf bundled up to the ears in warm, chunky clothing and scarves and sweaters the way some of us have to play in the months when snow is in the air and the wind-chill factor is pneumonic? But these tour guys are all playing sleeveless down in Florida or some place where there are no heavy jackets to stall their swings.

I look forward all year to watching them, coming down the fairways in wool caps and rain gear, slapping their arms to keep warm. I go to sleep at night dreaming of the winds howling in off the North Sea or the Irish Sea, the kind of conditions that crashed the Spanish Armada on the rocks of Ireland.

You suffer the indignities of pitch-and-putt tour golf because you know the British Open will exact its vengeance for you and restore the dignity of the game.

The British Open is a whole bunch of 25-foot putts, not those friendly little birdie tap-ins. British Open greens are harder than a miser’s heart, and they dispense birdies with the same grudging resentment. You seldom have a short putt in a British Open, and you never have that staple of the American tour, the tap-in birdie.

So we all awoke early this week and rushed to the telly for our annual rush of bonhomie and contentment. We waited to see guys in knee-high rough slashing away at a ball, even as you and I. We wanted to see guys hitting out of sand traps on their knees. We wanted to watch flags whipping, the sky falling, guys clapping hands to their heads and screaming “No! No! Not over there!”

A British Open is supposed to be all that. We wanted these lah-di-dah spoiled golfers to get their comeuppance. You’re like a fighter who all of a sudden is not knocking out palookas. You’re not batting against some sore-armed pitcher with a hangover, you’re not asked to return an 80-mph serve, take the ball away from the Rams, score on the Clippers.

Alas! Look what happened. The British Open, our last line of defense, turned into San Diego. The Irish Sea looked like a greasy vat across which no winds blew, no whitecaps bubbled.

The British Open was like a toothless old tiger, a clawless bear.

Without weather, it’s Tucson. A British Open needs those gelid winds, those scudding clouds, those menacing fronts.

The sun was high and hot, the days mild. Brits sat around shirtless, sunning themselves like a crowd at Santa Monica Beach.

It was enough to make you cry. Why aren’t these guys going into those little torture refinements, the inventions of the Marquis de Sade called “pot” bunkers? Why isn’t somebody having to hit a shot out of the parking lot as Seve Ballesteros did in ‘79?

There were more than 60 (count ‘em) scores in the sixties in the first two days alone. The cut was one over par. Usually the leader is one over par.

What have they done to our British Open? Who’s to blame here? Someone should swing from the highest yardarm in the British Navy for this. You think Winston Churchill would let this happen? Shows you how far the royal family has slipped that it can’t do anything about it.

Somebody named Tom Lehman has just shot 15-under par for the first 54 holes of the British Open. That’s an average score of 66.

You know what that means? Just another indication the king should have kept his American colonies. They’re corrupting the motherland.

The first British Open I ever saw was right there where it is this year, Royal Lytham and St. Annes (pronounced “Lithum and Sintons”).

It was 1969 and the Yanks who went over that year were, for the most part, horrified. I remember I had lunch with Miller Barber, one of the favorites from the new world that year. Miller was aghast when he got a load of the British Open and Lytham. “I can’t play this run-up game!” he exclaimed. “I never saw conditions like this!”

Lytham in that Year of Our Lord was laid out the way British courses had been since Queen Victoria’s day. The Americans were used to hitting those high approaches with backspin and plunking them down near the hole to stay.

Not at Lytham’s. I remember, I asked this old-timer who looked like one of those Col. Blimp types who used to run the Empire. I looked at the unkempt rough with some skepticism, but I looked at the unkempt fairways with astonishment. Our fairways over here in the States are like pool tables. Theirs were like unmown hay. “Don’t you mow your fairways?” I asked him. He removed his pipe, shifted his regimental tie and nodded. “But they’re exceptionally high, what kind of mowers do you use?” I pursued. “Sheep, old boy,” he told me. “Flocks of sheep.”

“And the sprinklers, where are the sprinklers?” I asked him. “Who’s in charge of watering the course?”

“God,” he answered.

He was jesting, of course. But not much. Mown by sheep and watered by God was the kind of tradition British golf came down with.

Not any more. They got sprinkler-head golf and mowers that go down to one inch. The fairways still don’t look like South Florida, but you can find your ball in them and hit off them.

A pity. It’s going to be a long hard winter of our discontent for us poor hackers. The British Open, our last bastion of defense against the onslaught of these golfers, has been breached. The game is in fine, furious rout.

They might as well shift the British Open to Indian Wells. If it’s going to be mowed by blade instead of tooth and watered by pipe instead of divinity, and if the wind isn’t to blow and the rain not fall, what we’ve got here is your basic Hartford Open.

The last best hope of mankind (golfing version) has gone aglimmering. I think it all started to go bad when the Brits started to ice down their beer.