Janzen Feels No Payne

Well, it wasn’t a choke exactly. More like a mugging, an unarmed robbery.

Payne Stewart couldn’t smuggle a five-shot lead over a competitor safely into the clubhouse here Sunday. Lee Janzen became the U.S. Open champion for the second time this decade. He beat the same opponent he beat at Baltusrol in 1993.

What happened? Well, basically, the golf gods got into Payne Stewart with a vengeance.

Look, when you hit a ball in the middle of a fairway, you have done exactly what the game of golf demands. You can’t do it any better.

You shouldn’t be penalized. There shouldn’t be any moguls to tilt the ball off line or out of bounds, any little glitzes not properly a part of the course.

And there probably shouldn’t be any divots for your ball to come to rest in.

Payne Stewart hit a near-perfect tee shot on No. 12, a pivotal hole, Sunday. Unfortunately, several other players had done the same thing earlier in the week. The fairway was littered with divots.

Stewart’s ball came to rest in one of them. It was a divot filled with sand. We don’t replace divots in golf anymore, we pour sand out of a bottle on them.

Unfortunately, unfairly, Stewart’s ball, with his near-perfect drive, came to rest on ground that was neither sand trap nor fairway. He couldn’t get the club on the ball. He slapped it into a trap. He made bogey from there.

He handed the tournament to Janzen then and there, in a sense.

Stewart thinks you should get a free drop or get to replace the ball no hearer the pin when it lights in a hole in the middle of the fairway. It’s hard to disagree with him. You shouldn’t lose the Open on a shot in the middle. You should lose it on an O.B., a right-to-right slice, a smother hook, a topped shot, a bladed sand blast. Stewart lost it for doing what the books tell you.

Janzen is a nice enough young man, with this nice, steady golf swing and temperament to match. He’s probably good to his mother, pays his bills, goes to church. But let’s face it. He’s not Tiger Woods, he’s not John Daly, he’s not even Fred Couples or this baby-faced amateur with a nice smile they had here this week, Matt Kuchar. He’s just--well, vanilla ice cream comes to mind. White bread, homemade fudge.

He cries when he wins, which is a nice touch.

Actually, if anyone wept here it should have been Stewart.

He is one of the staples of the tour, recognizable because he chews gum and wears knickers and costumes with it so outlandish a Brit writer once observed that he looked as if he were outfitted for a burial at sea. His garb sometimes looks like three flags sewn together with golden thread.

It is the view here, he also fell prey to a dreaded “Murray’s Law.” That is the tenet which holds that, in every golf tournament, the golfer, even the successful one, will have one cold round. The good golfer never has a cold last round--the Hogans, the Nicklauses.

The good golfer, too, perceives when he is having this cold round. And the trick is then to steer it in the clubhouse in 72 or 73 instead of 77 or so.

Janzen had already had his cold round as he teed it up for the final round at Olympic on Sunday: two 73’s, either of which would qualify.

Stewart hadn’t. He went into the final round 66-71-70. He finished with a 74, lost a seven-shot lead over Janzen.

Golf is such a cruel game. A torment. Bobby Jones once said, “Nobody wins an Open. Somebody loses it.”

Janzen started out Sunday as if he would be the one who lost it. He bogeyed two of the first three holes.

Meanwhile, back on the tee, Stewart started out as if it were Payne Stewart and 59 of his best friends, out on a Sunday afternoon $2 Nassau with automatic presses. No pressure.

Par golf would have won him the tournament by three strokes.

It appeared as if he wouldn’t even need that that. Ahead of him, golfers were leaving the field to him, failing to stop their approaches on greens, leaving 10-foot putts two feet short, hitting tee shots into the rough. When Janzen went to seven shots behind, it looked as if he were toast.

All of a sudden, on the fourth hole, Stewart joined the retreat. He began to rifle approaches through the green, misread putts, hit rough. Oops! Five bogeys.

And Janzen got the wheels back on. He put up four birdies and set sail on his 68. By day’s end, he was the only player in the field at par.

The golf gods weren’t through with Stewart yet. They had one more cruel trick to play on him.

He came up to the 18th hole, played meticulously and then had this 20- footer that would have tied him for the championship, given him another day.

I don’t know about you, but I would hate to have a 20-foot putt decide my future. It was the gods’ final bit of torture for him. He missed that putt by inches. He didn’t leave it short, it wasn’t off line. It was just inches away from $535,000, so to speak.

It just wasn’t his day. Bobby Jones would have understood perfectly.

Life is not fair. And neither is golf. That’s its charm.