They Deal With It, and That’s Major

What a Retief. Somebody finally won the U.S. Open.

At the point in Monday’s U.S. Open playoff where Retief Goosen jumped five shots ahead of Mark Brooks, he had played 10 holes and needed only 12 putts.

Isn’t that the same number of putts he had on the last hole Sunday?

Maybe it just seemed that way. If there is anything we should have found at the 101st U.S. Open, other than a bad case of sunburn, it’s that the mind can play tricks on you . . . especially in this “golf deal,” as Brooks would call it.

After spending the last month or however long it has been with Brooks at Southern Hills, you can’t help but learn something about the guy.

For instance, he likes brown slacks, his need to be liked is so low it can’t be measured, he’s tougher than a week-old steak and he has developed this talking style in which nearly everything amounts to some sort of “deal.”

In his lexicon, it’s a “putting deal,” it’s a “major deal,” and that’s a “big deal.” But in Monday’s “playoff deal,” he just didn’t have the cards.

Too often, he was swinging clubs from places where he needed a lawn mower instead.

Meanwhile, Goosen showed everybody what kind of player he is. He made clutch putts, he rescued par like a lifeguard and, most important, he only made a bogey at the dreaded 18th hole instead of a triple bogey that would have tied this train wreck of a golf tournament one more time.

Goosen didn’t exactly close out his two-shot victory to great fanfare, with trumpets sounding and cymbals clashing, but he was far enough ahead of Brooks that finishing with back-to-back bogeys didn’t matter.

What mattered is that somebody won. For a while, such an outcome was in doubt. It even had appeared as though the 101st U.S. Open might actually overlap with the 102nd, unless somebody learned how to make a golf ball disappear into a hole.

Once Goosen ironed out that small problem Monday, he was off and running. Brooks couldn’t catch up.

It was a strange sort of matchup, the 32-year-old, soft-spoken South African and the 40-year-old, outspoken Texan. What could they possibly discuss? Where is the best barbecue, Johannesburg or Fort Worth?

At least they dressed alike, in khaki slacks, white shirts and white caps. If Brooks hadn’t worn black shoes and Goosen white ones with brown stripes, somebody would have needed to stitch their names on the backs of their shirts to tell them apart.

You had no problem doing that in the playoff, which Brooks might call a “strange deal.”

At precisely 11 a.m., both players were introduced on the first tee to polite applause. Not far away, workers were busy breaking down the site, packing cardboard boxes and loading them into trucks. Many concession stands were closed and the crowd was only a fraction of what it had been Sunday.

No one should have been surprised.

Every time there is a playoff, three things are predictable: a winner, a loser and complaints about the playoff. It has become a tradition to question why the USGA clings to its 18-hole playoff format, but it’s worth examining.

The U.S. Open is the only major with the format. The Masters has a sudden-death playoff, and both the British Open and the PGA Championship use a four-hole playoff system. The USGA believes that the National Open is simply too important to decide in sudden death after 72 holes.

That may sound reasonable, but if nobody wins after 90 holes, then it goes to a sudden-death format. If you follow the USGA’s logic, there should be another 18 holes, up to 108. Let’s not even think about that one.

After that display of putting on the 72nd hole Sunday, you could make a fairly respectable case for a sudden-death playoff.

Think of the spectacle. It would have been either borderline hilarious or downright cruel to march Goosen and Brooks back out on the course, prop them up at the 18th tee again and make them keep playing until somebody sank a putt or one of them died of fright.

Say what you will about the mind-bending 18th hole Sunday, it was certainly rich in drama, something that Monday’s playoff could not even come close to matching, even though the level of pressure should have been the same.

Instead, the playoff was four full hours of Retief and Brooks, two decent if sort of unremarkable pros trying to win a tournament that would change their lives forever. This wasn’t Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the world. No, it was No. 44 (Goosen) and No. 195 (Brooks).

Of course, it’s not their fault they were the last guys still standing on Sunday night. What were they supposed to do, try to lose?

Goosen said he had telephone calls Monday morning from Nick Faldo and Ernie Els, who told him he had the goods to win the playoff. They also told Goosen to hang tough and forget the three-putt bogey on the last hole that cost him a victory a day earlier.

With the silver U.S. Open trophy in his hands, he compared his plight on Sunday to what Jean Van de Velde went through in the 1999 British Open at Carnoustie, where the Frenchman turned certain victory into stunning defeat. Goosen didn’t travel that path and now he can compare himself to a few others. The other U.S Open champions. And that’s the best deal of all.

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Now There’s a Knock on Woods

Defending U.S. Open champion Tiger Woods finally met his match at Southern Hills Country Club with a three-over-par 283, bringing a halt to some impressive streaks. They included:

* Four majors in a row.

* 15 consecutive rounds in the 60s.

* 19 consecutive rounds at par or better in the majors

* 38 consecutive rounds at par or better.

* 40 consecutive events under par.

* Eight consecutive top-10 finishes in majors (Woods finished tied for 12th).