Uncategorized - Golf Canada

PINEHURST, N.C. – Graeme McDowell watched countryman and playing partner Rory McIlroy boom shot after shot, attacking the treacherous greens at Pinehurst No. 2 every chance he got.

Was McDowell tempted to try the same?

Not at all.

McDowell hardly dazzled with the way he struck the ball but kept putting it right where he wanted, setting up a 2-under 68 that left him solidly in contention at the U.S. Open on Thursday.

“I spent the last few days just preparing myself mentally for the challenge, really knowing that this golf course wasn’t going to give much and it was only going to take,” said McDowell, looking for the second Open title of his career after winning at Pebble Beach in 2010.

He stumbled only once with a bogey at the 529-yard fourth, the longest par 4 at Pinehurst. He bounced right back with an eagle at the par-5 fifth, made his lone birdie of the round at the 14th, and put down par on everything else.

McDowell held a share of the lead much of the day, until Martin Kaymer birdied three of the last five holes for a 65.

Still, this was just the sort of round McDowell had in mind when coming up with a game plan.

“It wasn’t my best ball-striking display,” he said. “You don’t have to strike it amazing around here. You just have to position the ball correctly at all times.”

The 34-year-old from Northern Ireland played in a group with two other former U.S. Open champions, McIlroy and Webb Simpson.

McIlroy kept hitting it farther than his countryman, which is usually the case. But that wasn’t a huge advantage on a course with narrow fairways tinged with brown at the edges, areas that presented all sorts of potential hazards and sloping greens that send most approach shots sliding away from the cup.

McIlroy settled for a 71.

“I played the golf course very conservatively, if you compare my round to Rory’s round,” McDowell said. “I generally kept the ball exactly where I wanted going into the flags, short of a lot of greens but on the correct side of most of the flags.”

After the bogey at No. 4, McDowell unleashed one of his better tee shots of the round at the next hole. That was followed by a 3-wood that spun up onto the green, stopping about 12 feet short of the flag. He sank the uphill putt for an unexpected eagle.

At most of the holes, McDowell was content to just grind it out. He is aware that the last two Open champions, Justin Rose a year ago and Simpson in 2012, claimed the title with scores that were above par. McDowell certainly remembers his own victory four years ago, when even-par was good enough for the victory.

“This golf course is difficult and good shots are going to finish in bad spots,” he said. “I think the winner of this tournament is going to make 10 to 12 birdies, maximum. That’s only three a round. That’s what I mean by preparing yourself mentally for the fact that you’re not going to get a pat on the back very often at this golf course.”

McIlroy was impressed by McDowell’s performance.

“He gets the most out of it, misses it in the right places, has a really good short game and holes big momentum putts to keep his run going,” McIlroy said. “He always seems to be able to make those. This is his ideal sort of tournament – grinding it out and the winning score not being too much under par. He knows how to do that well.”

PINEHURST, N.C. – There’s no escaping the feeling that Phil Mickelson is setting himself up for another fall.

It’s happened a half-dozen times before at the U.S. Open, almost always following the same script. Mickelson digs a foothold near the top of the leaderboard in the opening round, hangs on, hangs on and then plays the last few holes on Sunday a stroke or three on the wrong side of par. Inevitably, somebody else squeezes by and instead of a trophy, he takes home another “best supporting actor” title.

Almost on cue, Lefty shot an even-par 70 on his first competitive tour across the scruffy, renovated Pinehurst No. 2 layout, and predicted once again this could be the year.

“This is a special tournament, a tournament that means a lot to me,” he began. “I don’t know if it will be this week or next year or the year after. I do still have a hundred percent confidence that I’ll be able to break through and get one.

“I do feel, though, that this tournament gives me a great chance on this golf course,” he added, “because I don’t feel like I have to be perfect.”

Mickelson was close to that Thursday with nearly every club in the bag, save the putter. He even surprised himself by hitting every fairway every time he leaned on his normally wayward driver. Golfers like to say they make their own breaks, but Mickelson caught one early in the day after a report in The New York Times said federal authorities found no evidence that he had traded in the stock of a company, Clorox, that is part of an insider-trading probe.

The same report said Mickelson, as well as famed sports gambler Billy Walters, are still under investigation over separate well-timed trades they made in a second company, Dean Foods, in 2012 just before its stock soared. Mickelson was asked about that after the round and he replied the way he has since reports that both the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission were looking into those trades first surfaced.

“Like I said before, with an investigation going on, I’m not going to comment any further on it. But I’ll continue to say that I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.”

When pressed about whether he’d pocketed $1 million by trading Dean Foods’ stock, he essentially gave the same answer: “I do have a lot to say and I will say it at the right time.”

And either way, Mickelson said a few moments later that he’s got more than enough on his plate at the moment.

“It hasn’t affected my preparation or anything for this tournament. I know I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, “so I haven’t been stressed about it.”

We’ll take Mickelson at his word on this one, since his history at the U.S. Open – let alone at this venue – is the kind of stuff that winds up on the cutting-room floor of a horror flick. He was playing alongside the late Payne Stewart here in 1999 and getting ready for a playoff when Stewart rolled in a 15-footer for par and the win.

Mickelson’s wife, Amy, was very pregnant when he arrived and his caddie, Bones Mackay, carried a beeper that had it gone off, would have sent Lefty scrambling to the nearest airport for the next flight home. Turns out his daughter, Amanda, who’s now almost 15, was born later that day, and just like the rest of us, all she knows is that when comes to the U.S. Open, her father has a funny way of finishing second a lot.

Mickelson figures the fastest way to end that streak is to get hot with the putter. He’s switched to the claw grip for this tournament, and while it didn’t hurt his chances inside 10 feet or so, he didn’t make anything longer and Pinehurst’s turtleback greens rarely let approach shots settle any closer. How long he stays with the new grip is anybody’s guess.

“It might be weeks, it might be months, it might be days, hours, I don’t know,” Mickelson said. “It’s just one of those things. Last year I putted just so well for a year and a half, and I’ve kind of over-done what I was doing. I’ve got to kind of settle back in.”

Mickelson turns 44 on June 16 and isn’t likely to master too many new tricks. He’s already captured the other three legs of the Grand Slam and fortuitously, the absence of rough and the premium on chipping here now make Pinehurst his kind of setup. But he’s not about to refuse help from any quarter.

On the par-5 fifth, Mickelson’s approach putt rolled over the marker of playing partner Matthew Fitzpatrick, an amateur who’s young enough to be his son, and stopped right in front of it.

“He came over and he said, `Is that all right there?'” Fitzpatrick said, “and he was obviously joking, but I didn’t think he was. I said, `I’m going to need that moved.’ And he said, `Don’t worry, I’m only joking.'”

A moment later, Mickelson told Fitzpatrick that hitting the marker had probably saved him from rolling the ball another two feet past the hole.

“I guess if he does win,” Fitzpatrick said, brightening, “I’ve contributed to it a little bit.”

PINEHURST, N.C. – Much to his delight, Martin Kaymer discovered Pinehurst No. 2 was even more different than he imagined in the U.S. Open.

This wasn’t the beast of a course that Kaymer and so many other players were expecting.

This was a day for scoring.

Kaymer made six birdies Thursday afternoon, three on the final five holes, that sent the 29-year-old German to the lowest score in three Opens held at Pinehurst No. 2. He made a 6-foot par putt on the 18th hole for a 5-under 65 and a three-shot lead.

“It was more playable than I thought,” he said. “I think that made a big difference mentally, that you feel like there are actually some birdies out there, not only bogeys.”

So much was made of the new look at No. 2, which was restored to its old look from more than a half-century ago. There also was plenty of talk that this U.S. Open would be as tough as any U.S. Open.

When he finished his final day of practice Wednesday under a broiling sun, Kaymer was asked what it would take to win.

“I said plus 8 because the way the golf course played on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” he said. “But obviously, they softened the conditions a little bit so it was more playable. So hopefully, I’m not right with the plus 8. I would be disappointed.”

Former U.S. Open champion Graeme McDowell took the conservative route on his way to a 68 that featured 15 pars, one bogey, one birdie and one eagle. He was joined by Kevin Na, Brendon de Jonge and Fran Quinn, a 49-year-old who last played a U.S. Open in 1996, when Tiger Woods was still an amateur.

“This was a golf course where I spent the last few days just preparing myself mentally for the challenge, really, knowing that this golf course wasn’t going to give much and it was only going to take,” McDowell said. “I’m assuming they put some water on this place this morning. And we were able to take advantage of that a little bit early on and actually think about getting at some of those flags.”

Brandt Snedeker, who had a chance at 30 on his front nine, had to settle for being part of a large group at 69 that included 20-year-old Jordan Spieth, Henrik Stenson, Matt Kuchar and Dustin Johnson.

The 15 players to break par were the most for an opening round at the U.S. Open since 24 players did it at rain-softened Olympia Fields in 2003.

Phil Mickelson, in his latest quest to win the one major keeping him from the career Grand Slam, shot a 70. He was among the early starters, who received additional help by cloud cover that kept moisture in the greens. Mickelson doesn’t expect Pinehurst to be any easier the rest of the week.

“There was some low scoring out there – some good scoring, I should say,” he said. “Anything around par, it’s usually a good score.”

Masters champion Bubba Watson was among the exceptions. He shot a 76 and said, “This course is better than me right now.”

The sun broke through shortly before noon and began to bake the course, though not enough to stop Kaymer. He watched some of the tournament on television in the morning, and he was particularly struck by the sight of Stenson’s 6-iron into the par-3 15th only rolling out a few feet. Kaymer expected it to roll off the green.

“Last night I thought that it’s going to be very, very firm in the afternoon,” he said. “But actually, it was more playable than I thought.”

Not everyone was able to take advantage.

Defending champion Justin Rose had a 72, making his bid a little tougher to become the first repeat winner in 25 years. Adam Scott, the world No. 1 who has been formidable in every major the last two years except the U.S. Open, had a 73.

Scott wasn’t about to panic. Pinehurst only figures to get more difficult.

“You know how it’s going to be at the end of the week,” Scott said. “We’re going to be looking at even par, or something around that.”

Kaymer picked up four birdies with relative ease – three wedges to inside 3 feet, and a high draw with a 3-wood to about 20 feet on the par-5 fifth for a two-putt birdie. A few longer putts at the end really dressed up the score.

He hit a 6-iron at the flag on the 16th hole and made a 12-foot birdie putt, and then hit another 6-iron at the par-3 17th to about 10 feet for birdie.

Kaymer tied the course record with a 63 in the opening round when he won The Players Championship last month, ending a drought of some 18 months. That only boosted his confidence, and the 65 on Thursday only adds to it.

Even so, he realizes it’s only one round, and that the course probably won’t be so kind or gentle the rest of the way.

“I would have never expected myself to shoot such a low round at Pinehurst … but it’s a good round of golf,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it. I’m not freaking out about it. It’s the first round of a very, very important tournament. I put myself so far in a good position, but we have three rounds to go. The golf course can change a lot.

“If other people want to make more out of it, it’s fine,” he said. “But for me, it’s a great start into one of the most important weeks of the year.”

Canada’s lone Canadian in the field – Graham DeLaet – opened with a 5-over 75.

Defending champion Justin Rose, who held off Mickelson a year ago at Merion, shot 72. There hasn’t been a repeat winner in this championship since Curtis Strange in 1988-89.

PETERBOROUGH — For the second day in a row, a Golf Association of Ontario (GAO) event needed a playoff to produce a winner. This time it was at the Men’s Champion of Champions, June 12 at the Peterborough Golf and Country Club.

After 18 holes two players carded even-par 71s: Wellesley’s Rob Cowan and Odessa’s Peter Beneteau. For Cowan, the Westmount Golf and Country Club member, he went about his round consistently, paring his first nine holes and continued his consistency on his back nine with a couple birdies to balance out his bogies. As for Beneteau, the Camden Braes Golf and Country Club member was actually two-under late in his round. However, a couple of late mistakes dropped him back to even to finish the round.

On the playoff hole, the 49-year-old Cowan had a nice drive that found the fairway giving him a 140-yard shot to the green. Meanwhile, the 17-year-old Beneteau tried to play it safe by hitting an iron off the tee. He was a bit further back and on his second shot he went right of the green landing just under the branches of trees and in front of a bunker. It was a tough look and Beneteau’s third shot found the sand. Cowan put his second on the green and was able to comfortably two-putt for the win, making him a two-time winner of the event.

Cowan talked about his consistency after the win. “I started off with those nine consecutive pars then finally birdied 11. I made another on 12 from the fringe. I made a couple chunky mistakes and bogeyed 16 and then just ran out of steam on some putts that could have resulted in more birdies.”

The day began for Cowan with a shotgun start on hole two meaning he finished his round with the first hole. Cowan says he played the first very aggressively, the first time, and found the bunker. Yet he learned from that and with the playoff right back on the same hole, he didn’t take as aggressive of an approach, something that worked out for him as he pared it for the win.

The win adds to Cowan’s GAO collection, which includes a 2010 win at this event and an Ontario Match Play Championship. “It’s cool! I knew the first one wasn’t an accident because I won by five but it is nice to get another one. The guys joked around saying ‘You’ve got to keep up with (Dave) Bunker’ who just won the Ontario Match Play. For me, any GAO win is good win!”

Cowan added that he thought the key to his round was that he never really played with any danger. “There was never really a threat of anything really bad happening. When I made my second birdie I just said to myself ‘Don’t make any mistakes’ and I hit well enough to get the job done.”

Cowan will now turn his attention to the Investors Group Mid Amateur in just over a week at Taboo Resort. He says he feels prepared after playing a practice round at the course when he was in nearby Port Carling last week for the Ontario Match Play. After that he will also take part in the Investors Group Ontario Amateur July 8-11 at The Club at North Halton a course he says he feels very good about.

Rounding out the top three was a three-way tie for third. Matthew Wheeler, of Toronto and Beacon Hall Golf Club; Nicholas Striker, of Waterloo and Oviinbyrd Golf Club; and Nicholas Ross, from Dundas and the Hamilton Golf and Country Club, all finished one off the lead at one-over 72.

The Ontario Men’s Champion of Champions was first contested in 1946 and features men’s club champions from Golf Association of Ontario member clubs across the province. Past champions of the event include Ontario Golf Hall of Fame members Bill Morland, Gerry Kesselring, Warren Sye, and Stu Hamilton, as well as Big Break Indian Wells champion David Byrne.

In his book, A Feel For The Game, Ben Crenshaw says, “If Dr. MacKenzie [famed course architect Alister] or Donald Ross or any of the other great architects came back now, I wonder what they would think of … what has been done to their courses. I never knew them, but I’ve studied their lives, their courses and their thoughts on the game. I think they would take a dim view of it.”

A dim view is exactly what many TV viewers may be taking over the next two weeks as the men’s and women’s U.S. Opens are contested on Pinehurst No. 2, a course that little resembles the one we last saw in 2005. Shades of brown and yellow are interspersed among the green of the hard and (hopefully) dry fairways. Clumps of native grasses punctuate the sprawling sandy waste areas. All that remains intact from 2005 are Donald Ross’s famed and feared domed greens and the closely mown collection areas surrounding them.

Thanks to Crenshaw and design co-conspirator Bill Coore, gone are the wall-to-wall green carpets that masqueraded as fairways and the lush grass roughs that the USGA delighted in growing shin-deep to punish wayward shots. Good for them and golf. Maybe not so good for the uneducated golf fans who think every course should be pristinely green. Pity them, as they are unwitting victims of the “Augusta Syndrome.”

When MacKenzie and Bobby Jones designed Augusta National, permanent site of The Masters, their stated aim was to create an “inland links.” Over the past 80 years or so, Augusta has morphed into something diametrically opposed to that. It does not offer a player multiple options but dictates the line of play; it does not offer a chance to play the linksy “ground game” where long-iron shots can be “stung” down fairways for many more yards than usual; it is groomed and coddled to the nth degree and resembles nothing else in nature. It is contrived, not natural. But it looks great on TV and, as a result, many golfers not only expect that unrelenting green on their screens but also on the courses they play. The result of the Augusta Syndrome has been a massive increase in every sort of input to sustain that unnatural image: Fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, water, manpower, you name it.

Over the years, Pinehurst No. 2 suffered the same unfortunate metamorphosis as Augusta. But someone saw the light and, as Pinehurst President Don Padgett II put it in announcing that Coore and Crenshaw Inc. would be renovating the course: “We are doing this because it is the right thing to do as stewards of this historic course.”

“We’re trying to uncover it, not recover it,” said Coore at the start of the project in 2010. “We’ll bring the strategy back and reinstate its character.” He and Crenshaw spent countless hours studying Ross’s original plans and notes as well as historic photos before commencing the controversial task of recreating a true inland links.

They have succeeded admirably. The fairways are wider, skirting around those yawning sandy waste areas, yet 26 acres of turf were removed; the area of maintained rough was reduced some 40 per cent; and single-row irrigation replaced the existing double-row system, reducing the number of sprinkler heads from 1,150 to 450. “We want the grassing lines to be defined by the limit of the irrigation system,” said Bob Farren, Pinehurst’s director of golf course management.

If you can get over the aesthetic contrast (shocking to most North American viewers used to pampered and homogenized PGA Tour venues), then you can appreciate what has been achieved by Crenshaw and Coore in “uncovering” Ross’s masterpiece. Although the green complexes are uniquely Rossian (he once said that they “make possible an infinite variety of nasty short shots that no other form of hazard can call for”), the hard, fast and eminently playable turf is definitely reminiscent of a links. The fact that the sandy areas and sinuous fairways provide shotmaking options was undeniable in the players’ news conferences leading up to the men’s U.S. Open. For example, Bubba Watson said he would lay up on many holes while Phil Mickelson said he would pull the driver out as often as possible.

If you are a golfer of a certain age, you may recall when you played a hole with a driver and 5-iron in the wet spring, 4-iron and a wedge in the dryness of summer, and something else all together in the fall. The rough was wispy and unpredictable. It was a time when creativity and imagination defined a good golf game, not the unrelenting similarity of lush fairways sustained uniformly throughout the season by wall-to-wall irrigation and chemical inputs.

Thanks to the visionary leadership at Pinehurst and the genius of Crenshaw and Coore, we will see a hint of that during the men’s and women’s U.S. Opens over the next couple of weeks. It might not be green, but it is better. Better for golf and better for the environment…so I guess it is “green” after all.