Heard the one about the Englishman and the Irishman who play professional golf in the U.S.? How in the span of eight days, one, Matt Fitzpatrick, captured the U.S. Open at The Country Club, and the other, Pádraig Harrington, claimed the U.S. Senior Open, for those 50 and older, at Saucon Valley Country Club. Not bad, eh?
What is it about the British and Irish in this northeast corner of the U.S.? Fitzpatrick’s victory came in a region known as New England, Harrington’s in Pennsylvania, a state named after the Englishman William Penn, a Quaker from the village of Penn in Buckinghamshire, 20 miles west of London, who founded the commonwealth of Pennsylvania that became the state of the same name.
Don’t forget the Boston Tea Party in the 18th century or the tumultuous American victory at The Country Club in the 1999 Ryder Cup. Remember, most of all that The Country Club was where Francis Ouimet, an American amateur, beat Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, two of the world’s pre-eminent pros, both of whom came from the Channel Islands off the coast of France, to win the 1913 U.S. Open and ignite American interest in the game.
Fitzpatrick’s triumph was one of the best of the more than 40 U.S. Opens I have attended, won with an exceptional stroke at a moment of extreme pressure. It was a reminder of how courageous he is. “There is no flag Matt won’t aim for,” Billy Foster, Fitzpatrick’s very experienced caddie, said. “He carries his balls around in a wheelbarrow.”
Having driven into a bunker on the 72nd hole, which seemed at the time to have been a serious error, the slight Englishman was quick to decide what club to use and how to execute the shot. He whisked the ball from sand to green with 9-iron to set up the par that gave him victory by one stroke. It was one of the three greatest bunker shots I have ever seen, in its way as great as Sandy Lyle’s on the 72nd hole when the Scotsman won the 1988 Masters, if not quite so sensational as Seve Ballesteros’ with a 3-wood on the 18th to halve his singles match against Fuzzy Zoeller in the 1983 Ryder Cup at PGA National.
Harrington holds a stare that is pronounced when you watch him on television, and the power of the camera can take you to within inches of his face. Then his upper lip is tucked in and his eyes generate a rare intensity. They look as though they could penetrate steel, and certainly did over the closing holes at Saucon Valley as the Irishman fought to retain his overnight lead.
Harrington and Fitzpatrick both hit the ball farther now than ever. The whoosh of Harrington’s practice swings is significantly louder than almost all of his senior-tour rivals. The result? He is longer, certainly off the tee, than almost all of them. Fitzpatrick has increased his swing speed by as much as 10 mph in recent months.
The significance of these triumphs by the two Europeans is that they came in the anniversary of the founding in 1972 of their home circuit, now known as the DP World Tour. Fifty years ago, Ken Schofield – who with his deputy George O’Grady and John Paramor, the inestimable rules expert, would become the three great men of the European Tour – had just left his job as the manager of the Dunblane branch of the Trustee Savings Bank.
The youngest bank manager in Scotland at 26, Schofield was moving to become the assistant press and public relations officer at the nascent tour. One of his first tasks was to produce the sadly defunct tour guide, a magnificent work of reference. “Our offices were in Bride Lane [in London] and John Jacobs [the first director] had a flat just off Baker Street, and a secretary in an adjacent room,” Schofield said. “John was a dynamic figure, magnetic in personality. That voice on the phone!”
Today this anniversary is completely overshadowed by the civil war that the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour are jointly conducting against LIV Golf, the organisation headed by Greg Norman and financed by Saudi Arabian money. It is one that is splintering professional golf and becoming increasingly bad-tempered and heated as facts and allegations are hurled from one side at the other. In a game as gentlemanly as golf, it is unseemly.
The DP World Tour may have won a battle last week when the PGA Tour increased its stake in European Tour Productions from 15 percent to 40 percent, thus boosting DP World’s finances. But a war is made up of a series of battles, and this was only one battle. From 1337 to 1453, the British and the French fought against one another in what is known as the Hundred Years War. Golf’s civil war will not last as long as that, but you would have to be remarkably prescient or foolish to suggest it does not have some way to go yet before the victor becomes apparent.
Top: Pádraig Harrington displays a competitive stare that could penetrate steel.
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