The 112th United States Open Golf Championship is now officially in the record books. Webb Simpson, a card-carrying member of golf”s new breed, has his first major as a 26-year-old. His bank account is $1.44-million richer. Simpson also fits a two-year-plus profile in becoming the ninth consecutive golfer to become a first-time major champion. Finally, he took a line out of the Geoff Ogilvy how-to-win the U.S. Open handbook by posting his score, sitting around the clubhouse, and waiting for the leaders to back up and hand him the Open title.
Yes, it”s true that Webb Simpson won the 2012 U.S. Open at San Francisco”s Olympic Club and yet never held the lead during the 72 holes that he walked the course. He came into the National Open with two missed cuts, started the day four strokes behind co-leaders Jim Furyk and Graeme McDowell, and picked up two bogeys on the opening five holes on Sunday. Standing on the sixth tee at 5-over-par, Simpson promptly birdied the sixth, seventh, eighth and 10th holes to get it back to 1-over-par. He then made par on the final eight holes highlighted by a great up-and-down par save on the 18th hole.
As Simpson putted out on Sunday evening, I remember thinking that it was a nice finish for him. I figured he had locked up a spot in the top five or maybe even the top three. Yet just like Ogilvy in 2006 at Winged Foot when Colin Montgomerie and then Phil Mickelson double-bogeyed on the final hole, Simpson was able to watch the leaders falter on the final nine. In the end, Webb Simpson was declared the 2012 U.S. Open champion. A handful of talented linksters happened to lose it.
This was the Olympic Club”s fifth time at hosting the Open and the tournament took on a nice touch of history and nostalgia. NBC”s Bob Costas did a great job in a memorable Sunday afternoon interviews with 90-year-old Jack Fleck, the 1955 Open winner, and 80-year-old Billy Casper, the 1966 winner. Both men were clear and concise in their memories of their past moments of glory on the national stage at Olympic. Fleck was especially interesting when he mentioned that he had won the Open with a driver given to him by Ben Hogan, the man he defeated in a playoff. Hard to imagine Tiger Woods giving one of his drivers to Webb Simpson prior to this year”s tournament.
Speaking of Tiger Woods, former United States Open champ, former Olympic Club member and current NBC golf analyst Johnny Miller was right on the mark during Saturday”s third-round commentary. Prior to Woods” final-group pairing teed off, Miller noted that the greens at Olympic were slower than they had been during the first two rounds. Miller said, “Tiger has always had a hard time adjusting to changes in the speed of the greens, especially when they start to get slower.” Woods promptly bogeyed the first hole by leaving his makeable par putt inches short, and suddenly he was on the road to a most inglorious 75.
Tiger has become quite the tease as a professional golfer lately. He wins the Palmer in March, goes into the Masters as the favorite and finishes tied for 40th. He wins the Memorial in early June, heads into the U.S. Open as the favorite, holds the lead through 36 holes, and finishes tied for 21st. Of course, the calendar on my wall reads 2012, not 2000. Blame it on the knee, blame it on the swing coach, blame it on the fire hydrant and the Waffle House girl, or most accurately, blame it on the putting stroke. Nonetheless, Woods reminds me of Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Phil Mickelson. There”s more history than talent there. The 2000 season was 12 years ago. Tiger and the others have lost center stage to Rory McIlroy, Keenan Bradley, Bubba Watson and now Webb Simpson.
The field for the U.S. Open was reminiscent of the old PGA Tour fields of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, only the top 60 money winners were exempt (nowadays it”s 125). If you made the cut in the prior week”s tourney, then you were exempt into the following week. The remaining 50-70 slots in the field went to Monday qualifiers. The end result was week-to-week volatility. This is how unknowns such as Lee Trevino got onto the tour and stayed there during the early stages of their careers.
The U.S. Open field starts with 10,000-plus entries, two stages and 54 holes of qualifying, and a final field of 156 golfers, including the game”s top professionals mixed among the successful qualifiers. As a result, major champions such as Simpson, McDowell, Padraig Harrington, David Toms, Jim Furyk, Els and Retief Goosen finished in the top 10. There”s nothing surprising about that. Yet in their midst was runner-up Michael Thompson. Tied for fourth was John Peterson. Kevin Chappell and Casey Wittenberg tied for 10th.
For the uninitiated, Thomp-son, the guy with the great putting stroke, was runner-up at Olympic in the 2007 Amateur and the 2010 Hooters Tour player of the year. Wittenberg was the U.S. Am runner-up in 2003 and had his first professional win this past March at the Louisiana Open on the Nationwide Tour. Chappell also has just one win, having won locally at Stonebrae in Hayward in 2010 on the Nationwide Tour. Peterson, who had a hole-in-one during play on Saturday, won the NCAA Championships last year. However, he bombed out at Q School last November and can”t find a tour to compete. Yes, the U.S. Open is truly open and the stories revolving around Casey Martin, Beau Hossler, Jordan Spieth, Andy Zhang and the others add to the flavor of the event.
Finally, and this probably deserves a column in the near future, was the bothersome comment from NBC, ESPN, Golf Digest, Links, Golf World, and Golf Week about what a great golf town San Francisco happens to be. True, there are four high quality and very private golf courses in the immediate vicinity, namely Olympic, San Francisco Golf, Lake Merced, and the California Club. However, outside of Harding Park and the Presidio, the immediate San Francisco area is no haven for the daily-access or public-course amateur golfer. Lincoln Park is poorly maintained, McLarn Park (Gleneagles) is a dangerous walk in the park, and the snake and frog people keep trying to close Alister Mackenzie and Jack Fleming”s Sharp Park. Public course play is just as valid an experience in Stockton as it is in San Francisco, which means that it”s not much of an experience at all compared to other metropolitan areas in America.
