Friend’s Undoing Leaves Els With Subdued Sense of Triumph at Open
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
LYTHAM ST. ANNES, England — Painfully for Adam Scott, he was absolutely correct. Just as he had explained before Sunday’s final round, a four-shot lead was not safe at this British Open, not even with only four holes to play and not even with Scott looking every bit the part of a first-time major champion after a birdie at 14.
But golf is the ultimate mind game, and though Scott, the talented 32-year-old Australian, has tried to alter the equation in the last two seasons by changing his putter and his caddie, he could not change his luck in the tournaments that still define golfers.
With his sunglasses still in place but his form crumbling, Scott made four straight bogeys on the final four holes at Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club. And when Scott’s last par putt of 8 feet rolled just to the left of the cup on the 18th green, this year’s Open champion was Ernie Els.
Rarely has a major winner greeted victory in such a minor key.
“I feel for Adam Scott; he’s a great friend of mine,” said Els, a popular South African. “Obviously, we both wanted to win very badly. I really feel for him, but you know that’s the nature of the beast.”
Els, whose seven-under-par total of 273 was one stroke better than Scott’s, knows plenty about the beast that is major pressure. Despite his nickname, the Big Easy, it has hardly been easy for Els to get his hands back on the claret jug. This was his fourth major championship but his first since 2002, when he won the British Open at Muirfield in a playoff after surrendering a final-round lead.
Els is 42, the same age as Darren Clarke was when he won the Open at Royal St. George’s last year. Clarke found a rare vein of form in extreme conditions and has done little of golfing note since his surprise victory. Els, even though he failed to qualify for the Masters this year, has been gathering strength and confidence, but this triumph was still quite a shock considering that he was six shots off the lead when the final round began and still six back when he completed the front nine in 36, or two over par.
But on a blustery day when Royal Lytham & St. Annes finally began to play like a brute, Els managed to feed off his frustration and commit to playing more aggressively and hitting more drives off the tees.
“When you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve seen a lot of things happen,” Els said. “And I just felt that the golf course is such, if you just doubt it a little bit, it was going to bite you. There’s too many bunkers, too much trouble, and there was a bit of a breeze. So I felt I was going to hit the shots, and I felt, I still felt I had a chance.”
He birdied the 10th, the 12th, the 14th and, most important, the 18th and said he made many putts while thinking of his 9-year-old son Ben, who is autistic and was watching on television.
“He loves when I hit golf balls,” Els said. “He’s always there. He comes with me. He loves the flight of the ball and the sound. I knew he was watching today, and I was trying to keep him — because he gets really excited — I wanted to keep him excited today.”Scott, meanwhile, was losing his grip in a final-round collapse that will rank among the most complete at any major.
“I had it in my hands with four to go and, you know, managed to hit a poor shot on each of the four closing holes, which costs you on a course like this,” Scott said. “I’m very disappointed.”
Disappointment was a common theme Sunday. Tiger Woods, five shots off the lead when the day began, could surely smell an opportunity when Scott started the day with a bogey, a birdie and then another bogey. But he made a triple bogey on the par-4 sixth hole after requiring two shots to get out of a deep greenside bunker that forced him to his knees for the second shot. It was Woods’s first triple bogey in a major championship since the 2003 British Open, and he never recovered. He finished in a tie for third with his fellow American Brandt Snedeker with a 277.
Graeme McDowell of Northern Ireland, who played in the final pairing with Scott, also made frequent visits to the sand and other undesirable locations. Three shots behind Scott after eight holes, he faded badly and ended up with a 75 and a share of fifth place at two under with Luke Donald, the Englishman who is ranked No. 1 in the world.
It is an apt reflection of golf’s current instability at the top that Donald still has not won a major championship. Els’s victory maintained a remarkable streak: he is the 16th different man in a row to win a major. And what will also stir debate is that he is the third man in the last four major championships to win with a longer-shafted putter.
Els switched to a belly putter last season despite years of criticizing their use as contrary to the spirit of the game. “As long as it’s legal, I’ll keep cheating like the rest of them,” he said last year.
Scott’s switch to a long putter last season has been critical to his renaissance, too, but it did not keep him from faltering at Lytham. He bogeyed 15 after hitting into a greenside bunker. He then missed a 3-foot par putt at 16. Before long, Els was generating a roar by making a 20-foot putt for birdie on 18, and Scott was misjudging his 6-iron approach shot on the par-4 17th, knocking it into thick rough to the front left of the green.
Looking back on it, it all comes down to the shot into 17,” Scott said. “That’s the one that I look at and am most disappointed about.”
He made a third straight bogey, then hit a 3-wood off the 18th tee instead of a long iron or driver. It ended up bouncing into a fairway bunker. He then blasted onto the fairway and hit his approach shot 8 feet from the hole. The line on his par putt looked quite straight, but there are subtle undulations on Lytham’s greens.
As it missed, Scott said, “Wow,” and slowly sank into a crouch, his head twisting away from the hole. But it surely will not be quite that easy for Scott to block out what happened on the final four holes.
“Well, look, it may not have sunk in yet, so I don’t know,” Scott said. “Hopefully, I can let it go really quick and get on what I plan to do next week and get ready for my next tournament. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’ve never really been in this position, so I’ll have to wait and see how I feel when I wake up tomorrow.”
Els, subdued in victory at first, was soon in a more festive mood: drinking toasts out of the claret jug at his Lytham hotel before heading to a car with the jug still in hand for the trip back to London to celebrate with his wife, Liezl, and their two children.
“I’ve been there before; I’ve blown majors before and golf tournaments before,” Els said of Scott. “I just hope he doesn’t take it as hard as I did.”
AI
