A careful McIlroy has a cool week and a win at the AT&T

in

PEBBLE BEACH — This was as good as it gets in golf—magnificent Pebble Beach in the sunshine, a leaderboard full of major champions, and Rory McIlroy, his once wild game tamed by maturity and wisdom, now under control, beating them all. On this Sunday, McIlroy delivered a masterful 66—each shot carefully crafted—even opting for a 5-iron off the tee at the historic par-5 18th. 

That’s the bayside hole that was nicknamed “The Finisher” nearly a century ago, and it proved to be just that for Rory McIlroy, who won the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am by two shots with a score of 21 under par, 267. In McIlroy’s wake were some of golf’s biggest names. Fellow Irishman Shane Lowry finished second at 269, while Justin Rose and Lucas Glover tied for third, another shot back. Lowry has a British Open to his credit, Rose owns both a Masters and a U.S. Open, and Glover is also a U.S. Open champion. Meanwhile, Sepp Straka, who led by a shot over McIlroy going into the final round, could only manage a 72 and slipped to a tie for 7th.  

McIlroy may be only 35, but he has been playing pro golf around the world, mostly on the European Tour, for years. He would hit the ball as far as possible to impress himself, spectators, and those in the media—but not always with precision, especially on the greens. Just last June he botched putts on the closing holes of the U.S. Open at Pinehurst. But maybe that had an effect, if you listened to him and watched him at Pebble, McIlroy seemed to have learned from his failings—as golfers so often do as they mature. 

“Pinehurst hurt the most,” said McIlroy. “Again, thinking of strategy and maybe those impulses that I talked about, hitting the right shot at the right time or being in a different place mentally, calming yourself down, using breathing exercises, whatever it is, I think the one thing that I did  (Sunday) really well is that I didn’t get too flustered and it may—it certainly feels a little more boring to me.” 

“It might look a little bit more boring on the golf course, but it definitely is more effective. Today was a test and I was able to come through it pretty well.” 

McIlroy has 27 victories, no matter where they’ve been played, some of which were considered part of the PGA tour. This AT&T was his first this year on tour, with McIlroy having only arrived in California Monday from the Middle East, where he annually competes a few times during the Winter. 

So much success, and yet when people refer to Rory they mention how he fell apart in the final round in 2011 at the Masters, the only one of the four Grand Slam Events he has not won.  

“It’s been a great week for a lot of different reasons,” said McIlroy, who had an ace on the 15th at Spyglass Hill on Thursday, the first round, which is the other course used for the AT&T.

“Playing Cypress Point for the first time, obviously getting a win. Yeah—it’s been a really cool week. Obviously couldn’t wish for a better start for my PGA TOUR season.”

Would it be possible these days to create a golf tournament the way Bing Crosby did?

in

PEBBLE BEACH — You read the nickname on one of the many plaques posted behind the first tee. “Crosby Clambake,” it says, the briefest reference to a tournament that has been altered over time—and to some, diminished— evolving into what is now the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

You know how it all came about, a singer-entertainer whose popularity helped brighten America during the Depression of the 1930s, creating a golf event for his pals and impoverished pros. It was an original, and it became an anchor for the sport, which has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry.

Most of us know that. What we don’t know is whether that would be a possibility, or even a fantasy in today’s world. Is there any individual around whom you can build a golf tournament or any sporting competition as once was done? Television has made us aware of so many multi-talented athletes and entertainers.

Just watch any of the late-night shows or sports channels. Pick one of your favorite stars. Then remember he or she must be a golfer as was Crosby or Bob Hope. It doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t need to. Which is why the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, once listed as “The greatest show in golf,” must be viewed through a historic prism.

You had Ben Hogan or Sam Snead trading strokes while Phil Harris or Dean Martin cracked jokes. It was like watching the Colbert show while it was being staged on the 18th green at Pebble.

There were birdies and bogeys and laughs. There were memorable lines, as well as memorable tee shots. The Golf Channel and ESPN didn’t exist in those days. If you wanted to know what was going on, you had to be standing there, even in the rain that came to be known as “Crosby weather.”

The purses were small compared to now—Scottie Scheffler, who is in this AT&T, earned $25 million last year. That figure would seem a dream for pros even in the 1950’s. 

Of course, everything changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. The tournament once was played on three courses including iconic Cypress Point where Bing himself was a member and once made a hole-in-one on the hole that juts into Monterey Bay, the 16th hole.  During his tournament, he would be seen wandering around the course welcoming fans and seemingly enjoying the golf as much as the players. 

Clint Eastwood, who became the mayor of neighboring Carmel, has a long history with the tournament, both as a player and an official.

In his book on the tournament, Dwayne Netland offered an Eastwood recollection. While a soldier at nearby Fort Ord, the Army Base which is now the site of Cal State Monterey Bay, he and a buddy crashed the Sunday night dinner, claiming they were assistants to Art Rosenbaum, the San Francisco Chronicle golf writer (and eventual sports editor). 

“I had the best steak I ever had and then went around and ate up all the desserts.”

You notice he didn’t mention a thing about clams. But that is how Crosby is remembered on that plaque behind the first tee at Pebble.

Newsday (N.Y.): Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson celebrated but not in hunt at U.S. Open

in ,

By Art Spander
Special to Newsday

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — For Phil Mickelson it was a round of nostalgia. For Tiger Woods it was one of staying relevant. Others were leading this 119th U.S. Open on Saturday, but for a few hours early on Phil and Tiger were the attractions.

Read the full story here.

Copyright © 2019 Newsday. All rights reserved.

Of Pebble Beach, Jones, Nicklaus and the U.S. Amateur

in ,

By Art Spander

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Two words, one locale, a dateline that excites golfers, a landscape that thrills artists: Pebble Beach, where Bobby Jones was slammed a year before he won the Slam and where Jack Nicklaus won an Amateur, a Crosby and an Open.

Many of us know Pebble for winter storms and celebrity hijinks, but now it’s summer, when the weather is morning fog and afternoon sun, and they’re playing the 118th U.S. Amateur, so players are grinding and not goofing.

The Amateur had been played only in the East until the U.S. Golf Association chose to hold it at Pebble in 1929. Jones, the defending champ, was eliminated in the first round of match play.

Nicklaus won the Amateur at Pebble in 1961, then of course won the Crosby a couple of times and in 1972 the first Open held at Pebble. He also redesigned the par-3 fifth hole, which was moved to the edge of Carmel Bay.

Nicklaus, interestingly, planned to stay amateur and chase Jones’ records, but for a person to become as dominant as Jack did with his 18 pro majors, it was necessary for him to turn pro, which he did in 1962 — and then a few months later, he won the Open.

Surely, the kids who have success in this Amateur, which now has reached the quarterfinals, will all turn pro. Maybe they’ll be stars like Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, who remains the only man to win three consecutive U.S. Amateurs. Or maybe they’ll be near-misses, like Ricky Barnes, who won the 2002 Amateur but hasn’t done much since going pro.

But whatever transpires, the contestants will have special memories. “The 18th hole,” said quarterfinalist Austin Squires, “there’s all that water on the left and the little stretch of fairway.”

Years ago a San Francisco journalist nicknamed the iconic 18th “The Closer,” not because it ended careers but because so many match-play events ended there, the fans on one side of the fairway, the surf crashing spectacularly on the other.

Jack Neville, with the help of Douglas Grant, laid out Pebble along the rolling bluffs. “It was all there in plain sight,” Neville told me back in the 1970s. “Very little clearing was necessary. The big thing was to get as many holes possible along the bay.”

Do courses make the player, or does the player make the course? The answer is both. Nicklaus hitting that 1-iron off the stick at 17, Tiger making that birdie out of the rough at six. That’s how we think of Pebble.

The quarterfinalists think they are in some of links heaven, and that’s a figure of speech because even though the official name is Pebble Beach Golf Links, the course does not traverse linksland.

Isaiah Salinda, a quarterfinalist, is from Stanford and South San Francisco. The Pacific Ocean is no big thing, although to him Pebble always will be. Squires, from Union, Kentucky, shakes his head at views he never imagined existed until his first trip to Northern California — and Pebble.

“It’s my first time at Pebble,” said quarterfinalist Devon Bling, who plays for UCLA. “This is an unbelievable place. I prepped by playing the little Tiger Woods PGA Tour game. It looks a little different in person. This is amazing.”

Is it ever.

U.S. Opens at Chambers, Erin Hills? Give us Pebble, please

in ,

By Art Spander

ERIN, Wis. — This 2017 U.S. Open at Erin Hills, smack in the middle of somewhere southwest of Milwaukee, has the strong scent of another on a course scraped out of America’s heartland, that one in 1970 at Hazeltine, near Minneapolis.

The responses that year varied from dislike to pure hatred, the latter expressed by the late Dave Hill, a testy pro who would just as soon drop a critic with punch as drop a 40-foot putt. “All it lacks,” he said of Hazeltine, “is 80 acres of corn and a few cows to be a good farm.” And he finished second.

Jack Nicklaus, more diplomatic than Hill, said what bothered him about Hazeltine is Ben Hogan never played there, meaning if the USGA, which runs the Open, is so obsessed with tradition, why are they bringing it to a site with no link to Hogan, Sam Snead or other former greats?

Now, after a remodeling, two U.S. Opens, a PGA Championship and the 2016 Ryder Cup, Hazeltine has some history and a presence. Mark Twain said that politicians, old buildings and prostitutes become respectable with age. To that list, add golf courses.

So maybe there is hope for Erin Hills. Or maybe not. The USGA deserves a small cheer, at least, for expanding the Open, once limited to very old line, private, restricted — and admittedly great — courses such as Merion, The Country Club and Winged Foot.

But bringing in venues such as Pebble Beach, Pinehurst and Bethpage Black, all expensive but available to the public, is different than showing up at a little-known site among barns and silos in America's Dairyland.

To a golfer, names like Pebble, Oakmont, Medinah and Shinnecock Hills, at the end of Long Island, have a certain resonance. As throughout sports do names such as Churchill Downs, the Rose Bowl and Yankee Stadium. Staging the U.S. Open at Erin Hills is akin to holding Wimbledon on a battered tennis court in northeast England, even if the opponents are Federer and Nadal.

This is the second installment of the USGA’s “Guess what we’ve got cooking?” idea. Two years ago, the Open was played at Chambers Bay, another unproven course on Puget Sound near Tacoma. It fell victim to the weather, a lack of rain in frequently rainy Washington State.

Gary Player, who has his own agenda — he designs courses — said Chambers Bay was awful. At least there were some beautiful views, unlike Erin Hills. And at the end, after the grumbling, the one-two finishers were, in order, Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson, two of the best.

That always has been one way to judge the quality of any course, and whether it should be used either for the U.S. Open or the PGA Championship: the leaderboard. The other two majors, the Masters, always at Augusta National, and the British Open, are outside this category.

If you get Spieth, who won two majors in ’15, and Johnson, who took last year’s U.S. Open at venerable Oakmont, then maybe the course will gain acceptance over the years. If not, at least it may have produced one magnificent tournament.

This week at Erin Hills, the leaderboard through two rounds was decent, especially with no Tiger Woods — who may be out forever — or Phil Mickelson in the field.

Rickie Fowler, who has the commercials, might at last get the major. Players such as Brooks Koepka and Paul Casey are winners lingering just outside the big names. They wouldn’t be a surprise with a victory.

What Erin Hills could have used to escape anonymity was a win by Rory McIlroy, Jason Day or Dustin Johnson, each of whom has at one time of late — Johnson at the moment — been No. 1 in the world rankings. “Never heard of the place, but Rory won there” sort of attention.

But Rory and Day missed the cut, and Dustin was right on the line.

Maybe Erin Hills' reputation will be that of the course where Day made two triple bogies on the front nine in the first round and a 23-year-old Open rookie from San Diego, Xander Schauffele, didn’t make a bogey until the second round.

Whatever, it’s still smack in the middle of nowhere, a course as hard to find as it is to play.

Global Golf Post: Pebble Beach Revealed as Beauty AND Beast

in ,
By Art Spander
For GlobalGolfPost.com

PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA -- It's a near-lethal combination, the U.S. Open and Pebble Beach, a tournament which can ruin your mind and wrench your wrists, and a course where the sun rarely shines and the putts hardly fall.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 Global Golf Post

SF Examiner: McDowell the last man standing

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

PEBBLE BEACH — The winner, of course, was the course, Pebble Beach. Graeme McDowell was the champion, the guy who finished first, but it was Pebble — tough, mystical Pebble — that proved the winner.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company

SF Examiner: Woods misses opportunity to steal US Open win

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

PEBBLE BEACH — They’ll look at what happened to star-crossed Dustin Johnson, how he fell apart the first few holes, mentally as much as physically, and tossed the U.S. Open over the cliff into Carmel Bay with a final-round 82.

And certainly that was true.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company

Newsday (N.Y.): Alluring Pebble proves bedeviling course

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to Newsday

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. -- It's the signature hole of Pebble Beach, a par-3 that pokes into Carmel Bay beguiles golfers with its beauty and sometimes baffles them its demands. You can putt onto the green from the tee, as did Sam Snead once, or you can be forced to use a 3-iron if the wind is in your face.

"How on Earth," mused Ian Poulter out loud as he walked to the 109-yard seventh Saturday, "are you supposed to play to that?''

Very carefully. Very tactically. As virtually every hole at Pebble, site of a U.S. Open for the fifth time. Especially the holes, such as the seventh, which are on the bluffs above the central California coast.

There's nothing quite like Pebble. Poulter managed a bogey 4 on the seventh Saturday. The biggest problem is the view. The player stands on the tee, looking at the surf crashing or maybe the Santa Lucia Mountains and sometimes loses concentration, not to mention an occasionally errant golf ball.

Pebble is like that. There's beauty everywhere. There's trouble everywhere. David Duval, who did so well in last year's Open at Bethpage, shot 31 on the front nine Saturday. He was a contender. Then he had a 7-over-par 43 on the back.

And how about Mike Weir? The opening round, he was among the leaders with a 1-under 70. After Saturday, he was among the bottom-dwellers, having shot a 12-over 83, despite an eagle 2 on the short fourth. Of course, he also had three double-bogeys.

Someone nicknamed Pebble "Double-Bogey-by-the-Sea," and the description is not inaccurate. Tons of those, and on the par-5 14th hole, numerous triple-bogeys. Friday on 14, which doesn't come close to the water, Zach Johnson destroyed his round with a quadruple-bogey 9.

"It's a beautiful, great course," insisted Poulter, the Englishman.

How do you do play it? As well as you can.

- - - - - -


http://www.newsday.com/sports/golf/alluring-pebble-proves-bedeviling-course-1.2037865
Copyright © 2010 Newsday. All rights reserved.

SF Examiner: Watson sentimental, satisfied at Open

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

Surely today will be the last dance for Tom Watson, his final round in a U.S. Open, the tournament that to him is the most important of any, this time being played on the course that to him is the most important of them all.

“If this is my last U.S. Open,” said Watson, “it couldn’t have happened at a better place, Pebble Beach. I’m somewhat sentimental about this place. There’s a lot to this place for me. It means a great deal to play the U.S. Open, but especially at Pebble Beach.”

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company

SF Examiner: Leaderboard all over the map at a truly open Open

in
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

PEBBLE BEACH – We should have known it would be like this. Should have foreseen another U.S. Open at Pebble Beach would produce everything from eagles to quadruple-bogeys, would give us a leader board of the famous and the anxious, would be, well, very Open.

Halfway through this 110th Open, this fifth at Pebble, Graeme McDowell is leading, Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson are lurking, and 60-year-old Tom Watson is playing. You can’t ask for much more.

Read the full story.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company

RealClearSports: Different Tiger? By Nine Strokes

in ,
By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. -- He said it was different, and it certainly was. Ten years different. Nine strokes different. "Now what are we to get from Tiger Woods?'' different.

Tiger owned Pebble Beach, figuratively speaking, 10 years ago. Tiger owned the U.S. Open, starting with a 65 and ending up a cumulative 12-under par. Tiger owned golf.

Read the full story here.

© RealClearSports 2010

SF Examiner: Favorite Mickelson suffers through poor first day

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

PEBBLE BEACH — Sorry about that, Phil. But that’s often what happens when you reach 40. Your putting falls apart.

Ben Hogan was a basket case on the greens when he crossed the magic number. Sam Snead even tried hitting a ball like he was playing croquet, not golf.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company

SF Examiner: U.S. Open will return to Pebble Beach in 2019

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

PEBBLE BEACH — It was a long time coming. “East Coast bias?” mused U.S. Golf Association official Mike Davis.

But once more it won’t be a long time before the U.S. Open returns to Pebble Beach.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company

SF Examiner: Stage set for more Pebble magic

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

PEBBLE BEACH — It’s a place of myth, magic and great champions. It’s a name, Pebble Beach, that evokes other names, those such as Nicklaus, Watson, Kite and Woods.

A golf course can be equated to a battlefield. It’s what happened there that makes it unforgettable. Through the years at Pebble Beach, what’s happened is four times the U.S. Open was played and four times top players won.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company

RealClearSports: Reacquainting with Tiger, the Golfer

in ,
By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. -- The sense of determination was heavy. Tiger Woods allowed that, yes, golf is supposed to be fun. "It's a game,'' he reminded. But a game with a purpose. To be a winner.

He sat there Tuesday, fielding questions two days before this 110th U.S. Open as he does before every major, smiling occasionally, snapping once. Whatever has gone on the last several months, and it's been a great deal, we are about to become reacquainted with Tiger the Golfer.

Read the full story here.

© RealClearSports 2010

SF Examiner: 10 years later, it's a different Tiger at Pebble

in ,
By Art Spander
Special to The Examiner

PEBBLE BEACH — The man has changed. At least to our way of thinking. It’s a different Tiger Woods.

The course has changed. The Pebble Beach that Woods and the rest of the field will challenge starting Thursday in the U.S. Open is not the Pebble on which Woods won the Open 10 years ago.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2010 SF Newspaper Company