By Art Spander
Global Golf Post
SHEBOYGAN, WISCONSIN — Jordan Spieth said it succinctly and approvingly. "It's good to have him back," was the observation. He was talking about the man with whom he partnered the first two rounds at the PGA. He was referring to Rory McIlroy. And yes, for the sake of golf, the sake of McIlroy and even the sake of Spieth, it was good to have him back.
Copyright 2015 Global Golf Post
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
HAVEN, Wis. — The man is confident, and he has every right to be. This has been Jordan Spieth’s year, his breakthrough, his star-turn. He won the Masters in record-breaking fashion, won the U.S. Open and fell one shot short in the British Open.
And now, he has a wonderful chance to take the final major of 2015, the PGA Championship. Three out of four in a calendar year is a feat accomplished only by the immortal Ben Hogan in 1953 and prime Tiger Woods in 2000.
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
HAVEN, Wis. — What's next for Tiger Woods?
In the short-term, it will be the Wyndham Championship in North Carolina next week. That’s probably the next tournament on his journey, his search. The indication is Woods will be at the Wyndham this coming week, which may be a mistake.
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
HAVEN, Wis. — He’s 102nd in the world golf rankings. He needs an interpreter when the questions are in English. And Friday in the second round of the 97th PGA Championship, Hiroshi Iwata equaled the lowest round ever in a major tournament.
Are we permitted to tweak the title of that old Beatles hit and make it “Out of Nowhere Man”?
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
HAVEN, Wisc. — Out on the man-built hillocks and swales that make Whistling Straits more difficult for fans to walk than for most pros to play, on the 17th green alongside side Lake Michigan, Tiger Woods had an 11-foot birdie putt. He missed, of course.
There barely was a response from the fans who made the risky walk to that area, a murmur rather than a gasp. And in the virtual silence, a young man trying to whisper. As Woods failed with the putt, the man sighed: “Those used to go in.”
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — He wasn’t exactly the wrong winner, although in the context of what was possible in this 144th British Open, that could be one definition — if an unfair one.
Zach Johnson may not be Jordan Spieth, in fame or fortune, but he is “The Champion golfer of the year.”
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — He was a stroke short, one swing of the 274 Jordan Spieth needed over the five days and four rounds of the British Open. This is the game of golf, a heartbreaker, because of one swing.
Three in a row, the first three majors of any year. Ben Hogan did it, won the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open in 1953. And nobody has done it since, and it's likely nobody will do it. Ever.
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Let us be the doubters, the ones who keep reminding Jordan Spieth what he’s trying to accomplish. We’ll tell him this has been done only once in the long history of golf, by the great Ben Hogan, and that it borders between improbable and unlikely — if not somewhere around impossible.
Spieth is a man apart, and man is the proper identification, not because he has reached his majority, age 21, but because he accepts the task at hand: winning a third straight major championship this year — and, lordy, maybe even a fourth — with an almost unreal zealousness.
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The confidence is subtle, demonstrated, not shouted. Yet there's no question Jordan Spieth has a belief that he can do what Ben Hogan did and what neither Arnold Palmer nor Jack Nicklaus could: win the first three golfing majors of the year.
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The specter of disappointment was lurking, haunting Dustin Johnson, or so we thought. What Johnson thought, or so he told us, was, hey, he can’t do anything about the past, about the way he squandered the U.S. Open.
“I did everything I was supposed to do,” he said of his final-day putting disaster at Chambers Bay. “It wasn’t difficult to get over it. But you know I was definitely happy the way I played.”
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — His strength is putting. He said so himself. But with the second round of the British Open full of rain, wind and a tiny bit of controversy, Jordan Spieth may have three-putted his way out of a chance for history.
Eight times over 18 holes that took two days and arguably may have taken Spieth out of his quest for golf’s Grand Slam — although he disagrees—Spieth needed three putts to get the ball into the hole.
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — He made us believers in the remarkable. Tiger Woods was one of a kind, captivating and enthralling. He chipped in at Augusta and won a Masters. He holed impossible putts at Torrey Pines and won a U.S. Open. But after yet another performance that was less embarrassing than it was lamentable, it is time to stop believing.
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — An hour’s drive north of Edinburgh, across the Firth of Forth, in the county of Fife, is golf’s holy land, Churchill Downs, Fenway Park and the Rose Bowl all rolled up in a bowl of haggis, the Scottish national dish.
In a region where “new” translates as something constructed in 1898, the “Old Course,” at St. Andrews, is appropriately named. The game of golf, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, has been played on the rolling links for nearly 600 years.
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
Featured Columnist
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Golf can be remarkably simple. Hit the ball, find it and hit it again. Golf can also be terribly complex when there’s too much thinking, too much listening to others than to oneself. Jordan Spieth came to that understanding long ago.
Spieth is the best golfer in the world right now, not so much by marching to his own drummer as ignoring the irregular rat-a-tat of others. He’s 21 going on 35, wonderfully skilled — isn’t there a line that says talent trumps experience? — and supremely confident.
Copyright © 2015 Bleacher Report, Inc. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — To the very end, until he decided to step away, Sinatra could fill a room. You thought of that when Tiger Woods, still searching for a past seemingly gone forever, came to the press tent for his pre-British Open interview.
It was standing room only for the media. Tiger never gives up, nor do we.
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
Special to Newsday
WIMBLEDON, England — Novak Djokovic understood whom he was playing and where he was playing Sunday. He also understood what he had to do against Roger Federer, a seven-time Wimbledon champion.
"You know he's not going to lose," Djokovic said. "I'm going to have to win it if I want to lift that trophy."
Copyright © 2015 Newsday. All rights reserved.
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
WIMBLEDON, England — They know his name now, know that he’s the best men’s tennis player in the world. They know his quickness, his return of serve and his ability to react, sprinting from one end of the court to the other. They even know his tendency to take tumbles as he reaches for balls beyond his reach, but not his hopes.
Novak Djokovic was always somewhat of an outsider, not so much an oddball but unusual — at least to Americans. Djokovic had a talent for mimicking other players, men and women — he knew every Maria Sharapova twist and move — and a talent for fading in big matches.
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
Oh those Oakland Raiders of the 1970s, talented and uninhibited, who, like the poem, would knock you ’round and upside down and laugh when they’d conquered and won. They seemed less a team of athletes than a group from central casting, characters but, when needed, full of character.
Ken Stabler, who died Thursday at 69 from colon cancer, was the perfect quarterback for those Raiders, someone who sensed how far he could push the rules and, in a manner of speaking, push his teammates — which was all the way to the top.
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
WIMBLEDON, England — Go ahead and say it: Grand Slam. Magic words in tennis, in sport, an attraction beyond the norm, a standard of brilliance, a mark of excellence, an achievement sitting right there within the grasp — well, the serves and the ground strokes of the magnificent Serena Williams.
Williams had attempted to avoid the subject, the way some baseball announcers refuse to tell us a team hasn’t had a hit, fearing somehow the words would have an effect, be a jinx.
©2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
Special to Newsday
WIMBLEDON, England — She had won Wimbledon, but Serena Williams was talking about New York and the U.S. Open. About the possibility of making history. About the possibility of becoming the first player in more than a quarter-century to win the tennis Grand Slam.
On a glorious day in suburban London, Williams beat Garbine Muguruza of Spain, 6-4, 6-4, giving her a sixth Wimbledon women's singles title and so much more. She now has a second "Serena Slam," winning all four of the majors in succession since the U.S. Open last year. And she has a shot at the true Grand Slam, all four in a calendar year.
Copyright © 2015 Newsday. All rights reserved.