For the better part of a decade Payne Stewart was under contract to NFL Properties, the marketing division of the National Football League. All he had to do to earn his keep was wear, while playing golf, any one of several ensembles - plus-fours, knee socks, matching cap and shirt - done up in the livery of various professional gridiron teams.
Several years passed, during which Stewart won two Major championships, but to the best of anyone's knowledge not a single golfer was inspired to go out and buy himself a matching outfit in the colours of his favourite NFL team. When Properties dropped him, Stewart signed on with another clothing manufacturer, whose creations he continues to model on the golf course.
Given the limited success of the earlier clothing line, we would have to assume that Payne's victory in last weekend's US Open at Pinehurst is unlikely to start a run on plus-fours at pro shops around the world. On the other hand, the next time they head off to play a round on a misty weekend day, golfers all across American will probably pull out the shears and proceed to hack the sleeves off their $250 Gore-Tex rain-suits, as Stewart did just before he teed off last Sunday. Stewart will probably argue that this impromptu surgery was performed to facilitate freedom of movement in his swing, but it seems plain enough that it was done in order to better expose the design of the golf shirt he was modelling during the final round of the US Open.
One thing you will NOT see a lot of this summer is weekend golfers attempting to use fairway woods to escape tricky lies around the greens.
When young Eldrick Woods unveiled this tactic to some success in a couple of 1997 tournaments, thousands of amateur imitators had sprung up by the following week. The common supposition is that a couple of botched putts - Woods three-putted the 11th hole from 10 feet, and then missed another tiddler on the 17th - cost Tiger the chance to force a Monday play-off last weekend, but a couple of other factors were equally responsible.
Two days before the tournament began, Lee Janzen, the defending champion, had been sizing up the field, and suggested that Woods would have trouble at Pinehurst No. 2 because "`when Tiger misses, he tends to miss long." The observation proved prescient, particularly on Sunday, when on three occasions Master Woods' approach shots bounded off the back of Donald Ross' humpbacked greens. But in the end it was Tiger's stubborn reliance on his three wood as his `trouble club' around the greens which proved his undoing, every bit as much as his shaky putting. Twice on Saturday and then again on Sunday he used a three wood when a putter might have sufficed, only to wind up 15 or more feet beyond the cup. The results of this year's US Open will undoubtedly have produced the usual gnashing of teeth on the other side of the Atlantic. Stewart's victory extended the Europeans' streak in this tournament to 29 years without a win, and, on a course which was supposed to be better-suited to their game, no European player seriously threatened, with Darren Clarke's joint 10th the best showing. The truth here is that the Americans didn't play it much better.
After two rounds the past three US Open champions had all missed the cut. This year's Masters champion, Jose Maria Olazabal, had departed a day earlier, supposedly after denting the wall of his hotel room with a badly-thrown hay-maker.
The curious aspect of this story is that while Olazabal's frustration - he played the last four holes of the opening round in four over-par - is understandable, he dined that night at a Thai restaurant in Southern Pines and appeared to have no difficulty managing a fork. An even better question might be: If Ollie spends the next month with his broken hand in a cast and doesn't play competitively for a couple of weeks after that, will the European PGA force him to take a fitness test before allowing him to take his place in the Ryder Cup, the way they did my man Miguel Angel Martin two years ago? As for the venue itself, get used to it. The word is that the US Open will be back at Pinehurst No. 2 within the next decade, most likely in 2007.
Many competitors, John Daly among them, won't be happy to hear about this. After taking an 11 Daly claimed the United States Golf Association had set the course up to `embarrass' the world's best players. There was a consistency to player reviews all week. Those who handled Pinehurst well tended to praise it, while those who had their troubles - and none, save perhaps the unfortunate Olazabal, had more than Daly - disliked the course. Having said that, it might also be noted that Daly DID have a point: Donald Ross never intended his masterpiece to be so punitive that only one player would finish under par over four days. While the USGA made certain concessions - they allowed the rough to be cut at three inches, an inch below their customary specification, and even dispensed with the usual jungle of green-side rough - they more than made up for it in other areas. Par, for instance, was reduced from 72 to 70 for the event. If you or I went back to play Pinehurst No 2 this weekend, both the eighth and 16th holes would be listed on the card as par fives, the way Ross designed them to be played.
The USGA is not alone in this misguided attempt to protect par; at next week's Murphy's Irish Open, just for instance, the 18th at Druid's Glen, a wonderfully-conceived short par five, will be presented to the pros as a devilish par four. As Sam Torrance pointed out a few years ago, "I don't know why they couldn't have left it alone. It's a lovely par five.
Arbitrarily changing par, of course, does not make a hole or a golf course more difficult, it merely creates that illusion. As evidence of this thinking, consider that although Pinehurst No 2 underwent many changes, both during Ross' lifetime and after it, the course arrived at its present incarnation when grass greens were installed in order to attract the 1936 PGA Championship. Apart from the fact that he was pitching to and putting on Bermuda greens, Ben Hogan was playing essentially the same golf course when he scored 271 over four rounds to win the 1942 North and South Championship.
That was 17 under par then (and since Donald Ross was the club president, you can take it that nobody attempted to re-designate his par five holes anything else for THAT tournament), and nine under even by last weekend's standards. Daly may have been off-base when he accused the USGA of attempting to embarrass the golfers, but by making a great golf course far more difficult than it needed to be, the bluejackets were clearly trying not to embarrass themselves.
