Don't Call It A Comeback
Ian Baker-Finch says there's no grand plan behind his appearance this week at Colonial. But there's reason to believe he's shed his competitive demons
Eighteen years after his win in the British Open, Ian Baker-Finch said he is content now with his life as an announcer.
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Ian Baker-Finch didn't want to turn his week at Colonial into a media event, but that's kind of what it's become. The reasons for the CBS broadcaster coming out of the booth to compete in the Crowne Plaza Invitational were fairly simple, and had nothing to do with a comeback: It was the 20th anniversary of his victory at one of Ben Hogan's stomping grounds, his daughter is going to Southern Methodist University nearby and his producer, Lance Barrow, is a director at the club.
"I should have entered 5 p.m. Friday, just gone and played," Baker-Finch was saying last Sunday morning after a workout and before his duties with the CBS golf team at the HP Byron Nelson. "Everyone else is making this more of a story than what it is. It's always the same. It's why I stopped playing. It became, especially in Australia, the 'Ian Baker-Finch Watch.'"
And true to form, an Aussie film crew has arrived in Fort Worth, monitoring Baker-Finch's return to professional golf for the first time in eight years. This wasn't like the circus following Annika Sorenstam around Colonial six years ago, but as of last Sunday I was Baker-Finch's sixth one-on-one interview, and he was heading into the press room at the Four Seasons in Irving for No. 7 with Melanie Hauser of PGATour.com.
"I was thinking, 'Let's go there nice and relaxed, see how it goes, I may have eradicated the reason I left the game,' " he said. "Now I go to the first tee and I'm right back where I was."
And where was Baker-Finch? Right there atop the list of modern-day players who fell victim to analysis paralysis syndrome: From the British Open Championship at Royal Birkdale in 1991, when he went out in 29 and shot a final-round 66, to not being able to hit the first fairway at St. Andrews in 1995, nobody bottomed out as hard and as fast.
The story is sadder in the sense that Baker-Finch, in the words of close mate Robert Allenby, "is one of the nicest guys we know." You'd never know, either, when stepping on the back tee with him at one of his clubs, or by his day-to-day demeanor, that he is still battling the competitive demons.
"I'm always just trying to tell him, 'Don't worry about what everybody else is thinking, it doesn't matter at the end of the day. Just go play golf,' " Allenby said. "He's listened to so many coaches, telling him to try this, try that, if he would just go out, keep it simple, play golf like he does most of time around home, he can play well."
Whether he's at the Bears Club, the Ritz-Carlton GC, the Fox Club, or on the days when he's a guest at Seminole, McArthur, Jupiter Hills or the Medalist -- and he's such a good guy that everybody wants him in their foursome -- Baker-Finch never fails to shoot mid-to-high sixties. With the guys he usually plays against, whether that's Allenby or Luke Donald, or hockey player turned celebrity golfer Danny Quinn or former Walker Cupper Eoghan O'Connell, or his caddie this week, Lance Ten Broeck, he has to shoot that number or he gets taken to the cleaners.
"He's always shooting anywhere from three to six under," says Allenby, "and he does it easily."
"He's been up here quite a lot this year," said O'Connell, who runs the Fox Club. "He plays with Louis Oosthuizen, Mike Goodes, Lonnie Nielsen, and he always ways to play off the back tees. He's playing really well, shooting in the 60s every time."
