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The anchoring argument and tradition

Mike Stachura — Sat, 25 May 2013 14:22:00 GMT

By Mike Stachura David Owen's recent post from a reader suggesting that the legendary Bobby Jones appears to be anchoring while putting raises one of the most inflammatory arguments in the roiling debate over whether the ruling...

Is the U.S. Amateur a major championship? Another round in the debate

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:51:00 GMT

When Jack Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters at age 46, we know it was for his sixth green jacket. What we don't know -- or at least can't seem to agree upon -- is whether the win was Nicklaus' 18th or 20th in a major championship.

The gray area has to do with whether you count Nicklaus' two wins in the U.S. Amateur as a major, an argument that has even greater relevance these days since Tiger Woods has three U.S. Am wins of his own (putting his career major total at either 14 or 17 depending on your definition).

So should the Amateur be considered a major, counting as much as the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open, or the PGA Championship? Two of our writers, Ryan Herrington and Alex Myers, square off in one of golf's great debates.

COUNT IT AS A MAJOR

To apply the label of major championship to a golf tournament is a subjective task, but it is one that can be done using objective truths. A "major" is a tournament that has the mortar of history providing its foundation. It annually assembles the best available competitors, all of whom aspire to win the championship above most any other title. It provides a superior challenge inside the ropes, one that separates the sensational from the standard and identifies the best player for that week.

Set against these measures, the U.S. Amateur Championship wears the label of "major" quite well. For 112 years the USGA has given out the Havemeyer Trophy, longer than any U.S. organization has been naming a winner of any golf tournament. The names that appear on that hardware have defined the game for generations.

The event is taken to the country's best courses, set up under conditions as demanding as any event in the world. (I might remind you that it wasn't until the participants at the 2005 U.S. Amateur were sufficiently stymied by Merion GC did the USGA decide to bring another U.S. Open to the course). There isn't a golfer alive who is eligible to play who wouldn't accept a spot in the 310-player field and longingly hope to obtain the spoils of victory at week's end.

There is one thing that the U.S. Amateur doesn't have that the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championship possess: professional golfers. Some will consider that a deficiency. For me, it's hardly a major problem.

-- Ryan Herrington

Follow @GWCampusInsider

DON'T COUNT IT AS A MAJOR

Even the casual golf fan knows that Bobby Jones' "Grand Slam" in 1930 included the U.S. and British Amateurs. And while at the time those events were considered majors, guess what? Times change.

The U.S. Amateur remains a big event, but it doesn't have the prestige it once had and isn't nearly the stepping stone to a golfer's career it once was. Unlike in the days of Jones, today's amateur events, even the pinnacle of the amateur golf calendar, cannot be compared to professional tournaments due to the obvious disparity in talent. The U.S. Amateur has a terrific field of talented prospects, but it consists mainly of American golfers who aren't old enough to drink yet.

Also, today's best amateurs don't stay amateurs for long, giving them only a small window to win the event. Yet for some reason, despite the wide gap in competition, keeping amateur and professional accomplishments separate is more of a sticking point in golf than in other sports. Take basketball, where Michael Jordan's six rings with the Chicago Bulls aren't grouped with the NCAA title he won at UNC.

And if we are to include the U.S. Amateur when counting a golfer's major championships, where do we draw the line? Wouldn't the British Amateur count as well since it did for Jones? If so, then congratulations, Sergio Garcia! You have won a major!

No, let's continue to count the professional majors separately, meaning Jack Nicklaus has 18, Tiger Woods has 14, Jones has seven and Garcia (sorry!) has zero. Keeping score in this game is hard enough as is.

-- Alex Myers

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Golf's Biggest Phenoms

Alex Myers — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

We take a look at some of the most talented youngsters to ever burst onto the scene.

2013 Masters Survey: 18 Questions

Golf Digest — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Masters lovers will do the darnedest things.

In a season of collapses, remembering one of the worst of all

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:58:00 GMT

By Bill Fields
Follow @billfields1

KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. -- During a season of lost opportunity, with the 94th PGA Championship being played on a dangerous course where a lead could have the permanence of a sand castle, it is worth remembering something that happened a long time ago.

Adam Scott, meet Al Watrous.

It is the 80th anniversary of one of the oddest matches ever contested at the PGA Championship, which went mano a mano from its inception in 1916 through 1957. This tussle, a scheduled 36-hole, first-round match at Keller GC in St. Paul, Minn., was epic.

Photo of Al Watrous by Getty Images

Watrous was 9 up with 12 holes to play against Bobby Cruickshank. That would seem to be an insurmountable advantage.

It wasn't.

Rather, the match turned into perhaps golf's ultimate tale of collapse and comeback.

"There is nothing more wearing to a leader who is playing well than the knowledge that his enemy is refusing to crack," wrote Bernard Darwin. "If by hanging on we can drive that knowledge into him, we may make him crack instead and that crack will be a bad one when it comes."

Darwin could have been talking about what happened that late-summer day in Minnesota.

Cruickshank hung on. Watrous cracked. It wasn't pretty.

Watrous was 33, a dominant player in Michigan, where he moved from New York when he was very young. (He would be the head professional at Oakland Hills for 37 years and capture nine Michigan PGA and six Michigan Open titles.) He won the 1922 Canadian Open and was on the first two U.S. Ryder Cup teams. Watrous was a pro's pro. As Walter Hagen wrote, "He's a great golfer . . . one of our real stylists."

"No one taught me the swing," Watrous told a Florida reporter in 1977. "I developed it from observation, you might say. I saw Bobby Jones when he was very young and Walter Hagen. I saw Harry Vardon. He was my idol. I was told I had a lot of Vardon's swing concepts."

Vardon, in fact, had been there to console Watrous after the 1926 British Open at Royal Lytham & St. Annes. Two ahead of Bobby Jones with five holes to play, Watrous was in control and poised to win. But he three-putted three times down that closing stretch. When Jones pulled off a miraculous approach from a difficult lie on the 17th hole, it was enough to defeat his faltering foe.

Cruickshank, too, had been a major victim of Jones, losing out to him at the 1923 U.S. Open -- one of nine top-six finishes the 5-foot-4 Scot had without claiming a major title. Given what Cruickshank had endured as a young man, however, his golf career was gravy.

During World War I Cruickshank saw the worst of battle, wounded in 1917 during a German barrage that claimed his younger brother, John, and 77 others in a company of 110 men. "There had been thousands of shells and everything was covered up," Cruickshank told Golf magazine in 1974. "I never found my brother, and yet he had been as close to me as from here to that door."

After convalescing, Cruickshank returned to duty and was taken prisoner in France. He escaped the following year and immigrated to the United States in 1921.

The ups and downs of golf competition weren't hard for "Wee Bobby" to keep in perspective. "We played everywhere and would have played for nothing," he said in 1974, "just to promote the game."

What looked like certain defeat for Cruickshank against Watrous in 1932 took a slight turn on the sixth hole of their second 18. As the duo approached the green, which Cruickshank had missed and Watrous hit, the Scot told Watrous it was the first time he would be 10 down in a match. The comment struck a chord with Watrous, who conceded his opponent a tricky six-footer.

"I felt a little sorry for him getting beaten so badly and didn't want it to be any worse than it had to be," Watrous wrote in a 1979 account of the match in Golf magazine.

"Not that Bob was ungrateful, but something aroused his genius immediately thereafter," The American Golfer reported in 1932. Cruickshank won the seventh hole, nonchalantly holing a 20-footer for birdie while Watrous missed an eight-footer for a halve. Cruickshank won the eighth, ninth, 10th (with an eagle) and 11th (chip-in birdie) holes.

Still, Watrous led 2-up with two to play. But he missed a two-footer on the 17th, and when Cruickshank birdied the par-5 18th -- he was seven under for the last 11 holes -- the match went to extra holes.

Watrous appeared to have salvaged victory on the 40th hole. With Cruickshank having bogeyed the par 3, Watrous faced a two-foot birdie putt following a beautiful 7-iron. "... he started to make a gesture to concede my putt and call it a match," Watrous wrote in Golf. "But at the last second he decided not to, although he hit his bogey putt very fast, one-handed I believe, as if to say that's it."

But Watrous missed his downhill birdie attempt and also the one nearly as long coming back. Incredibly, Watrous missed another two-footer on the 41st hole, ending what was only the second-longest match that day. Hagen lost in 43 holes to John Golden, part of what the Associated Press called an "orgy of overtime matches."

It was certainly a day when no lead was safe.

Despite meager Open record, Snedeker surges into lead

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:08:00 GMT

LYTHAM ST ANNES, England - Until quite recently, Royal Lytham & St Annes hadn't been the most welcoming of sites in the Open Championship rota for American players, with 70 years separating the conquest by Bobby Jones in the 1926 Open, Royal Lytham's debut, and Tom Lehman's '96 epiphany.

David Duval followed with his 2001 triumph, and now here comes another Yank, Brandt Snedeker, getting cheeky with the Lancashire locals.

Photo: Glyn Kirk/Getty Images

Snedeker, a fast-twitching talent from Nashville, Tenn., accomplished an unimaginable feat Friday at the 141st Open, throttling Royal Lytham with a stellar 64, which tied the course record, and daring to put his placard next to dearly beloved native son Nick Faldo. At 10-under 130, Snedeker equaled Faldo's 36-hole Open record set in 1992 at Muirfield, Scotland.

This from a guy whose three previous starts in the Open resulted in missed cuts. Snedeker hadn't even broke par in the UK before showing up at Royal Lytham.

"I'm sure everybody in this room is in about as much shock as I am right now," said Snedeker, 31, who beat his previous best round in a major by four strokes. "But I feel good. I played, honestly, pretty well the first two days."

Snedeker's being modest.

Related: Unlikely British Open Champs

A three-time winner on the PGA Tour, including the Farmers Insurance Open in January, Snedeker has performed exceedingly well, and his round Friday was fueled by cool, calculating iron play and unconscious putting. He hit 15 rain-softened greens in regulation, mostly aiming at the fat parts, and then buried a series of ridiculous putts, including a 45-footer at the sixth, a hole where bogey looked probable until he found that his pull-hooked tee shot into Lytham's jungle-like rough could be advanced to the green.

"I've gotten very fortunate when hitting bad shots," Snedeker conceded.

Of course, what really chaps the blokes around here is that Royal Lytham is playing more like your neighborhood TPC. Steve Stricker mentioned the "American-like conditions" in Round 1. Rain has sawed off its teeth, and with no wind to flummox the field someone with a hot blade had the potential to slice up Lytham.

Fifth on the PGA Tour in putting, Snedeker was just the guy to do it.

"When it comes to, you can call the 'American-ization' of this golf course, I guess, the softness of it, yeah, that's played a factor in it, for sure," Snedeker allowed. "It would be stupid to say it hasn't. I've never seen balls spin at a British Open before, and it's spinning this week. Having said that, it's still a links golf course. You've still got to get your ball around it.

"I'm making every 25footer I look at, so that makes it a lot easier," he added. "I feel like the reason why I knew I was going to play well this week, because ... from the first day I stepped on these greens I had a great feel for the pace."

Here's something else. There are 205 rather nasty bunkers at Royal Lytham. They have not been christened with fancy names like those at the Old Course at St. Andrews, but they are fierce, deep, sod-faced pocks of sand. Snedeker, known for his crisp ball-striking and spurts of birdies, hasn't been in one yet this week. Thus, through 36 holes, he has suffered no bogeys, a first for anyone in a major since Tiger Woods at St. Andrews in 2000.

"When he gets going, Brandt can go crazy low," said fellow American Hunter Mahan. "It is not surprising at all that he can get on a roll like this as well as he can putt."

Related: Brandt Snedeker: How to go low

Snedeker withdrew from the U.S. Open and sat out five weeks recently because of a bad cough. OK, so it was a cough that became so violent that he cracked a rib and had to withdraw from the Memorial Tournament after 36 holes. He didn't return until two weeks ago at The Greenbrier.

The next two days will reveal whether he has the fortitude and talent to not cough up his meager one-shot lead over Adam Scott, who added 67 to his opening 64.

He might be on foreign soil here, but Snedeker is not venturing into uncharted territory. Prior to his Open debut in 2008 at Royal Birkdale, Snedeker played a practice round with Tom Watson, winner of five Open championships. As a youngster, Snedeker fashioned his game, somewhat, after Watson's, mostly his fast play and fluid swing tempo.

The lessons didn't take right away, but he can draw on them now. Further motivation comes from his disappointing 2008 Masters, when, playing in the final pairing with eventual winner Trevor Immelman, he crashed to a closing 77 and left teary-eyed and T-3.

"This weekend I feel prepared," Snedeker said. "I've been in some pretty tight spots in the States and I've been playing in playoffs and playing against the best players in the world. So I kind of know what pressure feels like. Obviously it's going to be a lot more over the weekend, but I've got something to fall back on.

"I'm going to go out there and try to do the exact same things I did the first two days and hit a bunch of greens and make a bunch of putts and try to extend my lead as far as possible."

-- Dave Shedloski
Follow @DaveShedloski

Stingers: Dear gallery, stop yelling stupid things!

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 18:51:00 GMT

Hey, you! Yeah, you, the obnoxious guy who yells out absurd things right after a golfer tees off. You know who you are. Now stop it!

It's bad enough that golf fans have had to endure "Get in the hole!" and "You da man!" for decades. But now we have to deal with a new era of creative -- make that ridiculous -- sayings, many of which were on display at Olympic Club during the U.S. Open. "Mashed potatoes!"? "Filet mignon!"? "5-hour Energy!"? OK, so that last one -- yelled following a Jim Furyk tee shot, of course -- was actually pretty funny... but back to my original point: Enough's enough! If I wanted to hear drunk guys yelling random things, I'd watch "Jersey Shore."

I really hoped no one yelled "Get in the hole!" here. It was a par 5. (Getty Images)

I'm not trying to sound all Bobby Jones-preachy here. I don't think fans should be restrained to soft "golf claps" and dressing like they're about to attend a business conference, but they should keep in mind that players can actually hear them. And worse, everyone else watching -- both in person and on TV -- can as well.

I mean, if you're going to take advantage of total silence, why not at least scream something that's for a good cause? Maybe something like "Peace and goodwill!" Or, "Lower gas prices!" Or better yet, "Stop making Adam Sandler movies!"

At least there weren't any fans dumb enough to interrupt the trophy ceremony. Oh wait, that's right. One bozo's desperate attention-seeking ploy did just that, and prompted Webb Simpson to deliver the line of the week when he said, "Enjoy the jail cell, pal." Now that's something I hope everyone heard loud and clear.

Fans are supposed to stay behind the ropes and in general, keep to themselves. They should not feel entitled to make themselves part of the show. Can you imagine watching a highlight of Jack Nicklaus' 1-iron off the flagstick on No. 17 at Pebble Beach in the 1972 U.S. Open and hearing some idiot yelling "Mango chutney!" in the background? When it comes to major championships, as I once heard a Grand Canyon tour guide enthusiastically proclaim, "We're making memories here, people!" Let's try not to taint them.

-- Alex Myers
Follow @AlexMyers3

How He Hits That: Learn from Dufner's Trademark Waggle

Roger Schiffman — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:19:00 GMT

Editor's Note: Every Monday Kevin Hinton, Director of Instruction at Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, N.Y. and one of Golf Digest's Best Young Teachers, tells you how a tour player hits a key...

Tiger's tantrums? "Not on this stage," says Curtis Strange

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:59:00 GMT

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- As for the meaning of the Tiger Woods tantrums during Friday's second round of the Masters, two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange says, "It shows how truly frustrated he is. Only two weeks, he thought he had it. Now, not so much."

Woods won Arnold Palmer's tournament at Bay Hill two weeks ago. During Friday's round -- his 72-75 made the cut by two shots and left him behind 39 players -- Woods muttered curses picked up by television's microphones. At the 16th tee, after a 9-iron shot fell short and right of the green, he dropped the club, then kicked it.

Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Maybe Joe Hackenchop could go unnoticed with such an act in the Screen Door Open at Carlock, Illinois. But Tiger Woods is Tiger Woods, and attention must be paid. If the PGA Tour had any spine at all, it would change its policy of disciplinary measures carried out in secrecy. It then would fine Woods for the tantrums and announce that the next piece of boorish behavior would be cause for a month's suspension. Of course, it's more likely that I will be the Republican nominee for president before the PGA Tour dares move against its cash cow.

Photo Illustrations: Backward Hats, Forward Thinking

GolfDigest.com — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Photo Illustrations: How the icons of the game might look with their hats turned around