Kyle Stanley
Thoughts on a Monday morning after quite a weekend in SportsWorld, to appropriate a word that the writer Robert Lipsyte used for the title of his 1975 book on the role of sports in American culture. His most recent book is An Accidental Sportswriter, a memoir. Lipsyte, by the way, does not like golf. Never mind: He's a terrific writer and I always looked for his columns in the New York Times.
Anyway, here we go.
Robert Rock beat Tiger Woods in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship although everybody seems to be saying that Woods beat himself. We used to expect that it was a guarantee that Tiger would stomp all over the field when he entered the last round in the lead or tied for the lead. He and Rock were tied starting the final round. Woods sprayed his driver and shot 72, while Rock shot 70 to win. He said he was surprised that he managed to get the job done, but get it done, he did. As for Woods, the truth about his game will be told when the Masters comes around in two and a half months. He cares only about peaking four times a year, at the majors. Meanwhile, what a win for Rock.
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And what a loss for Kyle Stanley. The 24-year-old took a three-shot lead over Brandt Snedeker to the par-five final hole at the Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego, but tripled the hole and then lost the playoff. Twitter blew up with pitter-patter and clichés about how Stanley will learn a lot from his loss, which was no "tragedy," by the way—this golf, and golf only. Peter Jacobsen, a seven-time PGA Tour winner who once made eight on the last hole of a tournament, and won, told his 17,594 Twitter followers that "Kyle will learn from this and will win soon." He followed up with, "Most writers don't have the perspective of competition and what it can do for you. It can make or break you." The latter is probably true. The former? Not so sure. Who knows whether Stanley will win soon? Why is it a given that what happened will make him rather than break him? Nobody knows, not even Jacobsen. That said, I think he would make an excellent Ryder Cup captain. He's not afraid to say what he thinks, but he's also not so arrogant as to believe he knows it all. I'd wager that Jacobsen would be a pretty casual captain and that he knows winning or losing a Ryder Cup is more about the players than the captain. Meanwhile, I do hope that Stanley wins soon. He's loaded with talent and drive
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Speaking of drive, how about that final match in the Australian Open? Tennis, not golf, of course. I was riveted to the final even though I was watching a replay and knew that Novak Djokovic had beaten Rafael Nadal in an epic five-set match result that lasted nearly six hours— the longest final by 59 minutes in men's tennis majors. The shotmaking was otherworldly. I long for an equivalent in one or more of golf's majors this year. Nicklaus/Watson at Turnberry in the 1977 Open Championship? More, please.
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I played some golf on the weekend with my colleague Robert Thompson. He came down to Jupiter from the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, revved up and ready to use his Cobra Long Tom 47" driver, "the ultimate driver for jaw-dropping distance," according to Cobra's publicity material. We played the Loxahatchee and Dye Preserve courses in the Jupiter area, and rode around the Medalist Golf Club just up the road in Hobe Sound, where Woods, Rickie Fowler, Dustin Johnson and many other tour pros belong. Stacy Lewis, the gifted 26-year-old winner of the 2011 Kraft Nabisco Championship, an LPGA major, was working on her short game when we set out on our trip around the splendid course that Pete Dye and Greg Norman designed.
We returned an hour later. Lewis was then on the putting green. If I've learned one thing from spending winters in Florida, it's how hard tour pros work on their games. I ran into Woods at the Medalist a couple of weeks ago. He's there most every day, for hours. If he doesn't win the Masters, or anywhere else this year, it won't be for lack of work. As I wrote before the final round in Abu Dhabi, he needs to get his driver in order and hit more fairways. He hit only two fairways on Sunday in Abu Dhabi. Come Sunday at Augusta National, or Thursday, Friday and Saturday, for that matter, he'll need to do better. He doesn't need Long Tom. He needs the old Tiger, the one who could hit the shots and make the putts he needed. He's working hard at the Medalist to find fairways and make putts.
Next tournament stop for Woods? The AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, where he'll tee it up for the first time since 2002. Ah, Pebble. Woods won the 2000 U.S. Open there by 15 shots. Those were the days.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein