A Major Major Upset
To win the British Open, the oldest championship in all of golf, you have to be a steely old bastard and also a wise one. You have to be able to read wind direction with your nose, know the difference between a brown green and a green one, figure out the humps and hollows of old, bony fairways. You must have enough experience in seaside golf, and in life itself, to accept the unholy bounces that will take your good shots and hurl them into the hay. You must already be a winner of great tournaments, an internationalist. You must be Ben Hogan or, as he is dead, Tiger Woods or Vijay Singh or Davis Love III or Thomas Bjorn of Denmark, the four world-class talents who, coming down the stretch, were in excellent position to win the claret jug on Sunday at Royal St. George's Golf Club, on the English Channel.
Or you could be Ben Curtis, the guy who won.
Ben Curtis is a 26-year-old golfer who still lives part of the time with his parents in a brick farmhouse built in 1829 on Main Street in Ostrander, Ohio (pop. 405), and who learned to play on the rich soil of the course his maternal grandfather constructed 30 years ago, when he decided to convert his pig farm into a muni. Ben Curtis is a self-taught, self-coached, no-nonsense professional, narrower in the shoulders than in the waist, with a 1950s-style Buckeye buzz cut, golf shirts you could buy at Marshalls and rumpled cotton khakis. He is a slightly built man who a year ago was playing on the Hooters Tour and who qualified for the British Open only by way of his 13th-place finish at the Western Open in Chicago earlier this month, in the 15th PGA Tour event of his life. The winner of the British Open is a man who in May missed the cut at the Memorial tournament—played in Dublin, Ohio, 15 miles from Ostrander—his game all fouled up by the pressure of having scores of friends and family following him.
Meet Ben Curtis, your new champion golfer for the year, class of 2001 at Kent State, where he met his fiancee, Candace Beatty. In her sensible sneakers and mid-length denim skirt and pink blouse, she climbed up and down the baked dunes of St. George's on Sunday and brought the tips of her fingers to her mouth when a well-endowed female streaker raced across the 18th hole during the awards ceremony. Her man did her proud. Curtis barely glanced at the naked lady. More to the point, he finished a shot ahead of Singh and Bjorn and two shots ahead of Love and Woods. He was the only golfer to play the 72 holes on the fiendishly difficult golf course below par, which he bettered by a single shot on rounds of 72, 72, 70 and 69.
He did it, said his Sunday playing partner, Phillip Price, the Welsh Ryder Cup player, by doing many things right and almost nothing wrong. Curtis was one of 11 players who didn't make worse than bogey on any hole in the championship. "It's not a glamorous game he plays," Price said after the tournament. "But he's in play, he putts beautifully and he has our three-quarter, under-the-wind shot as if he's been playing it all his life." Curtis has an unhurried rhythm with every club, most particularly the putter. He's a smart golfer, in the Jim Furyk mold: not overpowering, but a player who will most likely play hard courses well and struggle in the weeks when he has to shoot 25 under to win.
He became the first golfer to win the first major tournament in which he played since Francis Ouimet won the 1913 U.S. Open. His win combines the best elements of John Daly's wild-thing victory at the 1991 PGA Championship, which Long John got into as the ninth alternate, and Jack Fleck's everyman victory at the 1955 U.S. Open, in which the club pro defeated Hogan in a playoff.
Back in Ostrander, in the modest Mill Creek Golf Club clubhouse, the great moment was almost missed by Curtis's family and friends. The gang was all there, gathered around the TV to watch Ben play in, when the satellite reception was suddenly lost. The screen frequently froze. The golfer's father, Bob, the Mill Creek superintendent, and mother, Janice, a manager of the course, resorted to following their son on a website.
Regardless, they could picture his face. It doesn't change. "Ben doesn't show emotion and he doesn't say a whole lot," the father was saying on Sunday, with the game still on. "Right now I'm thinking, He's been playing decent, but where does this come from? I mean, he's ranked 396 in the world. With Ben, it's always where he's playing next and how much does he have to earn to keep his card." With his win Curtis now is ranked No. 35 in the world and has a five-year exemption on the PGA Tour. He's set. For Singh and Bjorn and Woods and Love, last week was about leaving a mark on the game. Curtis had more at stake. He was trying to find a home in golf.
The winner, really, should have been Bjorn or Woods, who often seemed subdued and joyless last week. Tiger lives for winning majors, and he hasn't won one for all of 13 months now, since the 2002 U.S. Open. Call it a slump at your own peril, but it is true that guys are no longer hiking in when his name is heading north on the leader board.
The great man and the great Dane lost shots on Thursday that they spent three days trying to get back. But once a shot is lost, it's on the ledger forever. On Thursday morning, when it was wet and blowy, Woods sent his opening tee shot right of the first fairway, into snarling, spongy, yard-high rough. Woods and the small army with him never found the ball, and it cost him two shots. Of course, Woods being Woods, he clawed his way back into the championship. Much later, a spectator claimed to have recovered Woods's inaugural ball. The two strokes, of course, could not be recovered. They were spent.
Thursday was expensive for Bjorn as well. On the 17th hole the 32-year-old Ryder Cup player, seeking his first major title, failed to get his ball out of a bunker and whacked his club in the sand, for which he incurred a two-stroke penalty (LIFE OF REILLY, page 84). How much would he pay to get those two shots back? Many euros, except such strokes cannot be bought.
Playing with Love in the final twosome on Sunday, Bjorn had a three-shot lead when he missed a 25-foot par putt on 15. Gary Evans, the English professional who finished a shot out of last year's British Open playoff, looked up at the locker-room TV and said, "Welcome to the pressure cooker." A swami, Evans. On the par-3 16th Bjorn needed three swipes to get out of a greenside bunker and made double bogey. On the par-4 17th, he drove into the rough and ultimately failed to get up and down, making bogey. Needing a birdie on the difficult, 460-yard par-4 18th to force a playoff with Curtis, Bjorn was short of the green on his approach, then could only stare as his chip fell off to the right.
Curtis, the first player to arrive at Royal St. George's and register for the championship, came without his regular caddie (who had a visa problem). So IMG, the agency that represents Curtis (as well as Woods), arranged for a veteran European tour caddie, Andy Sutton, to work for him. On his final hole on Sunday, in the fourth-to-last pairing, Curtis made an eight-footer for par, leaving him in second place, two shots behind Bjorn when he went into the scorer's trailer. He was pulled out by Sutton after Bjorn was done playing in the sand. "C'mon, we could be in a playoff," the caddie said. "You've got to go to the range and chip a few." Like the face of Big Ben, the London landmark the golfer saw on a day of touring last week, the expression on Ben Curtis's face never changed. Even with victory secured and Candace clutching him and shrieking, he remained impassive.
When the long Sunday was over, Bjorn and his wife walked to their car, linked by their young daughter, Filippa. The golfer held the girl's left hand, the mother had her right. Every three or four steps they lifted the squealing little girl into the air, higher than some of Bjorn's fateful bunker shots. If his world had ended, you could not tell. The European golfers show an uncommon grace in defeat: Jose Maria Olazabal at the Ryder Cup at Brookline in '99, Jean Van de Velde two months before that at Carnoustie. You saw it again on Saturday, when the veteran English golfer Mark Roe, after shooting a 67, was disqualified for signing the wrong scorecard. "The rules of golf are there to protect the game," Roe said placidly. There's more than one way to earn a permanent place in the lore of the game.
Curtis chose the best way. In Sunday's long dusk Mark Steinberg, the IMG agent who represents Woods, was pressed into extra duty squiring Curtis's fiancee and two of his cousins, who came "all the way from America," as the winner said in his simple, charming victory speech before the packed bleachers around the 18th green. Within the small Curtis entourage being led into the crowded press tent by Steinberg, there was understandable hyperventilating going on. "Everybody needs to calm down," the agent told his temporary charges.
The agent wasn't, of course, speaking of golf's newest champion. Ben Curtis is always calm, even when he sees his name engraved on the silver trophy alongside the names of Tom Watson and Greg Norman and Nick Faldo, all of whom played superbly last week, and also Bill Rogers and Kel Nagle and Fred Daly, who peaked with their Open wins.
In the press tent Curtis cited a threesome of Americans on the jug and in the pantheon of golf: Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Bobby Jones. "Right now, many people are probably saying, 'Well, he doesn't belong there,' but I know I do," the winner said. "So that's all that matters." Twenty-six years old, one major played and one major won, and already so steely and so wise.