Washington Post Column: Darren Clarke, Japan women illustrate sports’ redemptive powers

Here is my latest for The Washington Post ------------

At a time when just about every sports event is inflated into the single most important event of our time, the rare moments that truly do matter can easily slip past us.

Sunday was one of those days. Two remarkable events took place within hours of one another, the kind that remind us there is more to sports than selling ad space on caps and shirts and scoreboards.
Darren Clarke is a man who has endured genuine personal tragedy. Japan is a country that has been through one horror after another in recent months and is still reeling from the natural disasters that have rocked it to the core.

There is nothing that can happen to bring back Clarke’s wife Heather, who died from breast cancer five years ago, leaving him to raise their two sons who were seven and five at the time. There is certainly nothing that can wipe away the death and the suffering caused in Japan by the earthquake and the tsunami that ripped through the country earlier this year.

But Sunday gave those touched by those tragedies a moment to smile and to believe that life can be redemptive.

Clarke’s victory in British Open, 10 years after he last seriously contended in a major championship, was uplifting not only to him and his family and Northern Ireland, but to everyone in the game of golf.
Few players in golf are better-liked than Clarke. He has always been outgoing and funny and self-deprecating. He was always considered a major talent. He led the British Open for three rounds in 1997, and three years later, he easily beat Tiger Woods in the World Match Play final. While he won often around the world, he could never quite get to the finish line in a major.

He was, however, a Ryder Cup stalwart for Europe. Six weeks after Heather’s death in 2006, encouraged by friends and family to play, he won all three matches he played for Ian Woosnam’s team. The memory of the entire European team crowding around Clarke while he wept on Woosnam’s shoulder after his singles victory still lingers.

Click here for the rest of the column: Darren Clarke, Japan women illustrate sports’ redemptive powers

Oosthuizen has special performance, is ‘the champion golfer of the year’

Anyone who has read this blog at all knows how much I hate to fly. I find the entire experience exhausting, demeaning and, at times, frightening. Even taking drugs I feel every bump.

Since I made the decision after 9-11 to only fly when there was absolutely no choice in the matter, I haven’t really regretted it very often. I really don’t mind the long drives, in fact I almost look forward to them because I enjoy the solitude. Sure, the phone rings at times, but it is my option to answer it or not. And when I think ahead to a trip and realize I don’t have to deal with all the hassles of flying because I’m going to drive I sleep a lot better at night.

Twice a year I wish I didn’t have a flying phobia. The first comes when I watch Wimbledon. The second comes when I watch The British Open—or, as real golf geeks call it, The Open Championship. That feeling multiplies by about 10 when The Open is at St. Andrews.

The other Open venues are all terrific in their own way. There’s nothing more spectacular than Turnberry; Muirfield is a wonderful golf course and Royal Lytham and St. Anne’s, even though it lacks the romance of being in Scotland is in a lovely seaside town and is a superb test of golf. Carnoustie is, quite simply, the hardest golf course I’ve ever played. The first time I played there one of the guys in my group turned to his caddy on the 13th hole and said, “when do we get to the easy holes?”

The caddy never missed a beat: “When ya get to St. Andrews,” he answered.

He wasn’t kidding.

Without wind, as we saw early last Thursday, St. Andrews isn’t that difficult. Of course that can be said to one degree or another about all links courses. Look at what Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus did at Turnberry in 1977 or what Greg Norman did in the final round at Troon in 1989 when he played 20 holes (unfortunately for him he needed to play 22 if he was going to win the four-hole playoff) in ten-under-par.

The first and 18th fairways at St. Andrews are 100 yards wide and the 18th has become little more than a long par three for most of the pros. And yet, I DID see Ian Baker-Finch hit his tee shot off of No. 1 across the 18th fairway and out-of-bounds in 1995. The ninth is also driveable—as Louis Oosthuizen proved so emphatically on Sunday—and the 12th can be too.

But St. Andrews is St. Andrews. Playing the golf course or just walking it is an experience like no other if you care about golf. You don’t have to be Tom Watson to get tears in your eyes crossing The Swilcan Bridge, you can be a hacker like me. You can get your scorecard framed from the first time you played there with a big circle around the 4 you made on The Road Hole.

The town of St. Andrews is just as historic as the golf course and would be a joy to visit if you had never played golf in your life. But if you are a golfer, when you start back in the direction of the clubhouse on The Old Course the feeling that comes over you is almost indescribable. And the feeling comes back, even when you are just watching on TV, memories washing over you.

I’ve been lucky enough to play The Old Course on several occasions. The first time I played there my caddy told me on the first tee he’d been there 26 years and he’d help me out of any situation I might get myself into. On the third tee, I aimed, as I always did, well right to play for my hook and the wind and proceeded to hit a push-slice across the road onto The New Course. There was no out-of-bounds so I walked to the ball, turned to my caddy and said, ‘what have I got from here?’

The caddy looked at me as if I was from Mars and said, “I dunno, I’ve never been HERE before.”

And you thought only Tiger Woods made history at. St. Andrews.

Actually Woods made no history this weekend. In fact, he barely made any noise at all except for his usual litany of muttered profanities and his now familiar refrain: “I’m hitting it great, just can’t putt.” (Jeez, he IS starting to sound like a lot of people I know).

But history WAS made and it was made by Oosthuizen. When I saw his name pop onto the leaderboard after his 65 on Thursday I barely paid attention. This is what I knew about him: he was South African, had won recently in Europe and had a name I wasn’t sure how to pronounce. Then he led by five on Friday. Here was my thought: The real lead in the golf tournament is six-under-par, because I didn’t think 50-year-old Mark Calcavecchia, who was in second place at seven-under, was going to hang around to contend on Sunday either.

Here’s what I thought when he led by four on Saturday and I watched him hit every shot (note to the R+A: I don’t care how much money ESPN is paying you, a 4:40 tee time for the lead group on Saturday is outrageous. I know they play far later in other sports and you’ve got light until 10:30 but give some consideration to the players who just sit around waiting and waiting to play) in the third round: this guy can play. I also thought all the ESPN comedians needed to give up the shtick about how to pronounce his name. It might have been funny ONCE.

On Sunday I knew I was witnessing something special. My guess is the TV ratings were lousy because it was a runaway and Phil Mickelson (again) was nowhere near contention and neither was Woods, whose new putter lasted three days. That whole episode was strange, Woods claiming pre-tournament he had never putted well on slow greens. He’s won the British Open THREE times, how poorly could he have putted on slow greens?

Those who didn’t watch missed an historic performance. If Oosthuizen goes on to become a star in golf, great. He’s clearly a very nice man with a wonderful golf swing who dealt with the pressure of contending in a major for the first time—heck, he’d made ONE cut previously and finished 73d—with amazing calm. But if he NEVER contends in a major again his weekend at St. Andrews will be worth savoring forever.

And if you didn’t choke up at least a little bit when he opened his victory speech by wishing Nelson Mandela a happy 92nd birthday then you have no sense of history at all.

The awards ceremony at The Open Championship is like no other in golf. No one thanks sponsors and there are no self-congratulatory pats on the back by the guys running the event. Peter Dawson, the head of the R+A, introduces the low amateur, the runner-up and then, “the champion golfer of the year.”

Again, if you don’t get a few chills when those words are spoken, you should be watching baseball at that moment.

I’ve been lucky enough to be standing a few yards away when those words were spoken on 11 different occasions. I hope I find a way to do it again. No doubt the Open will go back to St. Andrews in 2015. Maybe by then I’ll figure out a way to get there.




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Stranded at home; Lesson from Bob Woodward on using the description of weather in stories

This snow thing is now officially out of control. As I sit here the conditions outside my window are pretty close to a white-out. The snow is falling hard and fast and the wind is blowing it all over the place. How long the power holds out is anybody’s guess. Yesterday, when I tried to run errands, I had the sense that people were preparing for the Apocalypse. (the snow-palypse?)

Parking was close to impossible since there weren’t that many spaces to begin with because of piled up snow from the weekend and the whole world was out trying to get any supplies available. What was interesting was that no one was fighting over spaces or over food or even over batteries. It was as if a calm had come over everyone, a quiet acceptance that the next few days (at least) were going to be miserable and all anyone could do was hope for the best.

I’ve lived in Washington for more than 30 years and I’ve never seen anything even close to this. If you live in Buffalo you may have a sense of what this is like (except that snow belt places are far better prepared to deal with this sort of weather than we are) but otherwise you can’t imagine it. I certainly couldn’t.

Last weekend I escaped the first storm by leaving town Friday afternoon to drive to West Point so I could do the Army-Colgate game on TV on Sunday. That turned out to be a wise decision. There wasn’t a drop of snow up there and I saw a bunch of my Army friends and stayed in the Thayer Hotel where there was plenty of heat, plenty of food and no snow to be found. My trip home was a breeze—until I hit Baltimore.

Only then did I have a real sense of what had happened. The interstate was closed because abandoned cars (there had been a trailer-truck accident in the middle of the storm Saturday) were still being removed. I zigged over to The Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which was down to one, snow and ice-covered lane. The rest of the trip home was a nightmare.

We’re being told it will snow all day today. Given that travel was still very difficult yesterday three days after the weekend storm had ended, I can’t see the area being close to dug out before the weekend. It will, of course, be much more difficult this time because there is already so much snow piled up from plowing.

I would have loved to have gone to the VCU-George Mason game last night, which turned out to be a great game—Mason coming from 15 points down to win in overtime. I would have gone to tonight’s Virginia-Maryland game except there is no Virginia-Maryland game because it was postponed by the snow. Now, among other issues, I have to figure out a column for Sunday’s Post since one of those two games would have supplied me with a column of some kind. I’m supposed to do Bucknell-American on TV tomorrow night. Normally, AU is a 15-minute drive from here. I have no idea if the game will be played or, if it is played, if I’ll be able to get out of my driveway, off my street and to the campus. I just have no idea.

Back in 1985, the first time I covered The British Open, Bob Woodward dropped me a note when I got home. I still have it someplace. (I’ve kept any and all notes I’ve ever received from people I admire and Bob is at the top of the list). The note said something like this: “Great job on the British Open. Best thing you did all week was make people understand what the weather was like and how it affected everyone. You can never write too much about the weather: it affects us all and we can’t control it.”

Just as when Woodward told me a few years earlier that the key to any investigative story and most stories of any kind was, “getting the documents,” I remembered what he said. In fact, a year later, when I wrote ‘A Season on the Brink,” I almost always described the weather on a given day. If you go back and look, the first sentence of the book describes the weather.

Jeff Neuman, the editor who (after five rejections from other publishers) who bought my proposal for the book for McMillan and Company, kept trying to get me to take out all the weather references. “People don’t need to know what the weather was every single day you were there,” he said.

“Yes they do,” I said. “Bob Woodward says they do.”

To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of snow.

I know people romanticize it all the time, “winter wonderlands et al,” and if you watch movies like, “White Christmas,” you’d think there’s nothing better than snow. I just don’t see it that way. It may look pretty on TV and, I’m like everyone else, I remember sledding as a kid (In Riverside Park, right near the 79th street boat basin there was a great hill) and loving it. Now, snow is a nuisance at best and frightening at worst.

I don’t mind cold. The two mornings I was at West Point I happily got up in the morning and walked around the post for an hour in temperatures that never got much above 20 degrees. That’s fine. I also know there are people who will say, ‘hey, what’s wrong with a couple of days at home, sitting in front of a fire, taking it easy.

When I hear stuff like that I think of something Gary Williams said to me a few years ago. Maryland had ended its season with an embarrassing first round loss in the NIT at home against Manhattan. I called Gary that night just to see how he was doing. The next day he called me back.

“Hey, sorry I just got your message,” he said. “I drove right to my beach house (in Delaware) after the game to get away.”

“Good idea,” I said. “A few days just walking on the beach will do you some good.”

“John,” he said. “There are only so many days you can walk on the damn beach before you lose your mind.”

He’d been there 24 hours.

To be honest, I’m the same way. Sitting at home in front of a fire at night watching the Islanders (they finally won a game last night!) is fine. But one night in a row—maybe two—is enough for me. There are games to go to, work to be done, places to go.

I won’t be going anyplace for the next couple of days. No games, no work, nothing. I can’t stand it. And I still need a Sunday column.