r before has a continental European won America’s national championship. The ‘mechanic-type’ courses never suited Severiano Ballesteros in his prime but at Augusta he and Jose-Maria Olazabal were given the space to play from the tee and between them the great Spaniards won four green jackets. Bernhard Langer played with unerring accuracy in his prime yet surprisingly never really contended in an American Open and the really good Swedish men including Jesper Parnevik and Henrik Stenson are yet to win any of the four big championships.
Even Nick Faldo, the Englishman with the most precise of all games from tee to green, couldn’t win the championship most demanding of precise play – or the incredible short game skills needed to cover the inevitable mistakes so penalized in the Open.
Tomorrow the German Martin Kaymer tees off at the absurdly late time of 3.35 (driven presumably by television) with a five shot lead and the confidence of beating by far the strongest field in the game at the Players Championship only last month.
All being equal the winner is beyond doubt but it is golf on a brutal course and last time at Pinehurst the third round leader Retief Goosen, already twice the champion, did a final 81 and lost to Michael Campbell.
Europeans, including the British, had a miserable time in major championships once Henry Cotton sailed past his prime in the late 1940s and only Tony Jackin and South African Gary Player won anything of any consequence in the era when the rest of the world played with the small, 1,62 inch, ball. The game was largely dominated by American superstars lead by Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.
Peter Thomson the five-time Open Champion was the great small ball player and he argued long and hard for its retention. ‘Why’, he said ‘should we just become an appendage of the American tour?’
His point was well made. Why did Europe, Asia, Japan, Australian and New Zealand all have to fall in line with the one continent using the bigger 1.68 inch ball adopted decades earlier because it sat up better on the lusher fairways of North America.
The answer is simple. All the major manufacturers were based in America and they were not about to chance to a hybrid compromise.
The R&A made the larger ball compulsory for the Open Championship at Lytham in 1974 and the European tour bought the large ball into play not long after. It demanded better striking, it has harder to play in the wind but it was easier to use around the greens.
What happened next was no coincidence and it is why Thomson, even tough he made a brilliant case, was ultimately wrong. Within five years of the 1974 Open Ballesteros had won the Open, coincidentally at Lytham and he inspired a generation of ‘foreigners’ including Faldo, Olazabal, Langer, Ian Woosnam, Sandy Lyle, Greg Norman and Nick Price. From almost nothing there were non-Americans winning golf’s biggest championships with regularity. It is almost beyond argument enforcing the change to the big ball changed the professional game around the world by making a generation capable of competing with the American superstars.
The small ball is now long forgotten, an oddity of an era of wooden clubs and monstrous courses stretching to almost 7000 yards.
This week at brilliant Pinehurst there are par fours stretched to previously unthinkable 530 yards, the course is almost 7500 yards and it is a young and talented German dominating. A European win in the U.S Open will be of real significance and its genesis has been forty years in the making.