No matter what you saw on TV, it was Tiger Woods who presented Trevor Immelman with the green jacket for 2008.
Defending champion Zach Johnson only performed the formality of physically slipping the jacket onto Immelman’s shoulders, first for the worldwide TV audience in the Butler Cabin and again at the real ceremony on the 18th green.
Woods had plenty of chances to make a lead-grabbing move, but left his putting touch at home and didn’t capitalize on a single one. Simple as that.
He may have played on a damaged knee, but that was his choice and to his credit never used it as an excuse. In fact, no one knew of his surgical plans until after the surgery, when he briefly mentioned it on his website.
Unfortunately, not a lot of surprises Sunday. As expected, most of the wannabes ahead of Woods starting the day began to wilt just as the Magnolia and Azalea blossoms will do over the next 10 days. One by one, they succumbed to what the Augusta National now becomes on Masters Sunday – a mental torture chamber. First Paul Casey, then an extremely-game Steve Flesch, and finally gutsy Brandt Snedeker – all fought the valiant fight only to discover they don’t have all the shots needed to win the Masters on the new Augusta National. Nor the focus.
I speak for many of us when I say I hope the members at the Augusta National are pleased with how they’ve bastardized what once was the greatest major. I sure hope they are finished screwing with the golf course. Because what they’ve done over the last 10 years is turn what was once the most exciting Sunday of golf on the calendar into a boring, lackluster, cheap knockoff of the USGA’s worst nightmares. Did you see anyone “going for it” on Sunday? Not on CBS you didn’t.
Because nowadays you can’t. Even if they would’ve soaked the greens all night long to make them receptive, the stout winds snapping the flags and the bright sunshine would had them firm and crispy by noon. It was nearly impossible to get the ball close to the pins, which on the quick, Stimp-15 Augusta greens are always in places meant to embarrass players.
Now that they’ve allowed kids to enter free, what you saw Sunday was probably the biggest crowd in the last 20 to 25 years. But you’d never know it by your ears. Sadly, loud groans have replaced the explosive cheers that once echoed off the verdant hillsides and through the canyons of tall Loblolly pines. That’s because galleries don’t cheer “boring”.
Maybe it is someone’s macabre idea of “fun” to invite about 100 of the greatest players in the world, put them on the most beautiful and well-conditioned golf course on the planet at a time of year when we’ve all been golf-deprived for over six months, and then do everything possible to embarrass and humiliate them.
“It’s a pretty good test of golf,” Jim Furyk offered early in the week. “I mean, it used to be a lot of fun to play. It’s not fun anymore, but it definitely got a lot more difficult.”
You’re not alone there, Jim.
Even the second-best golfer in the world, Phil Mickelson, went home muttering to himself, frustrated by not being a factor. This was supposed to be his major, right?
Once again, Woods could not get a feel for the diabolical greens at the Masters – actually, no one could. Heck, he shoots 68 in the final round and he earns his fifth green jacket. But it was not to be. It was almost cruel to watch him play his heart out and give another supreme effort only to have nothing to show for it but second place. Lost in the shuffle will be the fact that Woods had a better final round (par 72) than everyone ahead of him on the Sunday morning leaderboard – by three shots. Immelman (75), Snedeker (77), Flesch (78) and Casey (79).
Can you believe it? A guy shoots three-over 75 on Sunday and still wins by three?
So Woods’ quest for a Grand Slam will have to wait another year.
With a little luck on the greens, which he didn’t have all four days, Woods could’ve easily shot that 68 to finish and win with 9-under. (Incidentally, that’s what I said I’d take for final score Saturday morning on the radio. The Golf Channel’s Brian Hewitt said he would have taken 7-under at that point and gone and sat in the clubhouse. I’m just a better guesser. But I digress.) This is not to say Immelman isn’t a worthy champion. He has won championships at every level.
As I pointed out in my Worm Castings blog earlier in Masters week, Trevor went nose-to-nose with both Woods and Vijay Singh at Cog Hill in the final round of the last Western Open (2006) for his first PGA Tour victory.
I’ll never forget the way the hard-nosed Immelman finished that one – the 28-year-old South African needed to two-putt from 32 feet above the hole to seal the victory. (All day, Immelman failed to fail under intense pressure from Woods, who mounted one of his famous Sunday charges. You remember that day – in the middle of his heroics, Woods knocked his tee shot on the par-4 10th hole at Dubsdread onto the collar of the green.)
But instead of safely two-putting Dubs’ 18th from 32 feet for his first PGA Tour win, Immelman drilled the downhill putt (with 9 feet of break) center-cut for a two-shot margin.
What got into him at Augusta? He’d missed the previous week at the Houston Open.
Perhaps Immelman calmed himself at Augusta with the thought of what he’d already been through in the last few months – that being the leader on the back nine on Sunday at the Masters doesn’t even come close to the life-altering horror of hearing you’ve been diagnosed with cancer. And the ensuing surgery and recovery.
Way to go, Trev.
RANDOM THOUGHTS: Somehow, Nick Faldo was on the air for four days without sneaking in a shameless, free plug for any of his sponsors. Methinks the avoid-commercialism-at-all-cost membership at Augusta National might frown on that. In that same vein, kudos for the four-commercial-minutes-in-one-hour format.
Might I also add how refreshing it was to listen to a lengthy golf broadcast without once hearing anyone stump for the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Evaluation Series (FECES)?
I have to salute the Augusta National membership for its “Golf Goes Worldwide” initiative, asking viewers to go online at masters.org and post their ideas on how to grow the game. On the other hand, 16 years ago the “finest minds” of the top golf organizations met for the same purpose. Golf Summit ‘92 produced some great ideas for improving a game that had yet to peak in this country. Virtually none of those ideas were put in action. Now that the game’s warts are showing, should we expect the Augusta National members to succeed where the country’s biggest golf organizations have failed miserably?
OK, here are my ideas for “Golf Goes Worldwide”:
I have attended the Wednesday Par-3 contest several times. None of those times did I ever see anything that resembled what was televised as the 49th edition. It used to be a quasi-serious competition. Now, allowing the children of the competitors to participate was a noble concept and accentuated the club’s effort to grow the game. On the other hand, the expanded participation dragged out the playing times to the point where the last groups were in danger of not finishing because of darkness. And because of all the excess foot traffic around the holes, the last groups of the day didn’t have a prayer of making a decent-length putt, either.
If the Augusta National membership wants to entice children to take up the game of golf, then it needs to get out front of the slow play those same children see when watching the pros on TV. Masters tournament director Fred Ridley, an Augusta member and past USGA president, emphasized early in the week that they reduced the 18-hole target time by seven minutes this year. To a new goal of 4 hours, 45 minutes – FOR A THREESOME! Sheesh. And our local public courses expect our foursomes to finish in four hours to 4:15?
I guess the next question would be “Why even talk about a target time?” The playing times the first two days were 5:17 and 5:37 – the latter 53 minutes over the target.
The weekend was equally slow. When was the last time anyone was penalized at the Masters for slow play?
In fact, no one on the PGA Tour has been penalized for slow play in the last 16 years. Yep, sixteen. 1-6. Four times four. No typo.
Another thing I’d suggest if the Augusta National membership really and truly wants to move the game forward, then they need to stop being the poster child for exclusionary membership policies and find a way to invite a few women members.
And finally, while some writers have loudly lauded the club for letting children in for free (when accompanied by a fully-credentialed patron), I’d like to see a way busloads of kids from the First Tee program and other junior golf programs would get some access, too. The way things set up now, badgeholders (all of whom are well-to-do or better) are bringing in their own privileged offspring, who could have attended in previous years on one of their parents’ tickets. Now badgeholders still use their extra tickets to bring their adult friends AND can their kids. Why not make them use their tickets to bring in their own children, and open the gates to those who otherwise would never get to see a Masters in person?
The Augusta National membership deserves a standing ovation from anyone sitting in front of a computer screen watching the “Amen Corner Live” and “Masters Extra” live streams on www.masters.org from the golf course. The smallish screen of previous years has been replaced with one at least six times as large. The controls for switching from one stream to another are very user-friendly, as is the pulldown leaderboard in the upper-right corner.
While new Masters chairman Billy Payne has infused his superb sense of public relations into the Masters following the reign of terror of Hootie Johnson, he still needs to do more then cut down a few of the new trees along the right side of No. 11 to undo Johnson’s 10 years of damaging “renovations” (read that “Tiger-proofing”) that have drastically changed the very character of the championship.
It’s no longer fun for the players to play, and watching Tour players move through the course like they’re walking on broken glass doesn’t make for a very compelling TV, either. Unless they do something drastic between now and next April, the famous Sunday back-nine charge at the Masters will exist only in history.
In my last column, I wrote that I hoped we wouldn’t see a U.S. Open being played at the Augusta National Golf Club, but that’s exactly what happened again for the third straight year. Knowing PGA Tour players as well as I do, I think you could take it to the bank that if this tournament wasn’t a major rich with history, very few of the marquee-name players would attend.
By the way, ESPN proved to be a solid new partner for CBS Sports. (Better it than the talent-devoid Golf Channel, which could use some major improvements in the production-values arena, too.) Thank God someone was enough of a clear thinker to leave Chris Berman where he belongs, too, in New York.
I understand CBS sees the Masters (along with the NCAAs) as the jewel of its sports portfolio. But each year, it seems the tone of the broadcast becomes more and more stiff, more and more obnoxiously reverential – announcers speaking in funereal, hushed tones; stately, formal bumper music that makes me drowsy; commentators holding back, afraid to make a fatal mistake alà Gary McCord and Jack Whittaker.
It’s a golf tournament, for chrissakes. And right now, it is in dire need of a major overhaul.