What golf needs is a shot in the arm, an injection of star-power excitement to ratchet up interest and create more buzz around the majors.
What golf doesn’t need is a buzz-kill Masters winner — a player so anonymous that he’ll have golf fans scrambling from their TV sets to their computers to Google him to find out who he is and where he came from — slipping the coveted Green Jacket over his shoulders Sunday evening in the Butler Cabin.
More often than not, the Masters has been uncanny in its propensity to deliver the best — the most poignant or thrilling story as its winner.
With apologies to the likes of Mike Weir (2003), Zach Johnson (2007) and Trevor Immelman (2008), all of whom won the Masters and faded into the game’s woodwork, the golf gods generally drop great stories from the sky onto the Augusta National grounds Masters week.
Golf, which has been a bit stale so far this year, needs a great story.
Tiger Woods hasn’t won a tournament in almost 17 months and hasn’t won in America since September 2009 and he’s working with the third swing coach of his professional career, trying to reinvent his game despite already winning 14 majors.
Until last week’s stirring victory in Houston, Phil Mickelson hadn’t won a tournament since last year’s Masters.
Then there’s the stable of young guns who are poised to become stars but have not quite crossed the threshold — players such as Dustin Johnson, Lee Westwood, Bubba Watson, Nick Watney, Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler, to name a few.
Golf, a star-driven sport, needs either one of its established stars to win the Masters, or it needs one of the up-and-comers to validate his status.
Woods rediscovering his form to win a fifth Green Jacket and 15th major a year after he turned his life into a raunchy reality TV show would be fascinating theater.
Mickelson, who has won three of the last seven Masters, winning his fourth to tie Woods and Arnold Palmer would be a wildly popular result for a couple of reasons. First, his worldwide appeal is at an all-time high and, second, he would further distance himself from Woods in current form; and it would catapult him to the
No. 1 ranking in the world for the first time in his career.
If it’s not going to be Tiger or Phil in that Butler Cabin schmoozing with CBS’ Jim Nantz, though, a first major championship win for Johnson would be a massive story considering the way Johnson leaked away final-round leads in the U.S. Open and PGA Championship last year.
A win by Westwood, the second-ranked player in the world, would introduce America to an entertaining personality with perhaps the driest sense of humor in the game.
A win by Ian Poulter, one of the most prolific Twitter users in sports, might freeze the website for a month he’d generate so much traffic with his tweets.
A win by McIlroy or Fowler would send their respective status straight through the stratosphere, though a Fowler win might be a bit much to ask considering that only one player in Masters history (Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979) has won in his first go-round at Augusta.
We haven’t even mentioned Martin Kaymer, the reigning PGA Championship winner who’s ranked No. 1 in the world at the moment. If Kaymer wins this week, he’ll have won the last two majors. Kaymer, though, hasn’t made a cut in three tries at Augusta.
Mickelson’s win last week and his comfort and confidence on this course notwithstanding, this is one of the most wide-open Masters in memory.
A look at the world rankings is all you need to know about the state of the game. The reality is there is no true No. 1 player in the world.
The world rankings are so crowded at the top that six of the top seven players have a chance to be No. 1 by winning the Masters this week.
If you care about the state of golf, pull for the most compelling story to unfold this week.
The game needs it.
No comments:
Post a Comment