What Would Be Bigger: Watson at the Open or Yang at Hazeltine?
by Ryan Ballengee on Aug 17, 2009 1:25 PM EDT
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PrintA lot of the talk about the PGA Championship has to do with whether or not Tiger Woods choked on Sunday. Well, that may not be the right question. The four majors this year have been defined by who failed to win as much as who did win. Kenny Perry, Phil Mickelson, Tom Watson, and now Tiger Woods were the couldabeens this season.
Thinking back on the four majors, the last two particularly stand out. At 59, Tom Watson winning the Open Championship may well have been the greatest achievement in golf history - maybe even sporting history. In the end, he lost in a playoff to Stewart Cink.
Conversely, YE Yang did the unthinkable. He beat Tiger Woods when he held a share of the 54 hole lead like it was no big thing. Now, writers are wondering if this is the greatest upset in the history of the sport. Bigger than Fleck, Ouimet, Daly, and others.
Well, assume for a minute that both actually happened this year instead of just one. (Holy cow. This would be golf's greatest year ever.)
What would have been bigger in your eyes? Tom Watson winning at Turnberry or YE Yang knocking off Tiger yesterday?
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Watson at The Open Championship
Because of his age, the accomplishment and his place in the history of the game…
by Bob Diercksmeier on Aug 17, 2009 1:30 PM EDT reply actions
Watson, hands down
The bigger story would have been a near 60 year old winning his 5th Open Championship at what many consider the #1 Major in the world, beating players half his age. We all knew that Tiger would at some point lose a Major. Now if you asked the bigger story, Watson or University of Maryland with a winning football record this year, that too is an easy answer….
Maryland having a winning record in the Atlantic Division? Lots of solid teams there. Even Wake and NC State are going to be tough outs no matter who plays them.
by Charles Boyer on Aug 17, 2009 3:19 PM EDT up reply actions
To me...
…Watson’s achievement would have been one of the greatest in the history of the game, if not THE greatest. Yang beating Tiger is just not that huge a deal to me. I understand that Tiger doesn’t lose when he has the 54-hole lead, but he also doesn’t win every single major he enters, so it was a simple matter of time for him to have a bad round when he needed a good one to win.
If Yang hadn’t have actually won yesterday I would have picked Watson as well, for all of the above mentioned reasons…but the fact that Yang withstood the pressure of the day and actually accomplished the goal of beating Tiger, and consequently winning a major, is pretty significant in my eyes. I know there will be the ongoing debate of whether Yang won or Tiger lost the PGA, but I’m giving huge kudos to Yang for not cracking under what I would think is tremendous pressure playing with Tiger in the last group of the final round of the PGA…he played his own game and made his own opportunities. I still can’t get over how many players actually had a chance to win the PGA on Sunday and no one came close except for Yang. So for actually beating Tiger (and the rest of the field), instead of the “what if”, I give the tip of the hat to Yang.
Hats off to Yang...
…but didn’t Rich Beem kind of do something similar in 2002? I know Tiger wasn’t the leader and that he was a group ahead of Beem, but he still had to face that Tiger was charging from behind and he had to deal with tremendous pressure of his own coming into the final hole.
Major winners universally have to deal with a lot of pressure. Yang did, Beem did, Shaun Micheel did, and so do all of them. To me, there’s just nothing out of the ordinary about the winner having dealt with tremendous pressure.
On the other hand, players simply don’t win major championships at the age of 59. Ever.
by Double Eagle on Aug 17, 2009 3:04 PM EDT up reply actions
DE, yep, I get what you are saying…I guess I’m just not very good with the “what if” vs. real – it’s hard for me to fathom the pressure of a major championship in general, but I believe that it goes to a whole other level when Tiger, the media, his mass of fandom, are all there as well…so I don’t think what Yang might have been feeling was the same as Beem or Micheel…but that’s just me guessing.
On the other hand, players simply don’t win major championships at the age of 59. Ever.
Exactly. Which is why I just couldn’t compare. I don’t know what it was that didn’t allow Watson to seal the deal that day – nerves, exhaustion, age, pressure, his putting stroke, adrenalin, or something else, but I believe he did a great thing for golf that week…even without winning.
kind of hard to compare Beem’s win with Yang’s. Tiger didn’t start with a 2 shot lead and they weren’t playing together. The pressure Tiger puts on his opponents – especially the ones he’s paired with – is unlike anything anybody has seen since Nicklaus in his prime…well…except that Nicklaus could come from behind in a major…but that’s just picking a nit. (lol)
Yang did something nobody has been able to do in a major.
"this ball will fit in that fairway"
Watson at the Open, because it would have shattered Old Tom Morris’s long-standing record of being the oldest player to win a major.
Not oldest
Oldest player to win a major is Julius Boros (1968 PGA, 48 years old). Old Tom Morris, as it turns out, was just old.
That’s true and it was bad writing on my part. Morris is still the oldest to have won the Open Championship. He was born June 16, 1821 and won the Open in 1867 at 46.
by Charles Boyer on Aug 17, 2009 4:32 PM EDT up reply actions
Technically, Morris would be the oldest – if he were still living :)
Email me any comments or questions at ryan@thegolfnewsnet.com.
by Ryan Ballengee on Aug 17, 2009 4:43 PM EDT up reply actions
For the record, I would take Watson no contest. Cause that’s something that’ll never happen again.
Email me any comments or questions at ryan@thegolfnewsnet.com.
Given the medical advancements that allowed Watson to stay in good enough form to do what he did, I would suspect it is a bad bet to say it will never happen again.
Flash forward 25-30 years and you may just see a last huzzah for an aging Tiger Woods at a major somewhere. Or perhaps a few years after that with an older McIlroy or Ryo Ishikawa.
In other words, never say never. Because you never can tell. :-)
by Charles Boyer on Aug 17, 2009 4:14 PM EDT up reply actions
Except when it happened last year i.e. Greg Norman
Or when Nicklaus ended up 4 shots back in the ’98 Masters at age 58.
I mean, it could, but you can’t go on expecting this to happen every year. If 50+ guys contending in majors becomes a regular thing, then I won’t use the cliche anymore :)
Email me any comments or questions at ryan@thegolfnewsnet.com.
by Ryan Ballengee on Aug 17, 2009 4:31 PM EDT up reply actions
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