Scotland echoes with moans of anguished golfers

Three days before the first tee shot in the Open disappeared into the rough and the first curse was uttered at Carnoustie Golf Links, Mark Brooks tossed a ball into the hay and handed his caddie the sand wedge.

"You try it," he said.

The caddie could see the ball through lush, green grass that was hidden by wheatlike strands swaying in the wind. He set down the bag, planted his feet and took a Ruthian swing. The ball hopped like a toad, visible only for a second before vanishing into more deep rough.

Brooks chuckled, took the sand wedge from his caddie and gracefully lofted the ball 20 yards into the fairway on the 15th hole.

We see them knee deep in the grass. We see only the top of their hats as they stand in the abyss of a pot bunker. We see them whiff. We see double bogeys, sometimes worse.

Put the best golfers in the world on the toughest links course in the world under the most trying conditions, and we think they look a lot like us.

Wrong.

They only sound like us.

Tom Watson, a five-time British Open champion, had it right when he quoted Bobby Jones as saying that golf is not meant to be a fair game.

The problem was, as Watson also noted about Carnoustie, "We're not on a fair course."

If average players had to take on Carnoustie last week, they might still be there. Make the officials who set up the course play a round of golf in such fabricated conditions and the British Open might not have resembled a U.S. Open on steroids.

"No one in the R & A could break 100 around here," Phil Mickelson said. "And that includes Sir Michael Bonallack."

Bonallack is the secretary of the Royal and Ancient, and one of the top officials on the defensive when 30 percent of the field failed to break 80 in the first two rounds.

Among the casualties was Sergio Garcia, who had rounds of 89-83 and vowed to not even watch the British Open on television that weekend.

Look what he missed -- a collapse like no other when Jean Van de Velde took a triple bogey on the 72nd hole to cause a playoff. Garcia also would have missed Paul Lawrie becoming the least accomplished player to win the Open in its 139-year history.

Lawrie was ranked 159th, the lowest to win a major since John Daly (No. 168) overpowered Crooked Stick in 1991 to win the PGA Championship. Lawrie, a 30-year-old Scotsman who had only two European tour victories, didn't overwhelm anything or anybody.

Now, Lawrie joins the great roll call of Open champions at Carnoustie -- Tommy Armour, Henry Cotton, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Watson. His name stands out as sorely as the Valhalla compared to the other sites for the millennium majors (Augusta, Pebble and St. Andrews).

"There is no way in the world that we set out to embarrass the best players in the word," said Hugh Campbell, chairman of the Open championship committee.

The R & A didn't exactly identify the best, either.

All it accomplished last week was that it was capable of growing grass really high and mowing grass so that the fairways would be extremely narrow. An authority no less than Player, who won an Open at Carnoustie in 1968, felt as though Carnoustie was not so much a test as a gimmick.

"The R & A has gone over the brink this time," he said.

This was a course that appeared to be set up for the sole purpose of making sure Carnoustie lived up to its fearsome reputation.

Bonallack had said earlier in the week that he didn't care what the winning score was, and neither would the champion. That much is true: Lawrie certainly had no complaints about his 6-over 290.

Until last this week, the Open's best defense has always been the wind. Tiger Woods recalled using two 5-irons to reach the 459-yard 17th hole during one round in the Scottish Open, and a driver off the tee and driver off the deck the next day.

That apparently wasn't good enough for the R & A.

Woods, the most exciting player off the tee, hit his driver only once each of the first two days. As complicated as golf can be, the objective was reduced to one simple philosophy.

"How can you play golf if you can't find your ball if it is a yard off the fairway?" Mickelson wondered.

AP