Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 17, 1993 TAG: 9306170116
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF WILLIAMS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: SPRINGFIELD, N.J. LENGTH: Medium
Of the 156 players who tee off today at Baltusrol Golf Club in the first round of the U.S. Open, there are easily a hundred who don't have any chance of winning.
If you see the likes of Eric Hoos, Ted Oh, Arden Knoll or Oswald Drawdy on the leaderboard come Sunday, there will be a huge upset in the making. Get your money down on them now when the odds are, say, 10,000-1.
For the remaining 56 players, this 93rd U.S. Open championship is wide open because no player has been able to clearly dominate this season.
Tom Kite, the 1992 champion, got off to a strong start, but an ornery back put him off his game.
Nick Faldo is fiddling with his swing again. You can't count him out, but with a new swing you can't count him in, either.
Paul Azinger has been the most consistent of players, but he missed the cut Friday at the Buick Classic in similar course conditions.
"It's very hard to name a favorite," Bernhard Langer said Tuesday after his practice round. "It doesn't matter who the favorite is."
No, but in the absence of a top dog, Langer is at least the popular puppy. The winner of his second Masters this year, Langer is as strong a player as the world has to offer. He won the European PGA championship by six shots and finished in a tie for fifth in a tournament in Hamburg, Germany, on Sunday.
Langer had never seen Baltusrol before this week. He played his first practice round Tuesday, trying to learn the little nuances, read the big breaks and shake the jet lag in one blurry, 5 1/2-hour practice round.
Langer, an honorable man, played at Hamburg because he was the defending champion there, and thus gave up the usual regimen of the top foreign players, which is to come to America the week before the Open to either play in the PGA event that week or play practice rounds at the Open site.
What Langer saw Tuesday had to please him. Though this is a long course at 7,152 yards with a par of 70, it is playing fast on the fairways and on the greens. The lack of rain this spring in New Jersey means the rough isn't as club-choking as the U.S. Golf Association would like.
The rough around the greens, because it is within range of the sprinkler system, remain the usual spinach patch in need of a healthy thinning. All in all, the conditions of this Open are more conducive to a foreign champion.
No foreigner has won the Open since David Graham of Australia in 1981, and he was more of a PGA Tour player at the time. Tony Jacklin of England won in 1970 and Gary Player of South Africa in 1965. You have to go back to another era to find another foreign winner, Tommy Armour of Scotland in 1927.
The theory, subscribed to in part or whole by nearly every foreign and American player, is that the difficult rough found around the greens in a U.S. Open takes away an element of the game. The conditions of tournament courses in Europe, Asia and Australia virtually never include heavy rough around the greens. Players from other tours are used to saving themselves around the greens by a variety of creative means.
In the Open, take a sand wedge, slash it out, watch it roll, hope it stops.
"They [USGA officials] take chipping right out of the game," Langer said.
That might not be enough to take the Europeans out of this Open. Baltusrol has large greens, and in many instances there is an opening onto the green where players can play the bump-and-run shot short of the green and bounce it on. This is the style of play around the world. Only in the United States are greens soft enough to accept a shot like a dart board.
Tom Watson even found the Baltusrol greens playing like a British Open course, which is not only to the advantage of foreign players, but to the advantage of Watson as well. He's won five British Open championships and finds the bump-and-run style to his liking.
by CNB