What on Earth Just Happened?
Everyone who plays it knows golf can be a funny 'ol game. There are times, though, when it is truly dumfounding.
On the face of it, hitting a ball that’s not even two inches across over hundreds of yards of uneven terrain dotted with sandpits, ponds, and trees and eventually making that ball disappear down a hole that’s not much more than four inches across seems absolutely ridiculous. Positively absurd, really.
Watch this whacky Royal and Ancient pastime for 40+ years and it’s inevitable you’re going to come across a lot of really weird stuff. One of my favorite newsletters/blogs/circulars is Kyle Porter’s Normal Sport in which the CBS golf writer recaps recent events sharing odd things that have occurred in the professional game and which might bring you to the conclusion that golf, and big-time pro golf especially, is anything but normal.
You never really know when Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Ludvig Åberg, or Bryson DeChambeau might pull off a shot that takes you a few seconds to assimilate. And with so much coverage on TV these days and so much money at stake (and so many camera angles) it’s really quite likely something singular and freakish is going to happen.
It does seem odd that it’s happened a couple of times in the last two weeks, though. Matt Kuchar’s bizarre decision to mark his ball on the 72nd hole of the recent Wyndham Championship and come back on Monday morning to complete his tournament got me thinking about other times I’ve watched golf on TV and been left staring at the screen, unblinking.
Here are 19 times over the last 40 years or so when I’ve been unable to make sense of what I’m watching.
1. Langer hits from a tree at the 1981 B&H (Faldo and Garcia, too)
My dad was watching the third round of the 1981 Benson and Hedges at Fulford when Bernhard Langer hit a shot out of a tree at the 17th. Though a kid with little experience of golf up to that point, I was fairly sure this sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen, but the German played a pretty nifty shot and eventually got out with a bogey-five. Nick Faldo did it on the 14th at Pebble Beach during the 1992 U.S. Open, and Sergio Garcia not only hit one out of a tree on the 10th hole at Bay Hill in 2013, he did so one-handed and backwards too.
2. First time watching the Masters, 1986
For an English teen, used to playing on wet, muddy golf courses (in the 1980s, agronomy and soil science weren’t what they are now) during the winter and, let’s face it, other times during the year too, seeing Augusta National for the very first time was eye-opening to say the least. The first time I was able to stay up late and watch the final round of the Masters was 1986. Seeing the vivid colors was immediately arresting. Plus, of course, I was watching what turned out to be the greatest golf tournament ever seen (even if I wanted Seve Ballesteros to win) - better even, perhaps, than the Duel in the Sun that happened nine years previously in the Open Championship at Turnberry. That had been a two-horse race between Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson. The ‘86 Masters, though, involved Nicklaus and Watson as well as Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Tom Kite, and Nick Price who had shot a third-round 63.
I spent two hours thinking this neon golf course couldn’t actually be somewhere on Planet Earth, and watching the most exciting final round in major championship history. And, despite my lack of golf history knowledge, I kind of knew at the time it probably couldn’t get any better than that. It hasn’t diminished my enjoyment of subsequent majors, but it could well be I watched the best final round I’ll ever see 38 years ago.
3. Seeing Corey Pavin’s swing for the first time
This wasn’t the very first time I saw Pavin swing a club. I think my first exposure to his somewhat ungainly action had come during the 1986 Masters when I remember thinking there was nothing there for an aspiring golfer to try and emulate. This video is from the 1992 Honda Classic at Weston Hills where Pavin holed a 136-yard 8-iron on the 72nd hole to get into a playoff with Fred Couples (Pavin won).
Of course, there were half a dozen aspects of Pavin’s game I should have tried to copy, but I didn’t realize it at the time.
4. Harold Henning with a long putter
It must have been the late-’80s and I’d never heard of them, let alone seen one. South African Harold Henning was playing, I think, the British PGA at Wentworth (the picture below was taken at the 1988 Crestar Classic at Hermitage CC in Virginia), and I can still remember the ferocity of my double-take.
5. John Daly winning the 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick
Plenty of golfers had swung past parallel before - Bobby Jones for one. But Daly’s crazy overswing came at a time when Nick Faldo and David Leadbetter were indirectly shortening everyone’s swing to improve their chances of making solid contact. I don’t remember hearing what his playing partners at Crooked Stick had to say about Daly’s action, but I’m guessing they were as stunned as everyone else. The fact Daly had got into the championship at all was a story in itself (he was ninth alternate), but the most memorable part of the event was Daly’s swing and how far he hit the ball.
6. Greg Norman interview with Sky Sports’s David Livingstone
I don’t remember the year (early-’90s sometime?) or the subject, and Google’s no help, so perhaps I’m dreaming it. But I’m sure I remember turning to my dad in disbelief as he turned toward me with a similar look. Norman gave short, testy answers and was incredibly rude. Though you could tell he was a little unsettled, Livingstone did well to remain calm. It was beyond cringe.
7. Mark Calcavecchia shank at the 1991 Ryder Cup
Calcavecchia was 4up on Scotland’s Colin Montgomerie with four holes to play in their Sunday singles, and managed to lose all four. The ‘high’light of this unfortunate stretch for the American was the shank he hit off the tee at the treacherous par-3 17th hole (after Montgomerie had already found the water). I’d watched Calcavecchia win the Open at Royal Troon two years before and had been seriously impressed. But I’d not seen a top player hit a shot like the one he hit at Kiawah. It confirmed beyond doubt the Ryder Cup creates a different sort of tension.
8. Seve Ballesteros shot off his knees, Paris 1997
There were numerous times when Ballesteros made me sort of lose sight of reality and question what just happened. I once sat a few yards from him on a practice range in Mallorca and just watched him hit balls for an hour (this was before I worked in golf and got to sit in on a few of his press conferences). No one else was there and, though he didn’t say anything, he turned to me once or twice and smiled.
He was deep in concentration and I’m glad I didn’t say anything, though I kind of wish I had. It was utterly mesmerizing. That so graceful and poised a golf swing could create such power was both baffling and extremely satisfying.
He hit the shot in the video above at the 1997 Trophée Lancôme in Paris. You’d think he was a performing trick-shot artist doing an exhibition for an invited corporate audience, and that his next trick might see him standing one-footed on a basketball and hitting 300-yard drives. But it was during a prestigious tournament on the European Tour. Legend.
9. Tiger Woods has gallery move a boulder at the 1999 Phoenix Open
The English dictionary doesn’t have the words to accurately convey the absurdity of 10 or so grown men moving a boulder so that another golfer can play a shot. Woods convinced the Rules official, Orlando Pope, that the rock wasn’t attached to the ground and was therefore a loose impediment. In watching video of the incident, four things stick out.
1. Before the crowd was engaged, Fluff Cowan, Woods’s caddie at the time, tried to move the boulder himself. Fluff was younger back then, obviously, but still he was asking a lot of himself. He could have been making a joke, in which case hahaha.
2. Though Woods does begin to help move it, a gallery member stops him and possibly suggests he doesn’t want to put his back out. So Woods ends up watching. Shouldn’t there be something in the rules saying if you want to move a loose impediment you have to move it yourself?
3. After the rock has been moved a few feet, Woods shakes everyone’s hand. Somewhere in Arizona (probably), there are a few men still telling the story of how they moved a boulder for Tiger Woods.
4. People are laughing, Woods included. So there’s a light-hearted side to this, and everyone knows Woods is making the rules work for him. It’s fairly safe to assume though, that if any other player was faced with a similar situation in the first round, he would have had to hit out sideways.
10. Jean Van Van de Velde; 18th hole at Carnoustie, 1999 Open Championship
On the BBC, Peter Alliss’s commentary during the Frenchman’s mental breakdown helped viewer see the funny side of what was going on. But he and colleague, Alex Hay, also gave us a sense that what was happening was far from amusing. Alliss emphasized it was “so so so so so so sad, and so unnecessary.”
I wasn’t surprised Van de Velde had taken a driver off the tee. He certainly didn’t need to, but he was swinging so well and had a big lead, so why not? After blocking one right and narrowly missing the water, however, it was time for him to say “Okay, wedge in, cruise home, no more risky stuff”. The 2-iron second shot should never have happened.
After that, it all just unraveled into what is surely the most unbelievable, miserable, and upsetting episode at the Open in living memory.
Van de Velde’s wife, Brigitte, could be seen behind the green laughing nervously. You almost had the feeling these crazy French people didn’t really appreciate what was at stake and just wanted to have a fun day out whatever happened.
They would, eventually, understand the enormity of what transpired, however. Brigitte would say Jean was never really the same person afterwards and, sadly, they split in 2002, finally divorcing in 2009. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since that day, and I wish now, 25 years later, I could look back at it and laugh. But I really can’t.
11. Tiger Woods second to 18th at Glen Abbey, 2000 Canadian Open
The world’s top players hit so many good shots, it takes something genuinely sensational to get an old golf watcher’s attention. Woods had authored plenty of time-stopping shots in his career but, for me, this one remains the most remarkable. Needing a birdie four to become the first to win the Triple Crown of U.S. Open, Open Championship, and Canadian Open since Lee Trevino in 1971, Woods blocked one right off the tee and found a fairway bunker. He had 218 yards to the flag with a large water feature between him and the green. Laying up sideways out of wet sand was obviously the sensible play, but Woods took the green on with a 6-iron. After an almighty lash, the ball finished a few feet over the green from where he’d get up and down for the victory. I began gawping when Woods pulled the club and aligned at the flag, gawped some more when he swung, and finally stopped gawping about 20 seconds after he’d hit the shot.
12. Bubba Watson’s approach to the first playoff hole (10th) at the 2012 Masters
Who knew a golf ball could spin like this? Watson obviously hit it with hook spin which tends to make a ball bound forward. Yet somehow, Watson’s ball both hooked and checked up a bit before rolling out sideways to the right. I’d never seen a golf ball, any ball actually, do that before. And I don’t think Watson, or Jim Nantz who was calling the shot, had either.
Tiger Woods did something similar out of a fairway bunker in Mexico in 2019. But that was in the second round, in Mexico, and he’s a right-hander who hit a slice-cut so the back/sidespin was expected. It was a really cool shot, but Watson’s was even better.
13. Phil Mickelson disrespects Tom Watson at the 2014 Ryder Cup
I wasn’t there but you could tell watching it on TV that the U.S. team’s Sunday press conference was extremely awkward as Mickelson threw the highly-respected, eight-time major champion under the bus for “straying from a winning formula” (referring to Paul Azinger’s pod system from 2008), and failing to engage with the players. He may have been right, but the more Mickelson spoke, the more I thought he was out of order.
14. Keegan Bradley and Miguel Ángel Jiménez square off at the 2015 WGC-Cadillac Match Play at TPC Harding Park
On-course, face-to-face slanging matches are rare on the PGA Tour, though it’s not entirely unthinkable that if you did see one these two players would be involved. Jiménez has hot Spanish blood coursing through his veins and, though Bradley has always seemed much more mild-mannered, he probably does have some Boston-area (a New England native, he currently lives in Newburyport, 40 miles north of Beantown) feist in him.
It was Bradley’s caddie, Steven (Pepsi) Hale, that said something to Jiménez as he queried Bradley’s drop from a cart path. He really shouldn’t have done that. Jiménez tells Hale to “shut up”. He probably shouldn’t have done that. Bradley then gets involved saying Jiménez shouldn’t have told his caddie to shut up. Fair play to Bradley for sticking up for his caddie but, again, he probably shouldn’t have done that.
It escalated and got a bit messy though thankfully stopped short of fisticuffs. The whole episode was very unfortunate but, in true vehicle accident in the oncoming lane fashion, hard not to watch.
15. The greens at Chambers Bay for the 2015 U.S. Open and Gary Player’s reaction
Staying with friends in Seattle during the 2015 U.S. Open, I came downstairs early on Thursday morning and saw the greens up close for the first time. I’d played the course a few times, the last visit coming just a couple of weeks before the championship at a media event. The USGA had dehydrated the course since then and cut the greens U.S. Open-short, so they looked quite different. My fiend had a high-definition TV (mine was nothing like as high-def as this one) which showed the green’s discoloration and unevenness in terrific detail, and I remember stopping in my tracks and just staring for a while.
You know the story of how the fescue surfaces were being overrun with poa annua (mostly inevitable in the Pacific Northwest) and how the heat had made the distinction between the two turf varieties abundantly clear. There’s more to it than that, and I should emphasize that Director of Agronomy, Eric Johnson, and Superintendent, Josh Lewis, did a remarkable job presenting greens as good as they were. But with so many factors conspiring against them, those surfaces clearly weren’t the best and the players weren’t slow to give their opinion. (The greens were returfed entirely with poa annua in 2019 and now look and play significantly better).
Something else that caught me cold that week was Gary Player’s tirade on Golf Channel in which he said Chambers Bay was “unplayable”, one of the worst courses he’d ever seen, and that it probably used far too much water.
We’re all aware Player has a tendency to overreact at times without knowing all the facts (he was frequently wrong about Chambers Bay), and that he has never seen eye-to-eye with Robert Trent Jones Jr. the main architect at Chambers Bay. But this time he went completely over the top.
16. Phil Mickelson hits moving ball at 2018 U.S. Open
It’s a shame Mickelson’s two entries in this list are for things he did which I never liked. He’s hit so many incredible shots (6-iron second from the pines at the 13th in the final round of the 2010 Masters comes to mind), but here I’m remembering him for disrespecting Tom Watson’s strategy at the 2014 Ryder Cup and hitting a moving ball at the U.S. Open.
Mickelson was clearly frustrated with his play during the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, and let his despondency get the better of him at the 13th in the third round. When his bogey putt began to pick up speed after passing the hole, Mickelson ran after it and hit the ball again before it had come to rest.
He received a two-shot penalty with the USGA deciding the move wasn’t a serious enough breach of etiquette to warrant disqualification. One wonders if it had been a less-famous, audience-attracting player, or if the Rules official had had some *****, a different decision might have been made.
17. Sergio Garcia loses it in a bunker at the Saudi Invitational in 2019
With so much cash on the line ($25m to the eventual FedEx Cup winner), the players remaining in this year’s playoffs are clearly showing signs of stress. A healthy and enviable perspective on life didn’t stop world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler slamming his club into the sand at the 13th hole during the first round of the FedEx St. Jude Championship at TPC Southwind. Though surprising (perhaps even a little shocking), it was, admittedly, a slightly prolonged raise-of-the-eyebrows moment rather than a full-on stupefied recoil - the sort that followed Sergio Garcia’s meltdown in a bunker at Royal Greens during the second round of the 2019 Saudi Invitational. The following day, the Spaniard damaged five greens out of frustration and was eventually DQed.
18. Monahan and Al Rumayyan strike a deal, June 2023
I was on the golf course (Smith Signature at Treetops in Michigan) when one of our group announced the PGA Tour’s Jay Monahan and Saudi PIF’s Yasir Al Rumayyan had struck a framework agreement with the intention, one day, of somehow uniting the two entities. Even though sizeable trees separated the holes, you could hear the astonished reaction from other groups who had, likewise, learned of the deal on their phones. Later, when watching a replay of the MSNBC interview with Monahan and Al Rumayyan, there was stunned silence in the room.
19. Matt Kuchar plays on at the 2024 Wyndham Championship
At the end of the tournament, the final group had the option to finish out or pick up because of encroaching darkness. His playing partners, Max Greyserman and Chad Ramey, decided to finish but, after hitting his drive at the 18th, Matt Kuchar marked his ball in the trees to the left of the fairway.
The 46-year-old, nine-time PGA Tour winner, returned on Monday morning to finish, and the first thing he did was call for a Line of Sight ruling. Having received a drop, Kuchar finally made a four for a closing round of 71 and T12 finish.
On Sunday evening, Kuchar had given a rather mysterious reason for his decision - something about showing the 29-year-old “kid” Greyserman that he could pick up in that situation - but it seemed implausible at best. Brandel Chamblee and Paige Mackenzie had a hard time explaining Kuchar’s decision on Golf Channel and, 19 days on, none of us are any the wiser.
In a Golf Channel interview, Greyserman said he didn’t really know what Kuchar’s intentions had been, but added that he’d give him the benefit of the doubt. I should too, perhaps, but watching Sunday then seeing video from Monday morning, did create an awful lot of doubt.
