Watson's Success Should Embarrass Golf's Young Guns

TURNBERRY, Scotland -- It's cold-truth time for golf now that we've had a day to catch our breath from the Tom Watson Open, won by Stewart Cink.

Watson's run at the British Open was a great moment for golf, and particularly needed in a tournament where Tiger Woods failed and Phil Mickelson stayed home. But while everyone marveled at a 59-year old stepping up, what did that mean?

It was fun to watch at the time, but it didn't say much about the game.

It said that the younger generation pulled a vanishing act when its two leaders were gone.

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And it said that if golf wants to be considered an actual sport, and not just a refined, difficult skill set, then it has a lot of explaining to do.

Early in the week, Watson said that golf is a young person's game. By the end, after watching the young people, he was enlisting the media to try to fight against the Open's age-rule, which suggests that 60-somethings can't compete.

So let's start with the younger generation because Watson -- and Mark Calcavecchia and Vijay Singh -- set up a battle of the generations in this tournament.

I think what we learned is that Tiger's greatness has been hiding the shortcomings of the guys he's beating.

Turnberry is a course well-suited for the older guys, because it doesn't play long. You can't just rip it to shreds, as Lee Westwood put it. Watson said that his experience on the links course made a big difference because many of the younger American players haven't seen that type of course.

Calcavecchia, by the way, who's 49, said that experience is completely overrated.

But whatever. Watson knew to bounce the ball up onto the greens, using the hard fairways, while the younger Americans rolled up sleeves and pounded their usual high-arcing shots that were affected by the wind.

"I see some of the kids, they're not playing the shot the way I would play it,'' Watson said earlier in the week. "Take some of the element of risk out of play. That's the way I think I'm playing.''

Well, is there some reason why today's young American players couldn't have figured that out? It sounds like the same problem with American tennis, where the young guys can only flex muscles, and not use strategy.

Watson's success was a condemnation of today's younger players. With Woods and Mickelson out of the way, you would think everyone from the current generation would have been salivating. This was their big chance.

Instead, they hid meekly while Watson made his move. Cink is hardly washed up at 36, but he's not one of the young supposed-stars, either.

He said that no one had ever included him in the talk about greatest players never to win a major.

Sergio Garcia. Rory McIlroy. Anthony Kim. Hunter Mahan.

Couldn't one of those guys beat out a guy who just had his hip replaced? Couldn't one of them have even contended? At least Chris Wood did.

This generation surely has more depth than any past generation. But what about at the top of the game? Padraig Harrington has all but lost his swing. It was a grand time for a new superstar to emerge.

Not an old one.


And can a guy seven weeks from turning 60 really do what Watson did if golf were an actual sport? All week, I saw John Daly smoking a cigarette on the 18th fairway and pushing a weight-loss procedure, and Calcavecchia talking about his wide base helping him putt, and his four beers a day.

Watson is surely in great shape for a 59-year old, saying he works out occasionally. But the muscular athlete (Woods) went home after two days.

It's about your definition of a sport, I guess. But if Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were to skip the U.S. Open, you would not see Jimmy Connors winning it. Joe Frazier could not compete for a title anymore.

If advanced age and lack of fitness don't eliminate you from the top level of the game, then it's hard to see how it's a sport.

In the end, that's just semantics, though, and maybe a good tavern-argument.

But of more serious concern to golf should be the shambles that Watson made of the younger generation with Tiger gone.

It's hard to imagine if Watson, say, had a bad Open in 1978, with the other stars of the day competing, that someone from the 1940s or '50s would have nearly won instead, especially if that someone's career had already wrapped up a quarter of a century earlier.

Maybe Watson had just one fluke week on a favorable course, but it just seemed strange that so few players from this century stood up at all.

So few seemed able to adapt their games.

At 39, Mickelson, who was home taking care of his sick wife, is already well past the young-gun age. Maybe no one will be there to clear him out of the way. Or if he just decides to go someday, then who knows?

Arnold Palmer might be ready to rise again.

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