ASK A professional tennis player: individual sport is very much the modern equivalent of a gladiatorial battle. Golf isn’t quite in the same league—at least not in the strokeplay format which is used for most professional tournaments—and demands an unrelenting focus on the player’s own game. The foe is a composite of the course, conditions, and the player himself. You’re striving to produce the best play that you’re capable of. That’s what golf is supposed to be about.
But I’ve never met amateur players whose weekend Nassau was based on strokeplay. Of course it doesn’t help that strokeplay is cruel and unforgiving—with one bad hole capable of ruining the entire day’s score—but the fact is that golf, as any other game, becomes fun, when you’re playing against opponents. And that’s why the Ryder and President’s Cups elicit so much interest and passion—match play isn’t just about individual brilliance; it’s about gamesmanship, grit, and pride; about holding your nerve and staring the other guy down. It’s adversarial—mano a mano.
And headlining this format is the WGC Cadillac Match Play Championship—the penultimate event of the World Golf Championships.
The WGC Series events are filled primarily through the Official World Golf Ranking, which is endorsed by all the sport’s major professional organisations and governing bodies, and individual tours’ official money lists /orders of merit. So, when this unique five-day event teed off at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco last week, the top players from the PGA Tour, as well as their counterparts from Asia, Europe, Japan and Australia were in the field. And that included Anirban Lahiri.
Lahiri put up a fine show, considering it was his maiden appearance at the marquee event. After winning his opening rubber against the much fancied Ryan Moore (4 and 2), he lost to Justin Rose in extra holes and another humdinger to Marc Leishman. Lahiri did not progress to the knockout stages but finished a creditable 34th that earned him $63,500.
The tournament was won by a man who, by all conventional wisdom, should have been the favourite from the outset, but wasn’t: world number one Rory Mc Ilroy has seemed a bit distracted on the course this year—almost sullen. He’s played decently by regular standards, winning the Omega Dubai Desert Classic in February but by his own lofty standards he’s unarguably out of sorts. It doesn’t look like his game is off, but rather that he’s not enjoying the game quite as much, and is almost indifferent to the results (or lack of them) he’s been notching up—the best on the PGA Tour being a distant fourth at the Augusta Masters. Even though he was the top-ranked golfer in the world going into this tournament, his 103rd spot in the FedEx Cup rankings was an indicator of his performances in 2015 in his adopted home (‘State-side,’ as he likes to refer to it).
In retrospect, a match play event is precisely what the doctor ordered to rouse Mc Ilroy from his reverie. Losing in this format isn’t about not scoring well: it’s about being beaten by another player. And that presumably, isn’t palatable to the world’s top-ranked player. Especially coming in the wake of all the media adulation that the latest sensation—Jordan Spieth—has been getting after his masterful performance at the Augusta Masters. It’s almost like McIlRoy needed to remind the world that, he is still very much the best player on the planet. He almost didn’t make it to the weekend: in his match with Billy Horschel on Friday, Mc Ilroy was 2-down with three holes left. After making a birdie to halve the 16th, McIlroy won the 17th and 18th with birdies to force extra holes, then won with a par on the second hole of sudden death. “I played solid; I wouldn’t say I played good,” McIlroy said later. “I dug deep when I needed to.”
It wasn’t just the format either—players at the event had to contend with a grueling playing schedule which often involved 36 holes in a day. On a marathon Saturday, McIlroy disposed easily of Japanese Hideki Maruyama in the morning before coming up against a resurgent Paul Casey in the afternoon.
Casey, who’s been on the road to recovery from a few years in golfing wilderness was in no mood to capitulate matching McIlroy in the regulation 18 holes and three extra holes which kept the pair on the course till dusk.
Standing on the tee on Sunday for yet another extra hole, McIlroy felt a surge of inspiration.
“I wondered if I had come all this way at 6.45 am just to play one hole. I really wanted to play all day!” he recounted later. A birdie on the first and Casey’s challenge was annulled which put the Ulsterman against the coolest customer in pro golf—Jim Furyk.
The Furyk—McIlroy match was, in many ways, the real championship match—the talented upstart against the unflappable grizzled veteran. McIlroy turned the tables—turning a one-shot deficit into a one-shot advantage—late in the day, again, shooting a birdie on the 16th hole, following it with an unbelievable seven-iron to within five feet on the 194-yard par 3 that led to another birdie, and closing out with a monstrous 43-footer for eagle on the last hole.
After the drama of the semis, the final with Gary Woodland was almost tepid and McIlroy closed the door on the big-hitting American by the 16th hole by going four up. All said and done, if this had been a strokeplay event, McIlroy would have ended the week at 26-under-par. Appropriate because he turned 26 years old the next day. The Irish phenom is the youngest winner of the event and even more tellingly, the only the third player in the last 75 years (besides Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods) to notch up ten wins on the PGA Tour by age 26.
By the time you read this an elite field of players will be about to tee it up at the TPC Sawgrass for the final round of the ‘Fifth Major’—the Player’s Championship. Jordan Spieth made an early exit in the Match Play, pre-empting a widely anticipated face-off between the two hottest golfers in the world right now. A final day pairing of Spieth and McIlroy tonight is what I’m hoping to see. That’s fantasy golf for you.
A golfer, Meraj Shah also writes about the game.
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