As I was saying, I'm watching on television and wondering, Where is John Philp? He was the Carnoustie greenkeeper in '99, and you couldn't pick up a newspaper without reading a headline like STOP WHINING, SAYS CARNASTY SUPER, or HOGAN WOULD HAVE HANDLED IT. "No one makes an arse of my course," Philp told reporters then. "Players are too pampered now." When a writer from the Times of London flushed him out last Thursday, Philp all but conceded that the R&A had ordered him to make Carnoustie a friendlier links, a place where you could spread a blanket for lunch and let children run about. "There's no doubt the course is easier," he told the Times. "The fairways are wider and the rough isn't as dense. The players can definitely feel more comfy on the tee."
Right now the cameras are panning that little dune short of the burn where my ball ended up after it hit the grandstand, and I guess there's rough there: about enough to make a dinner salad. I had real rough to deal with on my third shot. That's why my ball ended up in the burn. That's why I'm more famous today than Paul Lawrie or--at the risk of sounding immodest--Belgium.
Please don't misunderstand. I, Jean Van de Velde, am not saying that Carnoustie is easy. The bunkers have steep walls, and the burn has so many twists that it comes into play more than once on some holes. So even at a tournament like this, where spectators throw themselves in front of errant shots to spare Tiger and Sergio a bad lie, you see some big numbers. John Daly, who briefly held the first-round lead at five under, made seven bogeys, two doubles and a triple over two rounds, and failed to make the cut. Tiger hit his first tee shot of round 2 into the burn and made a double, and today he needed two tries to get out of a bathtub bunker on 15. Meanwhile, the 18th, a 499-yard par-4, has taken its usual toll, sticking the field with 172 bogeys, 44 doubles and 10 others. (That's a term the R&A reserves for crack-ups, like mine in '99, that are too lurid to label.)
So now I'm watching Sergio in the 18th fairway, and he needs a 4 to win. But it's not as if he has to hit his three-iron out of a patch of herbes as wild as an Amazonian rain forest. Carnoustie is so tame now that an Argentine garçon, Andres Romero, made 10 birdies today and finished third. Richard Green, the Australian lefty, matched Stricker's course-record 64. Hunter Mahan, the former college star, and Ben Curtis, the 2003 Open champion, shot 65s as easily as if they were ordering chips in the tented village. Scores like that were not possible in '99, when there were only nine rounds in the 60s.
Attendez. Sergio has hit into a bunker and bogeyed the last. There will be a playoff.
Here's what I don't understand. In April, a long and ponderous Augusta National setup quieted the crowds in Amen Corner and produced Zach Johnson's winning score of 289, matching the highest ever at a Masters. At the U.S. Open, in June, a heavily fortified Oakmont made minkeys of the field and a winner of Angel Cabrera at five over par. It seemed inevitable, then, that Carnoustie would be the third leg of the No Red Numbers Slam. I was looking for a winning score of 10 over. As they say in Canada, quel dommage.
