2014 and all that.
Derek Lawrenson anticipates a golf year to remember in which Hoylake will play a leading role.
The announcement of Royal Liverpool as the venue for the
2014 Open Championship means it will be a summer when the imagination of the world’s leading players will be tested more than usual. Not just an Open venue where the baked fairways - it will
be another scorcher, I take it? - allow for a wide variety of strokes, but a United States Open stage in Pinehurst that is one of the most mentally demanding on the rota. Over the years we’ve got used to U.S Open venues asking
the same questions: hit the ball to point A and then to Point B and woe betide if you end up at any stage in Point C. Not so at Pinehurst. Like Hoylake, no great strength is required to conquer Donald Ross’s masterpiece. Just a touch of sorcery around the bowl-shaped greens and qualities of shotmaking that recall an earlier age. Unlike Hoylake, Pinehurst has no great tradition of hosting majors. This will be just the third U.S Open to have been held there, and the first was not until 1999. Having come late to the party, however, it is almost as if the United States Golf Association is anxious to make up for lost time. For not only will the men’s U.S Open take place at Pinehurst
in 2014 but the women’s version will be staged the following week. It is asking an awful lot of a place to hold two such events back to back but then Pinehurst is a golf town unlike any other in America.
Not for nothing is it often compared with St Andrews.
You could stay at Pinehurst for a week’s golfing holiday and still not play all of its eight courses. No fancy names for any of these courses, either, just a number from one to eight depending upon when they were built. Number two, though, is the number one in terms of greatness. A statue of the 1999 U.S Open winner Payne Stewart
greets any visitor, a poignant reminder not only of his memorable victory over the parent-to-be Phil Mickelson that year, but also his desperately sad death in a plane crash. Who can forget Stewart embracing the left-hander and
telling him at the end of a thrilling finish: ‘You’re going to be a father, and that’s far greater than what happened here.’ Hard to take that, just two years later, this father of two young children himself, who brought so much colour to the game not only with his mode of dress but also his personality, would no longer be with us. In 2005, it was the popular Kiwi Michael Campbell who
held off Tiger Woods. So excited were they back home that the New Zealand Parliament was suspended so members could watch the proceedings. Has any golfer ever had a more dramatic rollercoaster
career than the man known as Cambo, to one and all? Only Ian Baker-Finch and David Duval perhaps come close. At the time of writing, almost five years on from that triumph,
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