Stat profiles for 1500 golfers
Lewine with some notes on Chris Wood getting close, Tom Lehman looking for history with a Watson win, having a "Sir" in your car and Lee Westwood dropping some weight.
TURNBERRY, Scotland -- It was only once he had finished that Chris Wood, 21, would have started thinking of how winning this Open was not exactly out of the question.
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“To follow up on ‘08 as well as I have is as good as I could have hoped for,” he said. “I felt so proud of myself and the way I stayed in every shot.”
Wood, who turned pro straight after Birkdale, never let his thoughts stray to how he might win over today’s last 18 holes and he did not want to find out where he was vis-à-vis the rest. The same, though, did not apply to his parents. Back at the 12th, they were savouring the sight of their son’s name alongside Westwood’s at two under par and the top of the leader-board.
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It’s not often you get a former Open champion walking round watching on the last day unless, of course, he has a microphone in his hand and the prospect of a lot of dollars in his pocket.
Tom Lehman, though, was out scaling the dunes with his young son Thomas, an eighth grader and a would-be professional. The 1996 champion wanted Thomas to see Watson’s bid to win a sixth Open. Lehman scoffed at the oft-repeated suggestion that having a champion in his 60th year would merely add to the impression that golf is an old man’s game. “It would be brilliant if he won,” said Lehman. “If it were any 59-year-old, it would be exciting, but for it to be Tom Watson is a simply fantastic story. I can’t think of anything that would beat it unless Jack Nicklaus were to come out of retirement and get his name up at the top of the leader-board.”
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After Sir Nick Faldo and his partner of the moment had finished dinner in the popular Wildings restaurant – the eatery where Tom Watson was most nights – the owner offered to run the couple back to the Turnberry Hotel.
They were halfway there when Faldo’s proud girlfriend felt the need to draw the owner’s attention to something about her man. “I don’t suppose,” she began, “that you’ve ever had a ‘Sir’ in your car before.”
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Lee Westwood has changed shape. Stuart Cage, who works for ISM, the player’s management group, was explaining on the range how the European Ryder Cup man has shed six inches from his waist at the same time as he has added half a stone in weight. The weight, apparently, is all muscle - and all down to his trainer, Steve McGregor, who has had him following a golf-specific series of exercises for the past two years.
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But it is the Englishman’s mind which has impressed as much as anything else so far at Turnberry, not least with regard to the way he handled going out with Tiger Woods over the first couple of days.
It is one thing playing with Woods when he is at his glorious best… According to those who have experienced it, you are conscious – often to your own detriment - of not getting in his way. On the other hand, it has to be almost as tough to play with the World No. 1 when he is having the kind of nightmare he had on Friday.
The present-day Westwood has enough in the way of poise and confidence not to feel awkward in such circumstances. “I was in my own little world,” he said afterwards. Yet it must have helped that Woods was doing as you would expect of him in trying not to disturb the others.
Not everyone in the golfing limelight is as well-disciplined in that area It was Ernie Els, for example, who once said light-heartedly of Colin Montgomerie, “If Monty’s playing badly, he certainly let’s everyone know about it.”
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