Jay Flemma

Jay Flemma is an entertainment lawyer in New York City that has been dabbling in golf writing. Flemma has a very successful site called A walk in the Park in which he reviews golf courses and those people that build them.
Today Flemma goes back four months and relives the memories of the U.S. Open at Winged Foot.

- GolfObserver editors

WINGED FOOT: Graveyard of Champions
October 15, 2006

None who bore witness to these terrible, soul-stripping events shall ever have them scoured from their memory.

The 2006 U.S. Open was golf's greatest Greek tragedy and horror movie rolled into one. With the chilling clank of more than mortal chains, the Golf Gods unleashed a frightful, fateful sequence of events. For forty ghastly but mesmerizing minutes, all shots save Geoff Ogilvy's triggered dismay and disbelief. When shock and silence did not hold sway, a subdued chorus of alarmed, incredulous gasps echoed through Winged Foot. Then finally, the patrons turned away, sickened at the carnage, unable to fathom what had just befallen so swiftly. Their great hero had plummeted to Earth with an Almighty crash.

Photo: ©Richard Heathcote/Getty Images Phil Mickelson with all of his fans around him.

They came for Phil Mickelson's coronation. Newspapers throughout New York City and across the country chronicled the unlikely, but long-time love affair between tough no-nonsense, urbane New York City on the one hand, and affable, embraceable, Mickelson on the other.

All of greater New York had adopted Phil as their favorite son. Indeed, his popularity is perennially strong throughout the country and for this week, as for many preceding, Phil was America's Golfer. He spent the week guided, even buoyed by the crowd's adoration. With his surge to the top of the leaderboard Saturday, the entire golf world was riveted to their televisions anticipating his inexorable march to a first U.S. Open triumph, a third straight major victory and a chance for Grand Slam immortality at the Open Championship.

It was supposed to be his victory lap. Instead he was borne from the field like Achilles on his shield; no romance, no chivalry, no noble or heroic deeds. It was dismay most exquisite, horror most compelling. We feared to watch, but were transfixed; awestruck by the sudden finality of his collapse, jolted to the fence by the lightning strike.

As dusk approached, the day's oppressive, sweltering heat had subsided. It was set to be an inspiring, soulful sunset: the kind of sunset in which fairy tales are spawned, dreams are realized. Winged Foot, our storied and stirring collection of intricate verdant cloisters has been the scene of so many of America's greatest golf fables.

Photo: ©Ezra Shaw/Getty Images Winged Foot is one of the most demanding tests of golf that can be found anywhere

But no golf course in the country has as much of a devastating synergy of history and misery as Winged Foot. Both Phil and Tiger called it "the toughest U.S. Open venue of all." For beneath the serene beauty lies a sleeping, pitiless behemoth. Penetrating, palpable, claustrophobic - menacing peril lurks in every hollow, dell and glade Ð in every player's mind, they hear whispers of a gnawing fear. Even slumbering, if Winged Foot wants to crush you, she need only roll over in her sleep. And when she is awake, she is angry and she roars. Compared to Winged Foot, Attila the Hun was a Franciscan Friar. Greedy, reckless, unfocused and otherwise unworthy players are gobbled up early and with ruthless efficiency. Winged Foot prepared for the U.S. Open does not suffer fools lightly. Moreover, the retribution of the golf gods for hubris and carelessness is merciless.

The combined wrath of Winged Foot and the Golf Gods is terrible to behold

Photo: ©Scott Halleran/Getty Images A stunned Colin Montgomerie walks off the 18th green after making double bogey six to take him out of the championship.

The 18th hole at Winged Foot is called "Revelations" but it should be "Apocalypse." Just ask Colin Montgomerie. There he stood in the middle of the 18th fairway, seven minutes removed from sinking a twisting seventy foot birdie putt to surge into a tie for the lead with Phil at four-over and perhaps seventeen minutes away from securing the major championship that has eluded him all his life. Perennial winner of the European Order of Merit and the quintessential Ryder Cup Yankee Killer, on the shot of his life he "stuck the iron in the fairway" (as he later lamented) and hit the ugliest shot in golf Ð short and right. A bladed pitch and two godawful putts later, he was at six-over. He lost another major by one shot.

Photo: ©Jamie Squire/Getty Images The always reliable Jim Furyk let things slip away at 18.

Monty wasn't the only popular and well-decorated champion to fall back late. Normally phlegmatic and unflappable Jim Furyk, who already owns one U.S. Open title, fidgeted nervously over a four-footer at the last. His crucial miss over a putt he normally cinches in the clutch was the difference between a playoff and defeat. Padraig Harrington made two bogeys late to also fall one shot short.

Still, none of these shocking, high-profile flameouts prepared us for Phil's supernova. Just forty minutes earlier, we would never have believed Phil's dream (which was all New York's dream) would lie in smoldering ruins. Fresh off a birdie on 14, Mickelson calmly rolled in a testy putt for par on 15 that preserved a two shot cushion over his nearest competitors. The gallery around 18 roared with delight as the scoreboard was changed to reflect Phil's lead as two shots with three to play. Cheers erupted from the normally subdued terrace. Elderly gentlemen were high-fiving. Women were actually weeping with joy and clapping as though rooting for the child of their loins. Mamaroneck polite society turned into a New York Yankees pep rally, if only for a moment of joyful ecstacy. Sportswriters began filing out of the media dining room to start to write their articles.

Then, inexplicably, the Phil who had learned to resist the most seductive and destructive force in golf - temptation - gave in to the siren's call and was dashed upon the rocks. He kept hitting the driver off the tee despite finding only two fairways all day. Even so, look at the magnitude of the amazing confluence of circumstance it took to derail him. Over the last three holes his shots found two bunkers, a garbage can, a tree and the hospitality tent. Even then, he still had a wedge back to the fairway and a pitch and putt for victory, pitch and two putts for a Monday playoff.

While most observers condemn his choice of driver off the 18th tee, it was his decision to take 4-iron around the big tree and go for the green that closed the Golf Gods' hearts against him. To them, that bravado was beyond all insolence.

Photo: ©Ezra Shaw/Getty Images A stunned Phil Mickelson as disaster is catching up with him on the 18th fairway.

The "Old Phil" too often succumbed to temptation and lost and yet, have there been more high profile "lay-ups" - safe plays - that beat any other player in majors? Phil watched as both David Toms and Payne Stewart stole majors from him laying up out of trouble and rolling in 12-15 foot putts to win. Phil knew exactly what not to do in that situation and did it anyway. And like horror movie patrons possessed of a knowing premonition that the coed climbing the stairs to the locked door on the dark landing is walking to her doom, patrons and TV viewers alike were silently imploring Phil to play safe.

Instead Phil, who had played Russian Roulette all day, finally hit the chamber with the bullet. After miraculously drawing a clean lie after his worst shot of the tournament, he chose to risk going for the win. With report of a gunshot, the ball hit the tree, the sound echoing briefly before the crowd gasped as one. The ball advanced no more than forty yards and the tree was still in the way. A fried egg lie in the bunker and a doomed greenside chip later and even a chance for a Monday playoff with Geoff Ogilvy was squandered.

Photo: ©Jamie Squire/Getty Images Phil Mickelson on the 18th hole after he realizes that his double bogey has just cost him the Open.

As he lined up his meaningless eight foot putt for inglorious six, Phil's resolve, so steady in the weeks leading up the tournament and so indomitable for 69 holes, gave way to despair. His head in his hands, with all the golf world watching, the realization of his failure stole over him with brutal finality. Embraced by the crowd all week, Mickelson was totally alone, left to sullenly reflect on his colossal blunder; and his cruel, but certainly not ineluctable fate.

Mustering his dignity, a bitterly dejected Phil prepared to face the ultimate crucible. USGA officials conveyed him to the media area. He staggered, indeed shambled to his bitter appointment with the press.

To his unending credit, somehow Phil fortified himself for those few agonizing minutes. A true champion even in his lowest moment,

Photo: ©Sam Greenwood/Wire Images A stunned Phil Mickelson explaining what happened in the final round.

Winged Foot is one of the most ancient and storied strongholds of American golf, but it is also the Graveyard of Champions. Jack Nicklaus ignominiously putted off the first green in 1974. Incredibly, Tiger Woods missed the cut in a major. Greg Norman was surgically filleted in a playoff. Tom Watson never won here. Neither did Hogan, Sarazen or Snead. This year alone, as twilight fell, she condemned Harrington, Furyk, Montgomerie and, most unforgettably, Mickelson to a grim internment, adding their markers to the other tombstones she has erected. For them, it will be many bitter watches of the night before this loss fades.

I've never heard 40,000 people silent and I've especially never heard 40,000 New Yorkers silent. But the silence that followed Phil's double bogey was truly overwhelming. It was a black moment, but gripping, nonetheless. It echoed and reverberated; a long pensive pall, somber thoughts at what might have been and what had been forsaken. But if you could hear crests fall, that sound would have been deafening.

As joyful streaks of red, orange and purple painted the dusky sky and mocked us in our disheartened mood, Winged Foot's Gothic clubhouse stood sentinel, presiding in stony, discompassionate silence. As sometimes happens, the game sadly became a morality play with our generation's everyman, a beloved hero as the doomed protagonist. Not only was the chance for the Grand Slam lost, Phil not only has not won since that fateful day, he has failed to even contend.

I know that to truly consider yourself a golfer, you must have a sportsman's soul - the soul of a lady or gentleman. But while the game demands that we tolerate and respect when golf becomes a morality play, but that doesn't mean we have to like it or enjoy it. "When dreams die it isn't pretty" noted one writer. This was a lifelong pursuit laid waste before all the world. As sportswriter and TV anchorman Matt Mulcahy of Syracuse's WSTM wrote so touchingly in his column the next day, "No one gives a golfer the U.S. Open, but all of us at Winged Foot wanted to tonight."