99 News Reporter

You will pardon me for not residence on the proposal, raised by some blithering idiot last week, that Tiger Woods and his fellow-competitors would tear apart Merion Golf society a course often described as “venerable,” “vulnerable,” and “outdated.” The vital thing is that, for the first time in more than thirty years, an Englishman—Justin Rose—has won the U.S. Open. From Northumberland to Cornwall, a nation rejoice.

O.K., “Rosie,” as he’s known to his American competitor, didn’t exactly tear up Merion. When he brushed a three wood from the gnarly rough at the side of the eighteenth green to less than an inch from the hole, he had completed four rounds at one over par, thus leaving intact the honor of the United States Golf Association, which hates to see anybody going low at the U.S. Open, long fashioned as golf’s version of waterboarding. One over par was good enough for Rose to secure a two-shot victory over Jason Day, a big-hitting Aussie, and Phil (The Thrill) Mickelson, who has now finished or tied for second in six U.S. Opens, and who was the overwhelming crowd favorite.

After tapping in the putt and shaking hands with his playing partners, Rose paused and pointed his finger at the sky in remembrance of his father, Ken, who introduced him to the game, and who died, of cancer, in 2002. For those of us who grew up in the land of St. George, it was a poignant moment. For forty-three years, the search has been on for a successor to Tony Jacklin, the slight son of Scunthorpe who defeated by seven shots Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, and the rest of the Americans at Hazeltine in 1970.

Two entire generations of English golfers, from Nick Faldo to Lee Westwood to Luke Donald, have found the U.S. Open, with its pencil-thin fairways, penal rough, and bone-hard greens, an insurmountable challenge. When, in 2010 and 2011, two Northern Irishmen, Graeme McDowell and Rory McIlroy, won successive U.S. Opens at Pebble Beach and Congressional, the British drought was officially over. Even for the most ardent English supporter of the Union, though, Ulster isn’t quite home. The wait continued.

In retrospect, Rose was always a likely candidate to bring it to an end. Back in 1998, as a gangling seventeen-year-old, he holed out from fifty yards at the last hole to finish fourth in the British Open at Royal Birkdale. Since then, like all golfers, he’s had his ups and downs. On turning professional, he missed the cut twenty-one times in succession. But since moving to Florida, in 2005, he has developed into one of the game’s most consistent players, with a swing widely regarded as one of the two or three best in the game. (His coach, Sean Foley, also coaches Tiger Woods, and he has described Rose as the better ball striker of the two.)

At Merion, where the fairways were just twenty yards wide in parts, and where some of the rough was six or eight inches deep, Rose’s ability to drive it straight and hit towering long irons paid great dividends. One up with two to play, he hit a five iron like a laser on the long par-three seventeenth, setting up a par, and then striped it down the middle of the fairway on the eighteenth, a monstrous uphill five-hundred-and-thirty-yard par four that was probably the hardest closing hole in the history of the majors. From there, Rose hit a magnificent four iron to the back of the green, mimicking the famous shot that Ben Hogan hit from almost the same spot en route to winning the 1950 U.S. Open.

This calibre of play proved too much for Rose’s challengers, including Mickelson, who was playing a couple of groups behind him. With all of America—or the part of it afflicted with the golf bug, anyway—cheering him on, the lumpy Californian provided his usual quota of highs (holing out a wedge shot on tenth) and lows (attempting and fluffing a flop shot from the front of the fifteenth green). Unlike at Winged Foot in 2006 and Bethpage in 2009, he didn’t flame out—he just didn’t play quite as well as the winner. His long shots weren’t as straight as Rose’s were, and his putting was mediocre. “For me, it’s very heart breaking,” he said after the round, and most of the viewers probably agreed with him.

But not the English contingent, which will hail Rose as a conquering hero when he returns home next month for the British Open, which will be held at snooty Muirfield, outside Edinburgh. With the London Olympics and Andy Murray’s victory at the U.S. Open, it’s been quite a twelve months for British sport, and Rose’s win caps it off. In a game where being self-centered and monomaniacal is practically an entrance requirement, he stands out for his decency and his modesty. “I’ve holed a putt to win a major championship hundred of thousands of times on the putting green at home,” he said in the media center afterward. “And preparing for this tournament, I dreamt about the moment of having a putt to win. Pretty happy it was a two-incher on the last.”

So, good news all around. Merion survives more than intact, and one of the good guys wins. Just don’t tell the English that he was actually born in South Africa.

Above: Justin Rose. Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty.