With Tiger in Top Form, A Strong Crew of California-Bred Players Helped Put Harding Park on the Presidents Cup Map For Good

by Vic Williams
photos by Joann Dost

So what if Barack Obama didn't show up at Harding Park for the 2009 Presidents Cup's closing ceremonies, as originally rumored? And so what if those ceremonies could only fill about half the temporary arena set up on the nine-hole Fleming Course, with the 24 members of the United States and International teams looking like they'd just wrapped up a laid-back member-guest? The biggest golf event to hit the City By the Bay since the 1998 U.S. Open was an unqualified hit, simply because one guy was very much THERE.

The moment Tiger Woods twirled his 3-iron and gave a familiar "I just kicked your ass" look on the final hole of his group's Saturday morning foursome play, we could score the Presidents Cup a success. Not that we couldn't do so before the shot, but that one electric moment — that rising to the occasion in a dramatic way only Tiger can seem to manage, with qualified shout-outs to Phil Mickelson — sealed the deal. Suddenly the chilly marine layer that settled over Harding Park for most of the week seemed to lift just a bit. The Man brought the heat, and we all felt it.

Harding Park shook with a strong though not-quite-Ryder Cup-sized roar when Tiger pulled off that second shot on the reachable par-5 as his putt-draining demon of a partner, Steve Stricker, looked on with awe. The rest of us just shook our heads. Tiger had done it again, stiffing the shot to within 20 feet to earn a conceded eagle from Tim Clark and Mike Weir, the International team's true bulldogs. After trailing most of the match, Tiger and Stricker pulled even with a must-make Tiger putt on 17, followed by yet another career highlight reel dagger on 18.

The Internationals had won four of the previous five matches that had made it to the final hole, so this win was definitely a turning point in what, up to that moment, had been a very tight Presidents Cup. Instead of the Americans maintaining a slim one-point advantage, they were three up, which they held through the day, then extended during Sunday's singles matches to final winning margin of 19 1/2-14 1/2.

So, yeah, that 3-iron was huge.

"I've been a part of losing Ryder Cup teams and winning Presidents Cup teams, and it's basically who wins the 18th hole more that particular week," Tiger said Saturday evening, after he and Stricker knocked down Ryo Ishikawa and Y.E. Yang 4&2 in the afternoon four-ball matches. "It's amazing how it can turn an entire Cup around just by having a guy win one match going into 18 or halve a match or something like that. It can turn the tide of an entire Cup."

Indeed it did. And who notched the winning point in the whole shooting match 24 hours later? Who else — by handing his PGA Championship nemesis, Y.E. Yang, a 6&4 comeuppance.

No one would ever accuse Tiger Woods of mailing in a performance in any stage of his 13-year PGA Tour career; note his hole-in-one as a rookie in Phoenix, or any number of heroic shots fired during the course of his 70-something big league wins and 14-and-counting majors. But seeing him truly fired up and dialed in on the fairways of a full-blown public track, in an event that was basically created by the PGA Tour to compete with the PGA of America's much more ballyhooed and history-steeped Ryder Cup, was proof positive that The Presidents Cup had finally arrived as a top-tier competition. And Harding Park? Let's just say the millions the PGA Tour invested in the 80-year-old cypress-lined gem were well spent. It should now occupy and regular and permanent spot on this event's rotation, and could attract many others. A regular Tour stop, perhaps? A major, which would put it on equal footing with the Olympic Club, the multi-Open host just across Lake Merced?

Now that we're a month-plus out from the final handshakes and amazingly subdued American celebration (at least by raucous, champagne-and-beer drenched Ryder Cup standards), these conclusions come to mind in the spreading wake of hindsight. And there will be more between now and the Presidents Cup's ninth edition at Royal Melbourne, in November 2011. But one fact is abundantly clear: This will never rival the Ryder Cup in hype or heated rhetoric. And everybody seems just fine with that.

Not that the nationalistic intensity surrounding the event won't ratchet up as Asia continues its inexorable march toward dominance in the global golf market. Judging from the number of fans at Harding Park getting vocal for the International side, the temperature is already rising. Yang and Ishikawa attracted thousands of ticket buyers from the culturally diverse Bay Area who might have otherwise skipped it, and Anthony Kim — who hails from Southern California though his parents immigrated from South Korea — was no doubt responsible for some Asian attendance as well.

That's all good as the game spreads its wings into new corners of the planet and sheds the "old white male" mantle. And by showcasing Top 20 players who don't hail from the United States or Europe, the Presidents Cup continues to feed into PGA Commissioner Tim Finchem's go-global marketing strategy. No doubt the Cup will eventually be played in Seoul, or Tokyo, or perhaps a city in China or Thailand. But despite the clear competitive juices flowing through both squads — fist-pumps and bumps were in full bloom, and several players, Kim included, fought mighty bouts with their nerves on Harding's tricky poa annua greens — this particular Cup never got close to overflowing with rah-rah bombast. Two dozen golf wizards just got out there, had fun and pretty much left the real nail biting to their captains, Fred Couples and Greg Norman, who in turn decided to leave the heavy battlefield lifting to their assistants — Jay Haas and honorary captain Michael Jordan on the Yank side and Golf Channel regular Frank Nobilo for the Internationals. That left the leaders to hobnob on the first tee each morning, yuk it up in the pairings meeting each afternoon (a charming and welcome departure from the Ryder Cup's secret process, as is this event' four-day competition set-up), and generally do their best to hide their angst. Only when pressed by the media for insights into their psyches did the two skippers betray their hyper-competitive feelings — and their desire to be out there battling alongside their troops.

"I'll be honest with you, it was very difficult, because we are competitors," Norman said after Thursday's matches, which ended in a tight 3 1/2-2 1/2 advantage for the Americans. "We still love to play golf, and to be there on the sideline, totally powerless about doing things except giving a little bit of advice maybe — I haven't been there before."

Couples, who's just as intense but rarely shows that his pulse rises above sofa spud level, agreed. "I'm the same way. And the advice thing, I don't know if I said this earlier. I gave Jay the advice for the first hour and a half, and then I took over and the matches started going the other way. So I flipped it right back, called the official and gave it back to Jay. I was afraid to be up on the 17th tee, because it wasn't my advice. So basically I was hitting guys in the butt, telling them 'great putt' or whatever and leaving them alone."

Otherwise-coolheaded Fred really felt the butterflies on the first tee that morning, mostly because of the company. "It was nerve wracking, because President Bush was there, Barry Bonds was there, Jerry West was there. So I'm like, OK, they hit, I'm going to go take another picture with Greg … it's a nail-biting thing because we have 12 favorites.

"I know it's going to be cake until Sunday, really. I know that's going to be the worst day ever for us, watching 12 matches go and we're trying to get to that magic number of points."

Sunday's singles turned more anti-climatic than anyone could have predicted, or wanted. Hunter Mahan and Stewart Cink rushed out to quick leads over Camilo Villegas and Adam Scott, while Anthony Kim — who, according to opponent Robert Allenby, was playing with a hangover and virtually no sleep — seemed rightheaded to everyone else on the property, and ended up blowing out the Aussie 5&3. Sean O'Hair continued the kind of steady play that had distinguished him all week, cruising to a 6&4 shellacking of Ernie Els, and though Ishikawa and especially Tim Clark kept the International hopes alive by taking down a distracted Kenny Perry and game but outgunned Zach Johnson, Tiger killed the buzz with pretty little up-and-down from the big cypress trees to the right of the drivable par-4 13th, draining an uphill eight-footer for birdie, and the Cup. He smiled broadly as Couples ran out to give him a hug and and the good news — though in interviews, Tiger maintains there was no such "we just retained the Cup" exchange at that moment. Whatever. By just after 2 p.m. local time, the trophy was safely back in the American's hands and the remaining matches in progress, including Mickelson's rousing 2&1 win over Retief Goosen, which left Phil undefeated for the first time in his 15-year Presidents Cup run. Minutes earlier, knowing the the Cup was lost, Vijay Singh continued the event's reputation for outstanding sportsmanship by conceding a long par putt to a struggling Lucas Glover on 18 to halve the match.

So, even with Tiger's heroics and utter dominance over every match's opponent with or without Stricker at his side, you could say the Showdown at Harding ended with a whimper. And it's a good bet that overall, the competition didn't translate all that well to TV, even with Johnny Miller's sometimes controversial commentary. But for folks who were there, three or four-deep around the fairly small greens and up the fairways, there was plenty of drama from stem to stern.

One high point came on Thursday, on the very last hole of the final foursome match between Goosen and Yang and Furyk and Leonard. With the Internationals in with birdie and Leonard needing to sink a kick-in one-footer to win, everybody in creation figured Goosen would give him the putt, but the South African — apparently making dinner plans in his mind, or something — didn't utter a word. So up stepped the steady Texan to clean it up, only to power-lip his way to a halve, which kept the Internationals within a point.

"His mind kind of went blank," Couples said of Goosen after the match. "He didn't mean anything by it, and Justin didn't have a problem. No one has a problem with it."

Of course, Leonard was at the center of another big putt a decade earlier at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass. — the Ryder Cup-clinching bomb heard round the world. And he recovered from this little gaffe with a strong 2-1-1 showing the rest of the way, even making fun of himself on Thursday night when, according to newspaper reports, he lined up a series of shot glasses in the team room, downing their contents in quick succession to kill the pain only to reveal that they were, indeed, just water.

That's the kind of Presidents Cup this was. Sure, every man played with intensity and spirit and wanted to win as much as they could for their respective charities, which is what these biennial shindigs are really all about. The captains gave it their all, the fans paraded their true colors and another fascinating chapter of professional golf history was written in that peculiar, progressive style only San Francisco can manage.

It would have been great had President Obama showed up to congratulate the winners, but we'll get over it — we already are over it — and will remember three things about this chilly October week in the City by the Bay: The playfulness, the understated pomp, and Tiger's peerless 3-iron. FG

Published in FG Magazine, November 2009

AMERICA'S MOST HONORED MAGAZINE AT ING AWARDS
It’s getting to be a habit, and we can’t seem to help ourselves. For the fourth straight year, FG racked up an impressive load of hardware at the International Network of Golf Media Awards announced at January’s PGA Merchandise Show. We scored six awards in all, besting writers and photographers from such national publications as GolfWeek and Sports Illustrated. First-place honors went to Vic Williams in Competition Writing for his piece on Tiger’s historic U.S. Open victory (July-August 2008), Joann Dost for her epic shot of Tiger’s 72nd hole putt on Open Sunday; and Calder Chism for his “Weekend Wisdom” drawing of Vic in the May-June 2008 issue. Outstanding Achievement awards went to Williams and Darin Bunch for Travel Writing. Other FG contributors who took home awards included Tony Dear and Bob Seligman. Next year, look for the clean sweep.