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RE-WRITING HISTORY

Well, it’s a form of history, anyway.

With his impressive victory at the Players Championship, Sweden’s Henrik Stenson must surely go down as the first-ever golfer of whom one can write: “Now he will no longer be best remembered for taking off his clothes.”

And indeed it’s true, for Stenson achieved a measure of fame/infamy at March’s WGC-CA Championship by stripping down to his underwear before attempting to extricate a ball from a water hazard – a moment which surely got the attention of PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, even if there was little that Finchem could actually do about it. But Stenson turned that fiasco/epic moment into little more than a footnote on Sunday by birdieing six of his final 12 holes en route to a flawless final round 66 and an emphatic four-shot triumph over Ian Poulter, in the process logging by far his largest worldwide victory to date.

And this really was an important win for Stenson, because...

While I am one of the seemingly small number of people genuinely enamored with the Official World Ranking, I must concede that there might be a flaw in its mechanism when a player can be a fixture in the world top 10 without at least occasionally winning on the top tour in t he world. Certainly Stenson has been a consistent winner in Europe (seven E Tour victories since 2000) and I haven’t forgotten that one of those events was the 2007 WGC Match Play which is, of course, also an official event in America. But in general Stenson has avoided playing regularly on these shores. In fact, going into this week, beyond the internationally oriented Majors and WGCs, the Players and the FedEx Cup playoffs, he had made a grand total of seven career PGA Tour starts.

Now, I can’t necessarily blame him for choosing such a path. Indeed, if money is not one’s sole motivator in life, there could be a dozen good reasons to play primarily in Europe – not the least of which might be an admirable sense of loyalty to one’s home circuit. The great Australian Hall-of-Famer Peter Thomson certainly felt no need to ply his trade regularly in the U.S., nor did Seve Ballesteros, and numerous other British and European players since the founding of the E Tour in the early 1970s.

But...

Thomson and Ballesteros made their worldwide competitive bones winning Majors, while those other E Tour types seldom challenged for elite status worldwide. Henrik Stenson, on the other hand, has not accomplished the former but, at least according to the World Ranking, has very much achieved the latter. Fair enough. But by coming to Ponte Vedra Beach and handing it to a world-class field in the game’s fifth biggest event, Stenson certainly validated that top-10 ranking, ending any speculation as to his ability to win “over here.” And if one doubts the significance of that, how, I wonder, do they think history will rate Colin Montgomerie, a genuinely great talent who never won either a Major or a regular Tour event in America?

Anyway, now being unquestionably established among the world elite, will Henrik Stenson opt to play in America more regularly? Or even less?

And then we have the ongoing saga of Tiger Woods, who blew himself out of Sunday contention with a horrendous start, hitting shots pretty much every place but where he was aiming over the first several holes, and never finding enough form to mount any sort of meaningful run thereafter. The naysayers, of course, are getting louder now, and one senses that Tiger’s alleged instructor Hank Haney may soon have considerably more time to dedicate to the all-encompassing work-in-regression that is Charles Barkley. But whether Woods brooms Haney or not, it is still too early to conclude that he has somehow “lost it,” that his knee may never sufficiently recover, or that he now resides again amongst the mortals. Indeed, a player of Woods’ singular talents will almost certainly rise again, in some form or fashion, to a level capable of winning Major championships. But the question that now might be a reasonable one to ask is:

In the time it takes to do that, will he lose his psychological edge?

Have the players that once generally fell to pieces in his presence now become emboldened enough by his post-surgery play that they are more ready to mount significant opposition during crunch time? I’m still certain that Tiger can regain his lost form (albeit almost certainly under new tutelage) but his psychological advantage very well could be on the wane.

And if so, that would certainly make for some interesting competitive times dead ahead.

Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 12:22AM by Registered CommenterDaniel | Comments1 Comment | References1 Reference

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