Coming Sunday: Shootout at the Stick

    Saturday, September 8, 2012
    Writing from Carmel, Indiana

    This 109th Open Championship of the Western Golf Association now has another name.
    One besides the BMW Championship, that is.
    Welcome to the Shootout at the Stick.
    That’s the only thing to call it after the third straight romp deep into red numbers by players of great skill who were allowed to put the ball in their hand.
    Here’s the leaderboard – gold-plated names to go with red numbers – entering Sunday’s final round at defenseless Crooked Stick Golf Club:
    Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh are co-leaders at 16-under-par 200. World No. 1 Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood are a stroke back at 15-under 201. Dustin Johnson, Robert Garrigus and Adam Scott share fourth place at 14-under 202. Tiger Woods is eighth at 13-under 203. Lurking four strokes back at 204 are Zach Johnson, Graeme McDowell and Bo Van Pelt.
    Those top 11 players have combined to win 25 professional majors, plus six Western Opens / BMWs and assorted Players Championships and FedEx Cups.
    Is that any good? Will that guarantee a walkup crowd of mammoth proportions on Sunday morning? Who wouldn’t want to come out and hang with Phil and Rory and Tiger and Bo, the local Hoosier in the hunt?
    “The cream has risen to the top, hasn’t it?” said Westwood after his 4-under 68.
    Short of the butterflies flitting in each player’s stomach during a major championship, this is as good as it gets for them and for those who watch them.
    Of those 11 low-shooting stars, only Woods and Van Pelt failed to break 70 on Saturday, and they scored 1-under 71, Woods fighting knee pain on the front nine. Mickelson, lounging in 13th place entering the day, blistered Crooked Stick with 10 birdies en route to an 8-under 64, the seventh such course record-tying score of the week. Scott and Garrigus barged into the conversation with 6-under 66s, Garrigus posting a 5-under 31 on the course’s difficult back nine.
    Of the 70 players in this third playoff tournament of the four comprising the FedEx Cup series, 17 are 10 or more under par through 54 holes. Ben Curtis made five birdies in a row and six in eight holes, shot 68, and is in an 18th-place logjam with Justin Rose, the defending champion. They’re at 9-under 207, those slackers.
    They’re seven strokes back, but might as well be 70 back, considering the depth of the talent pool ahead of them.
    This particular Saturday was as much positioning day as it was, as Ken Venturi dubbed it long ago, “Moving Day.”
    But Mickelson moved, and brought many in the gallery of approximately 35,000 with him. The stylish lefthander birdied five straight holes and seven in a stretch of nine from the fourth to the 13th, jumping from 7-under to 14-under. From that point, he and Singh swapped the lead.
    “It’s a lot of fun, fun to see putts go in, fun to hit fairways and attack pins,” Mickelson said. “It’s great to be back in the mix at the right time.”
    Mickelson was barely in the mix in 14 appearances at Cog Hill, and never at the end of four days. His best finish, a tie for 10th, came two years ago thanks to a back-door 67 on Sunday. He appeared to be in the hunt in 1994, trailing Nick Price by a stroke after 36 holes, then scored back-to-back 77s and finished in a tie for 64th.
    Now he has a shot to add this title to a glittering resume that goes back to his amateur days, when he won the Tucson Open and Western Amateur in the same year. That was 1991, when the PGA Championship was at Crooked Stick, but Mickelson wasn’t eligible to play. He somehow thought he was, even though he was an amateur, and even though the PGA was and is open to pros only.
    “I look back on that 20 years later and I’m still upset,” Mickelson said after his 64.
    Hey, whatever works as a motivator.
    Mickelson poured in a total of 31 feet of birdie putts from the sixth through nine holes, those to go with six others, including a 15-footer from the collar at the last. The roar for that one echoed off the glass-fronted corporate suites. Unaccountably, it didn’t set off the car alarms on the BMWs parked here and there across this sylvan, if muddy, landscape. But the rest of the field heard it, then played possum about it.
    “They’re just other players,” Singh said, dismissing the resumes of the other notables when considering his challengers. “I’m going to play my game, focus on my game, and see what happens. I think I’m playing good enough to win the golf tournament, and that’s how I’m going to think tomorrow.”
    Singh won the first FedEx Cup in 2007, but hasn’t won on the PGA Tour in four years. At 49, this may be his last best chance to hold a trophy in his hands by beating the kids. And, after five top 10s in the Western, the best a second to Joe Durant in 1998, maybe this is his time.
    There’s karma in golf, though. Singh has never fully escaped from the scorecard scandal that earned him a suspension from the Asian Tour in 1985 and sent him into oblivion. He came all the way back and has been a good, if generally taciturn, citizen of the game since then.
    McIlroy is the future and the present, based on his ranking, his win last Monday in Boston, and his looming presence a stroke in arrears. Hitting only eight fairways and nine greens, he scrambled to a 69 anyway, then went to the range to figure out why he was, in his words, “hitting the ball awfully from tee to green.”
    This from one of the dozen players in the field to post three rounds in the 60s so far, including an opening 64. If he figures things out, there’s no telling how low he can go.
    Meanwhile, there are all those guys chasing the leaders, including Dustin Johnson, who has hit only 26 of 42 fairways so far, but says the course sets up well for him. A Sunday 64 gets Johnson or one of his fellow chasers on television, if not the leader board. Given the firepower and the stakes, the Shootout at the Stick could make fans forget the Bears and Colts on the morrow, even in this town.
    Gentleman, start your birdies.
    – Tim Cronin