2007 Open Championship

There was a simple, eloquent beauty to the close of the Open at Carnoustie yesterday. Inside the perpetually grey skies and bright yellow scoreboards, the tight out of bounds fences and the golden grass walkways, there seemed to exist another world, a world left behind. Stone gathered centuries before any of us line the Barry Burn, holding up ground forged into its' modern image by Old Tom Morris, slant at angles that menace but still provide the smallest amount of hope. It looks as if ABC simply sent us a long-lost tape from decades ago, and we watch like it were new.

Watching Padrig Harrington and Sergio Garcia battle for a championship that us American's tend to treat as the "easy" major in golf created an atmosphere that comes out purely in major golf, no different than a contentious Masters or U.S. Open. What elevated it passed these standard examples was that vicious Carnoustie, with all it's looping greens and jagged fairways. It's greenside bunkers with the five foot walls, it's 251-yard par 3 17th. All this leading to the golf war zone, the 18th, "home", and the ghost of 1999 preventing any ease of mind.

Of course, in 1999, this was a different course. A 24-year span between Open's obviously made the caretakers of the ancient course feel like there was something to prove, causing modifications that would create a feral beast of a golf course. The rough was raised to nearly knee-height, the fairways were thinned. On some holes, layup landing areas were 9 feet wide. Weather conditions helped no one, as coastal wind ripped the golfers for most of the week. To all involved, this was a prime example of making a golf course overly difficult in the modern era; not many golf courses have psychological terms named for them, nor do they drive professional golfers to tears. Carnoustie was eased slightly, allowing golfers to have a punchers chance this time around.

However the Beast played this week, it went out the window when Padrig Harrington, nursing his one-stroke lead, was led Home. Seeing the driver coming out of his bag, the quiet gasps of Mike Tirico illustrated the answer to a great question of humanity: we do not learn from mistakes that are not our own. Somewhere in our mind, lost amidst the hours of memory footage of Jean Van de Velde removing his shoes to wade in the Barry Burn, is a silent majority that will not let us pull out the 4-iron. It's different. Harrington knew it was different. And when he whacked it into the Burn, we all knew it was exactly the same.

So we watched the wayward ball stumble off the footbridge into the water, mere paces short of relieving Harrington of a spectacular failure. It pocked off the stone, and into the Burn, about five yards past where Van de Velde's drive went eight years ago. He judged his play as Garcia teed off behind up - or more correctly, over him - on the 17th. Now a stroke down on the hole, his only option was to whack it hard and close...leading him to another visit with the Burn. His boyish face looked bamboozled, hoodwinked, startled, lost, dead. He made his double bogey, knocking it up and down, and walked to his waiting son, who leaped into his arms with a sad smile.

It was at this point when the ghost of Jean Van de Velde awoke at Carnoustie. Van de Velde is still alive, of course, but the ghost of his championship body walks Carnoustie. The young frenchman, so coy and smart with his play all week, so stiff and numb at the end, showed his head. Van de Velde has said the loss didn't affect him too much, that it was "just another round of golf." And it was true; the man who would have cared about such things remains at Home, wondering just how everything could have gone so wrong.

He saw Padrig, and what had the makings of a colossal failure. A failure that lacked the panache of his distruction, but something huge all the same. Garcia came to the tee and whacked it strong with an iron. He drifted his second into a greenside bunker, but that was fine; he still needed only par to silence the critics and become a champion. The ghost saw his bunker shot, a marvelous play that put the Spaniard and his belly putter feet from glory.

Now, this is not a haunting ghost, mind you. He was, like his original host, a very even-handed soul. He contained no ill will towards the other golfers, or even the course. Simply that one moment where everything had gone wrong and had inadvertently chained him here. He knew what this did to people; he saw the look in Harrington's eyes after his double, and saw himself eight years ago. Numb, dead, lost in a game he had mastered. As Garcia hit what looked to be the winning putt, the ghost walked to the cup and caught the ball just as it were to fall in. He knew Harrington would win in the playoff; he also knew that Harrington had waited longer for this championship. He dropped the ball outside the cup and let it roll a few feet away, crumpling Garcia.

Of course, Harrington won. The ghost of Home were with him on this day.