So Close, Uncle Tom

My workaday routine has morphed into a workaweek routine, so gloriously predictable if unsettling and unstable it is. Work during the week, sprinkle in a softball game or two, assault my liver, decency, and all sensibility on a Friday or Saturday night, golf on the weekend mornings, and channel the 50 year old WASP in me by taking in the tennis or golf tournament du jour Sunday afternoon.

So it was the same this past week, the Ohio State library one week closer to opening its doors, the softball squad picking up another couple of victories, firing an extremely mediocre 99 at Legacy golf course, and ensuring the Kenilworth stays open by washing down jukebox tunes with bottles of finely aged Bud Heavy. Yet the sameness of it all was rendered memorable by seemingly the most mundane element of my routine; watching golf on Sunday.

Tom Watson, only a month or so shy of turning 60, was one putt away from turning the Open Championship, golf's oldest event, into a coronation and celebration of defying age and inactivity through determination, focus, and religion-less spirituality best described as faith in one's vision of self, surroundings, and experience.

Watson was one of golf's greatest champions, a contemporary of Jack Nicklaus and Greg Norman and Seve Ballasteros and Nick Faldo. Eight major championships to his name, five British Open titles (though none since 1983), and all of the accolades and admiration rightfully associated with such preeminence were his. But at 'ol Turnberry, in July of 2009, he stood on the doorstep of what I believe would have been the singular greatest sporting achievement of all time; winning the big one for the fogeys, and claiming the Open for the sixth time at age 59.

For 71 holes, he danced the dance of serenity and "dude, I got this." With winds whipping off the Irish Sea and the undulating fairways and greens frustrating golf's best in the world (the Tiger himself missed the 36 hole cut), Watson presumed his experience and game plan would carry the day. No matter the English bookmakers had punters betting on Watson at one thousand to one odds against him winning, he believed.

And his silky swing, though robbed of some of its violent superiority, was as steady as the Scottish thermometer was skittish. He hit almost every fairway and green, running the ball off the mounds and over the hills, dodging the pot bunkers and overgrown rough, and sinking improbable putts from all over Ayrshire. He was truly the eye of the hurricane, individually calm amidst turbulent chaos circling about. He was an old freaking man, about to tame one of the game's most challenging beasts.

And then came the 18th hole on Sunday. Needing a par to win, his drive was pure. His second shot looked perfect, but was just too much, rolling dangerously off the back of the green and onto the lip of the rough. To the hack like me, when I hit an eight-iron pure and straight and it bounds off the back, I'm happy with my swing and curse the result, which will invariably be double bogey. But Tom had to have a plan, right? Just get up and down, a chip and a putt, or a push putt and a putt, or something.

His first putt crept dangerously beyond the hole, leaving a testy eight footer for it all. And at that moment, the serenity left his soul, and history left the British Isles. His putt looked like the putt of a 59-year old man with the weight of history on his shoulders, or the putt of a 30-year old project manager with the weight of a $25 bet on his neck. He pussied it, never gave it a run, left it short and allowed it to veer off line.

He tapped in for bogey and forced a four-hole playoff, but the epic story that had been all but written was reduced to a woulda-coulda-shoulda rough draft, crumpled and sky-hooked into the wastepaper basket of too-good-to-be-true along with all the other fables that just don't quite sync with reality.

The playoff was an anticlimactic foregone conclusion. Stewart Cink, an affable man with scary-good golf talent and a likable disposition, was gonna eat him up. Though Cink had stared history in the face before, and not only blinked but threw up and pooped a little bit on himself (he choked away the 2001 US Open with a series of blown putts, including an unforgivable two-footer on 18), this was different. He was the wrestling heel, Drago in Rocky, the guy that in this moment was just too good, too now, too ready to even think about letting it slip away again. He realized he was the villain in this movie, and was all too content with it, as long as he, in his words, "got the girl in the end." And he claimed what was, as it turned out, rightfully his.

For 17 holes on Sunday I couldn't help but think of my uncle Jim. Like Watson, he is a middle-aged going on old man, still trim and fit and blessed with enough spunk and guile to run with the kids-- hell, in Italy, he was outdrinking and homoerotically out-thrusting his decades younger nephews, but that is a troubling story for another day-- and for a while, he did. Uncle Jim dusted off his Manny Sanguillen swing and subbed on my Sunday softball team, doubling his first at-bat and going five for his first six at the age of 62. But the dog days of summer wore on, and the cramps in his thighs didn't subside. I still got it, his eyes said, but your asking me to give it just a little too much.

And so it was that Tom Watson has still got it, but all of us asked for him to give it for just one hole too many.