With Safeway win, Cink provides validation he didn’t need

By Art Spander
For Maven Sports

NAPA, Calif. — He said it would be a validation, one that Stewart Cink contends he didn’t need. “Hey,” he told us, “I know I’ve got enough game to compete out here, I really do.”

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2020, The Maven

For Stewart Cink, still no regrets about that British win

By Art Spander
For Maven Sports

NAPA, Calif. — Sometimes fortune is more important than results. Sometimes it isn’t exactly what you do but indeed when you do it.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2020, The Maven

RealClearSports: Match Play Is Golf for the Moment

By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

MARANA, Ariz. -- Match play is when golf becomes the NCAA basketball tournament. Match play is when two men compete head to head, as Ali and Frazier or Nadal and Federer. Match play is "get the ball in the cup or get out of here.''

And, as Tiger Woods a day earlier, Lee Westwood, Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy are out of here. Done.

Read the full story here.

© RealClearSports 2011

Newsday (N.Y.): Watson hopes to challenge again after near-miss in '09

By Art Spander
Special to Newsday

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- For Tom Watson, the Open Championship inevitably evolves into the past, even if he doesn't want it to.

Either someone is asking about what might have been a year ago or that missed opportunity here on the hallowed golfing ground of the Old Course 26 years ago.

Strange how it is in sports. No matter how many championships you earn, and Watson has five Opens, only one fewer than the century-old record of Harry Vardon, the questions are always about the championships lost.

Such as the 2009 Open, when Watson, age 59, led for 71 holes at Turnberry before a bogey on 18 led to a tie and playoff loss to Stewart Cink.

Such as the 1984 Open here when Watson came to the 17th, the Road Hole, "the hardest hole in golf," tied with Seve Ballesteros and hit a 2-iron onto the road near a stone wall. The bogey dropped him to second.

It was a nostalgic but forward-looking Watson who showed up in the media tent Wednesday, 24 hours before the start of the 139th Open.

"St. Andrews is a hard course to understand," said Watson, when asked his chances. "You have to re-learn it every day."

This will be his seventh and most likely his last Open at St. Andrews, a course on which Jack Nicklaus said "all great Open champions must win," but a course where Watson has only one top-10 finish, that runnerup.

The disappointment of a year past, when Watson was a stroke from becoming the sports story of the year, has not lingered.

"It tore my guts out," said Watson of the final-hole failure at Turnberry, "but I've had my guts torn up before in this game. But it hasn't made any impact.

"People of our age come up to me and say they couldn't stop watching. They say. 'I'm 60 years old, and I've given up on the game or given up on something else, and you've given me hope.'"
The hope for Watson is in 2010 after an 18th place in the Masters and a 29th in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, "It would be a great triumvirate if I did well here at age 60."

Ballesteros is not doing well. He is home in Spain, after undergoing multiple surgeries for a brain tumor. At the Champions dinner, held only when the Open is at St. Andrews, Ballesteros sent a brief video.

"He said I wish I had energy to be there," Watson said. "It was sad to see him. But seeing him I remembered the cheer that went up before I tried to make my par putt at 17 [in '84]. I looked at 18, and there he was [indicating an arm pump.] I said. 'Uh, oh, I have to make it now.' But I didn't."

Watson and several others, including Arnold Palmer, received honorary doctorates from the University of St. Andrews.

"I told Arnold, 'You've always been my idol,'" Watson said. "When I grew up I was a member of Arnie's Army. Then Jack came along and beat Arnie, and I couldn't stand it. I told Arnie, 'The only reason I beat Nicklaus all those times is because he beat you.' He got a laugh out of that."

- - - - - -

http://www.newsday.com/sports/golf/watson-hopes-to-challenge-again-after-near-miss-in-09-1.2105409
Copyright © 2010 Newsday. All rights reserved.

SF Examiner: Likeable Watson forced to deal with sting of defeat

By Art Spander
Examiner Columnist

Losing, we have been told, is the great American sin. But was it sinful what Tom Watson did at the British Open? Surely, it was disappointing. The idea in sports is to win.

The reality is that more times than not we lose.

“The taste of defeat,” wrote basketball star and U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, “has a richness of experience all its own.”

The memory of J.T. Snow hunched over and staring at his locker after the seventh game of the 2002 World Series forever will remain. Snow and the Giants had that Series won, had a 5-0 lead in Game 6. Yet they didn’t win.

And there was Snow contemplating what could have been, what Giants fans to this day believe should have been.

Tom Watson is very much a part of the Bay Area as the Giants and A’s and the rest of the franchises. He came from Missouri, but was a Stanford man ... still is a Stanford man.

No cheering in the press box is the yardstick to which American journalists must adhere. An event must be approached without bias. In this British Open, however, I cheered silently for Watson.

Not only because of his age, not only because a 59-year-old golfer finishing first in a major championship tournament would have been the sports story of the century, an irresistible tale of persistence and implausibility, but because in this world of fraudulence and dishonesty, Tom Watson is genuine, truthful.

In the winter of 1968 as a Stanford freshman, Watson for the first time competed in the San Francisco Amateur at Harding Park. In the match-play portion he hit an errant shot, into the trees, at the 10th hole I think it was, and after he putted out for what presumably was a par, he said he had moved the ball accidentally at address, thus had a bogey and lost the hole.

No one saw his transgression. The ball had remained virtually in the same place it had been. He received no advantage. But Tom Watson was governed by the rules of golf, as well as his conscience. For him, there was only one way to play the game.

Tom has had his moments, created his legacy. He won five British Opens, two Masters and then at Pebble Beach in 1982 in the U.S. Open. He was involved with Sandy Tatum and Robert Trent Jones II in the creation of Spanish Bay Golf Links on the Monterey Peninsula and has taken part in charity events at Stanford.

He can do without our tears, even though symbolically he deserves them.

Watson played so well for so long in the Open, until the last of the 72 holes, and then as the Bay Area, as America, as the world of golf winced, he messed up, dropped into a playoff and lost to Stewart Cink.

“This ain’t a funeral, you know,” Watson told a grim-faced pack of writers in what the Open still calls the “Press Centre.”

No, it was a defeat, supposedly enriching an athlete’s experience.

You looked at Watson as you did Snow back in 2002 and found that concept very hard to understand.

Art Spander has been covering Bay Area sports since 1965 and also writes on www.artspander.com and www.realclearsports.com. E-mail him at typoes@aol.com.

- - - - - -

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sports/Likeable-Watson-forced-to-deal-with-sting-of-defeat-51368017.html
Copyright 2009 SF Newspaper Company