Wire to Wire - Kaymer Joins Distinguished Group of Start-to-Finish Winners of U.S. Open

By: Jay Flemma


[Editor's Note: Cybergolf's Jay Flemma was in Pinehurst for the 114th U.S. Open. Here's Jay's final report.]

Martin Kaymer may have won this U.S. Open at breakfast Sunday morning when he walked into the Pinehurst Starbucks and ordered oatmeal. Who does that? Normally it's grande lattes with cloyingly sweet flavor syrups, or fattening sugary donuts, or some meat-egg-and-cheese calorie bomb.

Ordering oatmeal at Starbucks when everybody else is giving into urges: that takes discipline.

It's that kind of focus and control that defined Martin Kaymer's inexorable, unstoppable march to an eight-shot victory at Pinehurst No. 2. He birdied the first hole of the championship and never looked back, taking the lead for good with a 31 on the back nine on Day 1 and ultimately became just the seventh player in U.S. Open history to go wire-to-wire without sharing the lead at any time.

To put that in historical perspective, only six other golfers have done that. Five of them are golfing royalty and the sixth may get there soon enough. Kaymer joins the following illustrious group:

• In 2011 Rory McIlroy razed Congressional Country Club's storied Blue course like Godzilla tore apart Tokyo (Godzilla ate trains, Rory ate Y.E. Yang and his hideously ugly golf outfits). Although Kaymer wrested the 36-hole scoring record from McIlroy, Rory still holds the 54- and 72-hole scoring records as well as lowest aggregate (268) and lowest score to par (-16).

• Tiger Woods turned the trick twice, once in 2000 when he decimated everyone by 12 shots at Pebble Beach, then again in 2002 at Bethpage Black. While Bethpage was more of a slow boring grind, at Pebble he wallpapered the resort with the rest of the field. He even lined them up floor to ceiling, carefully smoothing out all the lumps. Nobody does that anymore, not even the really classy decorators.

• In 1970, England's Tony Jacklin not only won by a whopping seven shots, he became the first golfer to play all four rounds of a U.S. Open under par, (71-70-70-70 at par-72 Hazeltine National). Like Kaymer, Jacklin appeared to be playing a different golf course than everyone else. Feeling right at home in windy conditions more akin to the Baskerville heaths, Jacklin was also the only player under par that week on a course that the rest of the players loathed. (Especially runner-up Dave Hill, who had his second-place check lightened heftily by a fine after making intemperate comments such as, "They ruined a good farm when they built this course . . . Robert Trent Jones must have had the blueprints upside down.")

• Ben Hogan won his fourth and last U.S. Open at Oakmont in 1953 by opening with a 67 and never looking back, "romping through Oakmont's furrowed bunkers [furrowed] and lightning greens like they didn't exist," as veteran scribe Dan Jenkins wrote. Hogan slammed poor Slammin' Sammy Snead by six shots.

• In 1921, Cornwall, England's James Barnes won at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Md., by a whopping nine strokes over Walter Hagen. "Long Jim" as he was known, was a four-time major winner who also bagged two PGAs (including the first-ever in 1916) and a British Open. "He's a Hall of Famer," said the USGA's museum director Rand Jerris of Barnes, "One of the true great of the Golden Age."

• Walter Hagen also won wire-to-wire (making what Barnes did to him even more astounding). He won at Chicago's Midlothian Country Club in 1914 by opening with a 67, then holding off Chick Evans.

Some of you may be saying, "Wait a minute! What about Jack Nicklaus?" Nicklaus won wire-to-wire twice, but there were ties. In 1980 he shared the first-round lead with Tom Weiskopf when they both set the opening 18-hole record with blistering 63s. The same thing happened at Pebble in 1972. Although Nicklaus opened with a 71, so did five other golfers, though none of them stood a chance. You can take Kermit Zarley, Mason Randolph, Tom Shaw, Chi Chi Rodriguez, and Orville Moody. I'll take Jack.

For those of you scoring at home, here are the other golfers who won start to finish with ties:

• Retief Goosen - 2001, Southern Hills, won in a playoff over Mark Brooks.

• Payne Stewart - 1991, Hazeltine, won in a playoff against Scott Simpson.

• Hubert Green - 1977, Southern Hills, the year a woman called the golf course and said some men were on their way to the tournament to shoot Green, who told officials he thought it was an ex-girlfriend, let's keep playing. But he stayed away from his caddie and playing partners nonetheless.

Caddie Shayne Grier recalls the incident with some levity. "I said, 'Hey, Hubert, I grew up in the streets in Worcester, Mass. If someone's going to hit me, they weren't going to give me a telegram. Let's just give them a bigger target to shoot at.' " Green birdied the next hole after Grier's remark and put the tournament out of reach.

• Tommy Bolt - 1958, Southern Hills (he was tied with Julius Boros and Dick Metz after a first-round 71).

• Chick Evans - 1916, Minikhada Club in Minnesota.

• Alex Smith - 1906, Onwentsia Golf Club, Lake Forest, Ill.

• Willie Anderson - 1903, Baltusrol (Lower Course).

But getting back to Kaymer, it's obvious he is a great frontrunner, perhaps our generation's Ray Floyd, who also used to run away and hide after taking the lead in big tournaments. Kaymer won the Players wire-to-wire last month as well, becoming the first person to win both the U.S. Open and Players in the same year. The closest anyone came to doing that was Nicklaus in 1978 (he finished sixth at Cherry Hills.) During the stretch when he was No. 1 in the world, Kaymer won five out of seven tournaments he entered. Right about now the German national soccer team is hoping they can channel some of the golfer's dominance.

Talk about German precision engineering: although he was tied for 18th in greens in regulation - normally one of the two most important stats at a U.S. Open, he was T-8 in driving accuracy and kept getting up and down from Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro, making every big putt when he had to. The defining moment came Saturday when Kaymer survived a squirrelly round. After hitting 26 of 36 greens the first two rounds, he hit just nine, spraying the ball all over Pinehurst No. 2, No. 5, No. 7, and No. 10, and they haven't even built 10 yet! From tee to green he shot an 81 that would have had Rickie Fowler and Erik Compton in a playoff, but he scrambled like Fran Tarkenton, scoring a 72 that kept him in the driver's seat.

That's what you have to do to win the U.S. Open - keep it together on the day your swing takes the day off. You won't play perfectly all four days, so you have to survive the moments when the wheels could come off.

The big shot Sunday was a 7-iron from the sandy waste area on the par-5 fifth that led to an eagle. That kept him in control and preserved the cushion he was able nurse all the way to the clubhouse. It made Sunday a leisurely stroll instead of a battle - a stroll as easy as ordering oatmeal for breakfast at a Starbucks.

"This is great! Nobody knows me in here," Kaymer told the golf writers lucky enough to stumble upon him by accident. After his performance this weekend, they will now, Martin. They certainly will now.

Since launching his first golf writing website in 2004, http://jayflemma.thegolfspace.com, Jay Flemma 's comparative analysis of golf designs and knowledge of golf course architecture and golf travel have garnered wide industry respect. In researching his book on America's great public golf courses (and whether they're worth the money), Jay has played over 420 nationally ranked public golf courses in 40 different states, and covered seven U.S. Opens and six PGA Championships, along with one trip to the Masters. A four-time award-winning sportswriter, Jay was called the best sports poet alive by both Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports writers and broadcasters. Jay has played about 3 million yards of golf - or close to 2,000 miles. His pieces on travel and architecture appear in Golf Observer (www.golfobserver.com), Cybergolf, PGA.com, Golf Magazine and other print magazines. When not researching golf courses for design, value and excitement, Jay is an entertainment, copyright, Internet and trademark lawyer and an Entertainment and Internet Law professor in Manhattan. His clients have been nominated for Grammy and Emmy awards, won a Sundance Film Festival Best Director award, performed on stage and screen, and designed pop art for museums and collectors. Jay lives in Forest Hills, N.Y., and is fiercely loyal to his alma maters, Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and Trinity College in Connecticut.