Baseball Blog

It was too painful to watch. When Tom Watson walked down the 17th fairway after pushing his tee shot deep into knee-high fescue at yesterday’s British Open, I had to change the channel. I was literally unable to watch as the cameras trained in on Watson, who was resigned to his fate as having come so close to earning the greatest victory in the history of golf, but falling short in the end.
As it was happening, I found myself rooting so hard against Stewart Cink that I thought for a moment his body had been inhabited by J.J. Redick’s. I wrote about this on Yahoo’s Devil Ball Golf yesterday and, naturally, added to the ranks of commenters who think I’m some sort of provoker who likes getting a rise out of people. But I was serious. I was genuinely rooting against Cink. And now that I’m reading interviews with him and looking at pictures of himself and the Claret Jug on Twitter, I dislike him all the more.
It’s not logical, and I know that. But I don’t care about Stewart Cink winning the British Open. I cared about Tom Watson capping one of the greatest stories in sports histories.
Great games and players? Those will always happen. It’s in the percentages. We’re always going to have great duels because, give us enough games, and there will be some memorable ones. But something like this, a 59-year old man with one putt to win a major — that’s once-in-two-lifetime stuff.
Read Joe Posnanski’s column from today’s Kansas City Star. As always, he says it best.