Showing posts with label Francesco Molinari. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francesco Molinari. Show all posts

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Golf Takeaways for Amateurs from The Open Championship

During Jordan Spieth's final round at The Open Championship, there were wayward shots and missed putts - disappointing for the young PGA professional seeking a back-to-back win.

On the flip side, Francesco Molinari was sure and steady, plodding along with sixteen pars and two birdies to clinch his victory.

Congratulations go to Molinari, however, for not allowing the pressure of playing golf with Tiger Woods to dictate his swing or his confidence.

Golf for Beginners has compiled this short list of golf takeaways that amateurs should consider, based on the conditions at Carnoustie and the trials and tribulations overcome by players during the 147th British Open Championship.

Play It Safe:

Keep calm in the face of adversity - golf is a game of recovery, as Francesco Molinari showed the rest of The Open field on Sunday. Think about each hole and plan your strategy to keep the ball in play, going into the hole in the least number of strokes.

Play the Wind: 

Jordan Spieth complained stated about the windy conditions, "I felt like I had really good control of the ball. I didn't play the wind the right way on those two holes. I was trying to fight it instead of accepting that the wind is going to win out here."

What can an amateur golfer do to combat the wind?

Butch Harmon golf tip for playing the wind: "Keep the ball low to neutralize the conditions. Take a couple extra clubs, and swing at 75 percent. Fast swings create more backspin and send the ball higher, so resist the urge to smash it."

Putt to Win:

Putting far outweighed being in tough lies off of the tee - Molinari was listed as fourth in putting for the week at Carnoustie, a statistic which helped him win The Open Championship. Molinari has been working with a coach to improve his putting, once said to be a "weakness" in his game.

Coach Denis Pugh stated, "He isn’t giving away strokes gained elsewhere on the course, on the greens now." For amateurs, don't give away strokes. Practice your long putts too...at least to snug the golf ball up to the hole so it's an easy two-putt.

What golf lessons did you learn from watching The Open Championship? Comments welcome below and tag us on Twitter @Golf4Beginners.

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

WGC-HSBC Champions Preview: The Weird Art of Winning, Part 1

The last global tournament of the stroke play season will see an unprecedented number of newcomers rewarded for their wins with a place at the WGC-HSBC Champions. There’s also a good chance that, for the first time in golf history, the season will end with all the Major titles and WGC trophies in the hands of first-time winners. Tim Maitland reports.

As the world’s best golfers descend on Shanghai for the WGC-HSBC Champions, the world of golf has never been so wide open.

Wgc_hsbc_champions_2010_round_1_westwood

photo credit: GolfCentralDaily.com

 

At the moment all of the big trophies have pride of place in their winner’s display cabinets, because none have won at such lofty levels before. The PGA Championship and US Open Championship belong to relative youngsters in 25-year-old Keegan Bradley and 22-year-old Rory McIlroy. The Masters belongs to Charl Schwartzel, 27, making first-time Open Champion Darren Clarke look like a grizzled veteran at 43. 

This year’s WGCs belong to a group of thirty-somethings – England’s world number one Luke Donald (WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship), American Nick Watney (WGC-Cadillac Championship) and Australia’s Adam Scott (WGC-Bridgestone Invitational) – while 28-year-old Italian Francesco Molinari returns to Shanghai to defend the WGC-HSBC Champions.

Thirteen different players have won the last thirteen Majors and only three of them (Mickelson, Cabrera and Harrington) have won Majors before. The last nine World Golf Championships events have also been won by nine different winners; a spell unprecedented since the stable of elite tournaments was introduced in 1999.

There have been six different winners of the last six European Tour Orders of Merit (more recently the Race to Dubai). Compare that to the period between 2005 and 1993 when Colin Montgomerie (eight times), Ernie Els (twice), Retief Goosen (twice), and Lee Westwood (once) shared thirteen titles.

It’s the same on the PGA Tour, where democracy reigns after the duopoly of Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh who were the only players to lead the PGA Tour money list at season’s end or record the most wins between 2009 and 1999. The PGA Player of the Year award and the Jack Nicklaus Trophy (The PGA Tour Player of the Year), with the exception of Padraig Harrington claiming both in 2008, also belonged to Woods or Singh.

This season there have been twelve first-time winners during PGA Tour regular season and an almost unprecedented parade of rookie winners. Compared to the stability of previous years, even the FedEx Cup and Tour Championship winner Bill Haas – a two-time PGA Tour winner in 2010 – could be described as coming from relative obscurity.

The reason would seem to be obvious: the decline of Tiger Woods. Arguably the greatest golfer ever (although some will deny him that claim unless he rebounds and overtakes Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen Major triumphs), Woods was so dominant that through to the end of 2009 he’d won almost thirty per cent of his starts on the PGA Tour.

If you combine his two hottest periods, from 1999 to 2002 and from 2005 to 2008, he claimed thirteen of the twenty-seven Majors he played.  Up until the end of 2009, he triumphed in sixteen of the twenty-nine WGC events in which he competed.

What we’re seeing now, with Tiger so far down the rankings and so far removed from his last big victory that he hasn’t qualified to play in China, is not just young talent, but several generations of golfers figuring out how to win.

 

Part two in Tim Maitland's article coming soon: Why should learning to win matter?

 

 

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Monday, August 29, 2011

Italy's Quiet Golf Champion – Francesco Molinari

Francesco_Molinari
A year ago Francesco Molinari put the seal on a remarkable twelve months with one of the most sensational tournament displays ever seen in Asian golf, when he and Lee Westwood finished streets ahead of a world-class field at the WGC-HSBC Champions. Tim Maitland reports.

When Francesco “Chicco” Molinari briefly raised his hands in the air and gazed momentarily up the cheering Shanghai crowds in the grandstand at Sheshan last year, you would have had little clue from his body language that he had just gone eyeball to eyeball with the hottest player on the planet and won. 

Even now, when he looks back at the best performance, the biggest victory, the most spectacular year of his career and a season unparalleled in the history of Italian golf, his voice – a deep baritone – rumbles along at exactly the same steady, careful, unflustered pace. 

"It was very, very good. It was probably the best golf I’ve played so. When you’re playing against the number one in the world it doesn’t get any tougher than that, especially the way he was playing. It was just a great week for my confidence and my self-belief to see that I could compete against the best in the world," the 28-year-old explains, his tone showing no hint of the kind of excitement of someone describing the day and the week where he delivered a performance that he had strived for most of his life.

There’s no hint of exhilaration when he considers the culmination of a remarkable twelve months in his life. It started when he won the Omega Mission Hills World Cup for Italy with his older brother Edoardo in Shenzhen and continued when he twice played alongside Edoardo as his brother won his first European Tour events in Scotland. If that wasn’t enough the brothers, who were born a little under two years apart, paired up again to help Europe win the Ryder Cup and, circling the globe, Francesco returned to China to claim the biggest prize of his career taking his season earnings to within a few Euros of 2.8 million.

 The vanquished in this case is far more effusive than the victor.

“Last year’s event was great! Myself and Francesco ran away from the field! We played a different golf course that week!” exclaims Westwood, who was starting his first of what would be 22 weeks at number one.

“It was pretty much flawless golf,” Molinari muses modestly.

As the quiet champion, Molinari is perhaps destined to be filed in the same place that the 2006 Shanghai winner Yang Yong-Eun occupied until he became Asia’s first male Major Champion and his 2009 PGA Championship cast his previous achievements into a new light. Both are symbolic of the arrival of relatively new golfing nations to the sport’s top table and, at the times of their win, neither golfer had the same superstar status as some of the other names on the HSBC Champions roll of honour like Phil Mickelson (2007 & 2009) or Sergio Garcia (2008).

They have one other thing in common: to win both produced a performance so perfect that they remain a regular reference point.

“I try to revive the feeling I had that week. I played with such poise. It was my perfect tournament,” Yang said the week before he enshrined himself as a legend of Asian golf.

Molinari’s emotions are he’s exactly the same.

“Definitely! What is left for me from that week are the feelings that I had on the golf course; being competitive, being really in the moment and just the attitude I had on the golf course, rather than the game itself,” he says.

It’s hard enough to believe Francesco would need such a reference point, so unchanging is his demeanour: even people close to his family say that while brother Edoardo rides a more typically Italian emotional rollercoaster, Francesco never deviates.

What’s almost impossible to believe is his claim that, as a child, learning the game in Turin, his dentist-father frequently banned him for ‘throwing the toys out of the pram’.

“I used to throw clubs as a kid and swear and if my Dad saw me from other holes throwing clubs he wouldn’t let me play for a couple of weeks. That was the punishment for not behaving on the golf course,” Francesco explains.

“I think I was lucky to learn the lesson as a kid. When you turn professional you try really hard think about what you’re doing and not about what happened or what is going to happen. I think that’s what I did really well in Shanghai.”

Patience has proved a virtue in other ways too. At the insistence of their parents, both Edoardo and Francesco had to complete degrees at the University of Torino (Edoardo studying Engineering and Francesco choosing Business) before starting their golf careers.

Although the younger Molinari initially singles out improving year-on-year rather than his victories, there have been plenty of highlights in his professional life.

“The World Cup and the Ryder Cup were two of the biggest moments in my career. The win in Shenzhen was great, playing against Rory (McIlroy) and G-Mac (Graeme McDowell) in the last round and winning by one shot at the 18th is always something special. Being the first World Cup success for Italy alongside my brother Edoardo was just something really unbelievable.

“The Ryder Cup is an unbelievable experience; different from any other emotion you can feel on the golf course. The first morning we were not even playing and when we went to the tee they started chanting “There’s only two Molinaris” and it was just a lot of fun. I thought it was one of the best chants of the week. It’s a lot of tension and a lot of pressure but at the same time it’s also a lot of fun because you don’t play for money, you don’t play for world ranking points… you just play for winning and the team.”

As for the steady improvement, Molinari admits that the law of diminishing returns applies as you get into the jet set of tour society. This year he has strived for a little more distance and in the process lost some of the pinpoint accuracy.

That’s not the only change. This year Molinari has played fewer events to make room for the Majors and other WGC tournaments that his HSBC Champions win has allowed him to add to the cream of the European Tour’s events.  The results haven’t been bad – top 10s in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, Volvo World Match Play Championship and the BMW Italian Open and, the highlight, a third place finish at the WGC-Cadillac Championship – but they haven’t been as consistent as previous seasons.

The other big adjustment has been the arrival of his first child, a son Tommaso, born this year on February 5th.

“Life changes after a baby. You have to adapt to the new condition of being a parent, but it’s fun. As soon as he smiles you forget about anything that happened – good or bad – on the golf course. It gives you a different perspective,” Molinari reveals.

So, Molinari returns to the HSBC Champions not quite on the crest of the wave that swept him to the biggest win of his career, but looking forward to defending his title on what he describes as “a phenomenal” 18 holes of golf.

“It’s going to be different! We won the World Cup in China and now I’ve won in Shanghai; obviously I really like playing in China! It’s going to be fun to be back there another year. The HSBC Champions was just the climax of a fantastic year for me. I’m really looking forward to going back there this year and try and do the same,” he says.

How he’ll be received will be interesting. Perhaps like “YE” Yang Yong-Eun it will only be a Major championship that will make a nation relatively new to the sport re-evaluate the near-perfection he displayed last year.

If Francesco Molinari doesn’t get the recognition from the golfing public, the player he vanquished believes the Italian certainly has got it from his peers; the people that matter most.

“I think he did by all the players. That’s who you want recognition from,” Westwood says.

“He played very nicely,” the Englishman adds.

It’s a comment that sums up Francesco Molinari perfectly; simply because it is so understated.


Francesco Molinari Profile:
Personal
Nationality: Italian
Born: 8th November 1982, Turin (Torino) Italy
Height/Weight: 5ft 8in/11st 5lb (172cm/72kg)
Family: Wife Valentina (m. 2007). Son Tommaso (b. 2010)
Lives: London, England
Education: Degree in Business, University of Torino (Università degli Studi di Torino/UNITO)
Other interests: Snowboarding, Football (Supports Inter Milan and West Ham United)

Career
Professional wins:
2010 WGC-HSBC Champions, Sheshan International Golf Club, Shanghai China
2010 Ryder Cup, Celtic Manor Resort, Newport, Wales
2009 Omega Mission Hills World Cup, Mission Hills, Guangdong, China (with Edoardo Molinari)
2006 Telecom Italian Open, Castello di Tolcinasco G & CC, Milan, Italy

Other Professional Landmarks:
November 2010: career-best 5th place in the European Tour’s “race to Dubai” order of merit
October 2009: reached top 50 of the Official Golf World Rankings for the first time
2004: Turned pro after earning his European Tour card at his first attempt at Q School

Amateur wins:
2004 Italian Amateur Stroke Play Championship; Italian Match Play Championship; Sherry Cup, Spain
2002 Italian Amateur Stroke Play Championship; Italian Amateur Foursomes Championship (with Edoardo Molinari)

2010 HSBC Champions victory:
Became the first wire-to-wire winner in the history of the HSBC Champions
His first European Tour victory since the 2006 Italian Open – a gap of four years and 185 days and 125 European Tour events between victories
His first WGC victory of his career, in his fifth WGC appearance
Moved into the top 15 of the Official World Golf Ranking; his highest career position
Marked the first time since the WGC events started in 1999 that European Tour members had won three events in the same year (Ian Poulter (WGC – Accenture Match Play), Ernie Els (WGC – CA Championship)
Became the 17th different winner of a WGC event, while Italy became the ninth different country to win a WGC event
The Molinaris joined Seve and Manuel Ballesteros, who in 1983 both won, as the only brothers to win in the same European Tour season. (1983 Seve – PGA Championship, Irish Open and Trophée Lancôme; Manuel – Timex Open. 2010 Francesco – WGC-HSBC Champions; Edoardo – Barclays Scottish Open and Johnnie Walker Championship)


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Saturday, February 26, 2011

HSBC Women's Champions Final Round Duel: Arimura vs. Webb

The final round of the HSBC Women’s Champions looks like one of those great things in golf: a good old-fashioned duel. If stroke play can ever look like match play then this is it. Separated by just one stroke, and a further five shots clear of the rest of the field going into the final round, Chie Arimura and Karrie Webb have been conducting their own private battle. Tim Maitland reports.


The duelists could not be more different: Chie represents the future, Karrie is already a legend.

  credit: Karrie Webb winning Kraft Nabisco


Webb at 36 has seen it all, done it all and got the t-shirt! She qualified for the World Golf Hall of Fame 11 years ago and when she became eligible to be inducted in 2005 she was the youngest inductee ever at that time.


Arimura in sharp contrast has never won outside Japan, but those who have watched her burst onto the scene on the JLPGA have been expecting her to break through internationally. At just 23 years of age she already has seven wins under her belt, including five during a spectacular 2009 season: she knows how to win.


 

credit: Golf Digest


“It’s still not easy! With each experience you learn the nervousness and the pressure you have to go through. I say I’m still not used to it!” Arimura says.


The main reason that an international win is missing from her young CV may be that she hasn’t played that often outside her homeland. During her great 2009 season she showed up at the Evian Ladies Masters and the Women’s British Open and last year she played the HSBC Women’s Champions, the Evian and in all four LPGA majors, finishing 9th at the Kraft Nabisco, 32nd in Singapore.


Those with insider knowledge of the Japanese game, such as 2010 HSBC Women’s Caddy of the Year Dean Herden, have been expecting her to breakthrough internationally.


“I’m not surprised at all. She had a wonderful year in 2009 and she really learned how to win that year. She’s a real hard worker and she’s probably the toughest Japanese player since I’ve been caddying on the JLPGA Tour! All that hard work pays off somewhere down the line,” says Herden.


“She hits her iron shots so straight and you need to do that around this course. She’s a complete player. She hits it so straight off the tee and she hits her irons so straight and she’s deadly with the putter. All round she’s got a great game; there’s not one part that is weak. She chips well, she does everything right. She’s cute and she’s known for that in Japan; the smile, the good looks and she’s not very tall. She’s quite famous too, her and Sakura Yokomine,” he adds, before insisting that, if Chie wins on Sunday it won’t be long before her name is just as accepted as those of Ochoa, Shin (who he caddied to victory in 2009) and Ai Miyazato.


“It’s the great thing about this event, it’s a great stepping stone for every player; once they win this it gives them the confidence to go on to even bigger and better things. I think Chie can probably win a US Open she hits it so straight and they set up those courses with long rough and tight and she’ll kill it,” Herden insists.


Arimura’s caddie this week, Lionel Matichuk, who works permanently on the Japan Tour, has also known Chie was bound to break out internationally sooner or later.


“She’s good. She’s good enough to do it. She’s top quality; she just hasn’t played many international events,” said Matichuk.


“I’ve known her for three years and she’s always been pretty good. This week she’s just been in control, hitting a lot of solid shots into the wind, so the wind hasn’t affected them much and if she’s made a mistake somewhere she’s recovered. She’s got a good short game, pretty much everything.”


As if playing almost head-to-head with a legend like Webb – a winner of 7 majors and 36 LPGA events – Arimura will also have the hottest player on the planet in her 10-10 a.m. group. The world number one Yani Tseng, still in with a chance of winning for the fourth week in a row and her fifth consecutive event, leads the best of the rest six shots behind the young Japanese star.


“To play amongst these great players, even now, feels very much like a dream, but I’m calm and I think I’m ready to play well,” Chie insists.


“We had the duel between Lee Westwood and Francesco Molinari at the WGC-HSBC Champions in Shanghai last November and people are still talking about that,” says Giles Morgan of the event won by the young Italian.


“That battle was compared, not equal to, but compared with the 1977 Duel In The Sun at Turnberry between Nicklaus and Watson; that’s how special duels are and if we have one in the final round in Singapore the fans are in for a treat!” he adds.

 

Arimura, who has never won an LPGA tournament, will be paired Sunday with Webb and world No. 1 Yani Tseng of Taiwan, who shot a 69 Saturday and is six strokes off the lead.

 

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Wednesday, December 08, 2010

The "crying shame" about Tiger Woods golf vs Westwood, Molinari duel

When it comes to deciding the highlights of 2010 there are plenty of contenders for most dominant display and an obvious winner of the most exciting moment of the year in golf. However a special category should be saved for the display of Francesco Molinari and Lee Westwood at the WGC-HSBC Champions for producing one of those most-cherished moments in tournament golf; a good old-fashioned duel! Tim Maitland reports.

No-one in their right mind could argue against that rain-sodden reenactment of the Somme – the drama at the Monday denouement of the Celtic Manor Ryder Cup – as the highlight of the year. Special mention would go to the three-way play-off for the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits (Dustin Johnson eventually being penalized for grounding his club in a “bunker” on his 72nd hole, while Martin Kaymer saw off Bubba Watson): an Oscar winner in any other year. The individual performance? Louis Oosthuizen taking the Open Championship by seven shots at the home of golf would probably eclipse Cristie Kerr’s 12-shot victory at the LPGA Championship in most books, mainly because it’s St Andrews above Locust Hill.

They wouldn’t have a category for what happened at Sheshan International Golf Club in the WGC-HSBC Champions for the simple reason that two players almost never run away from a world-class field the way that Francesco Molinari and Lee Westwood did in finishing ten and nine shots ahead.

“It’s very rare: very unusual indeed. Often you get one person that streaks away, but two separating themselves that much is unusual,” said former Ryder Cup player and winner of the inaugural tournament in Shanghai David Howell.

“It just goes to show how well both of them played, ultimately how much Francesco deserved to win and how unlucky Lee was.”

A quick straw poll of the professionals on the driving range produces a lot of scratching of heads as to when they personally witnessed a similar moment of classic head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest hand-to-hand combat.

“Probably once every five years you’ll see two guys; it’s sort of like they get on a crest of a wave and they’re playing each other, feeding off each other and they just keep going. With a top-class field it’s very rare,” said Australian veteran Tony “TC” Carolan.

“You see these old classic tournaments where you get these fantastic duels because they’re playing together. They go along together, they played together over the weekend because they were so far ahead and they just kept going away from the field. It’s basically two different tournaments running at the same time! One and two are playing it out and the others are playing for third.”

True to that patent, the Molinari-Westwood encounter began from the start. The Ryder Cup teammates were first and second just one shot apart after the first round at Sheshan and finished each day in the same positions with the same margin as they left golf’s great and good trailing in their dust. There is one obvious comparison to make: The Duel on the Bund and the great, the legendary Duel in the Sun.

“The classic one was, of course, Nicklaus and Watson; the Open Championship at Turnberry in 1977.


Shanghai? It definitely belongs with it. What was good about Shanghai was that they’d drawn away; the only one that was similar was 1977, because they were away from everybody else and there were just the two of them at it,” declared TV commentator Renton Laidlaw, himself something of a legend in the game and one of the few people qualified to make the comparison because he was at both Turnberry 30-odd years ago, working as BBC Radio’s report and covering for London’s Evening Standard, and at Sheshan in November as a Golf Channel commentator.

“It was absolutely fantastic. Watson had won the Masters that year. They lapped the field. The guy that was third, Hubert Green, was 10 shots behind them, it was rather similar to Shanghai.”

There was one other person present in Shanghai, who was also at Turnberry in 77. Laidlaw’s Golf Channel colleague Warren Humphreys, a former English Amateur champions and winner on the European Tour (the 1995 Portuguese Open), not only played the Open Championship that year but had a hole in one. He agrees that isn’t a stretch to start comparing the two duels.

“It was a special week. If you look at Shanghai, in the end it was the first round score that won the tournament and after that they matched each other score for score. That’s similar to the Duel in the Sun; they matched each other score for score apart from one shot in the final round,” Humphreys said.

“The Duel in the Sun: Watson was at his peak and holing putts and Jack played OK… and it’s one of the legendary performances.  Jack with his B+ game and Tom had everything going – A plus-plus – and that’s right because Nicklaus was so much better than everyone else. Like Tiger, Nicklaus’s 15th club [his mind] was one shot a round – that’s four shots a tournament – better than anyone else. He would win more just because of the way he could think and the way he could handle pressure"


“Obviously, what Francesco and Lee did was world-class – I think, even in such a short history, the HSBC Champions has proved you don’t win it unless you’re playing at the highest level – but to hear it’s being mentioned in the same breath as the Duel in the Sun is one of the greatest compliments that can possibly be paid,” said Giles Morgan, HSBC Group Head of Sponsorship.

“The history of the sport is so precious and so revered I don’t think I would have dared make the comparison, but then when you hear people talking who were at Turnberry, and in Warren’s case played in the ‘ 77 Open, and who were also at Shanghai, you have to respect their point of view and be grateful for it.”

There are, of course, some ways in which the Duel on the Bund can’t begin to rival the Duel in the Sun. When Nicklaus arrived in Turnberry he already had 14 of his record 18 major championship victories under his belt. By the end of that week Watson would have three of his career total of eight and would become only the fourth player in history (after Arnold Palmer in 1960, Gary Player in 1974 and Nicklaus himself in 1975) to win multiple majors in the same season.

“There were two players at the top of their game,” explained Laidlaw, who is also the editor of the annual R&A Golfer’s Handbook.

“And I think Jack (Nicklaus) always enjoyed the competition more than he enjoyed winning. I think he would have won more if he’d been more intent on winning. He liked to win, but what gave him the real thrill was the competition. If he lost, but it had been a great competition, that satisfied him. "

Laidlaw went on to say, "That battle with him and Watson was a classic. I always remember Watson saying that he knew, even at the last green, at which point he was one ahead, and even though Nicklaus had been in the bush and had played a recovery shot onto the green and was some 20 or 30 feet away, he said “I knew he would hole it”.  And of course he did. 

Watson said, because I knew he would hole that, “I’d already made up my mind that I would have to hole my putt” – it was only a short putt, 2 ½ or 2 feet – he said “I knew that I’d have to hole it to win”. It meant so much to Watson to beat Nicklaus; beating Nicklaus was always the key. He was as happy to beat Nicklaus as [Isao] Aoki was unhappy to lose to Nicklaus when they battled very closely in the 1980 US Open at Baltusrol. They came to the wire as well and Nicklaus refused to let Aoki win that one. Aoki was trying to become the first far eastern or Asian winner of a Major. That was a great battle.”

It’s debatable, as with so many of the other great battles, as to whether the Aoki-Nicklaus encounter of 1980 qualifies as a duel. Aoki only got on terms with Nicklaus in the third round and he and the Golden Bear only escaped the rest of the field – led by Watson, Lon Finkle and Keith Fergus – on the final day.

“It is really hard to come up with other tournaments, Majors anyway, where two people have fought it out. If you could really put your mind to it you could probably think of a few more, but there’s not that many. Sometimes you find there’s a duel over one round or over the last 27 holes, but you don’t get it for four rounds,” Humphreys said, having racked his brains along with Laidlaw to compile a list of possibilities.

“With the best will in the world, Faldo at the [1996] Masters with Greg Norman, where he caught up on that big lead, wasn’t the same, because Faldo played well but Norman collapsed. In Shanghai you had two people peaking, not one falling apart and one playing well. Every now and then you get special weeks. Normally it takes one player to be on their peak form to win a tournament. If you get two players who are peaking at the same time and who are not afraid to win and are confident in their own ability then you get a very special moment, but it happens rarely. I think it was an exceptional performance. I think the way that Molinari played stretched Westwood and then Westwood stretched Molinari and when you get two players that play like that, and they were both very confident in their game (and I think Molinari produced one of the best putting weeks of his career), then you get a special week.”

What’s interesting is how far we have to look back for comparisons and how few times during Tiger Woods' domination that anything approaching a duel came to fruition. The main exception would be Tiger’s 14th Major – the 2008 US Open at Torrey Pines – when Rocco Mediate took him through an 18-hole play-off into sudden death. But then even that doesn’t fit with our definition of the duel, as Westwood was only one shot behind after 72 holes.

“That’s the Tiger influence, isn’t it? For a lot of the Major championships he’s decimated fields himself and he hasn’t had anybody to play against when he’s been on top form. I think that’s the crying shame about the era of Tiger Woods,” said Humphreys.

“The Nicklaus era was tremendous because he had so many rich players, talented players exciting players, charismatic players alongside him; Palmer, Player, Trevino, Floyd, Watson… you can name a whole bunch of them. Lots of talented players… Curtis Strange… and he beat them all over a 30-year period. Tiger, in a way, hasn’t had that. I think in a way it’s to the detriment of Tiger because I think he in a way would have liked to have been stretched and to find out what he would have done if he had had someone pushing him.”

For the 2010 WGC-HSBC Champions to truly deserve to sit in proximity with the 1977 Open Championship, it may take time: time for history to ferment, time for Westwood and Francesco Molinari to cement their reputations so that their battle becomes a part of golf folklore.

At this point Laidlaw, a recipient of the PGA Tour’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism, disagrees:
“The plain fact is you can take all these duels, just as the duels of that time. If they never do anything ever again – in both these cases I think they will [be successful again] – you can’t take away from them the fact that their duel in the HSBC Champions was marvelous to watch. One holed a putt then the other holed a putt; it was just fantastic how they did that. Whether they do or don’t go onto to win Majors doesn’t take anything away from the excitement and drama they produced in Shanghai, which was riveting, riveting!” the 71-year-old Scot states.

The fact is though that, if Westwood turns his spell as world number one into a fully-fledged reign and if he can turn his 2000 European Tour Order of Merit and 2009 Race to Dubai wins and his consistency in Majors – two third places in 2009 and two second places in 2010 – into the Major victories that define greatness, then what both he and Francesco Molinari achieved in Shanghai will be looked on in a new light, not that what Westwood did wasn’t incredible enough as it is.

Troubled by an unusual calf injury that left his ankle swollen, the Nottinghamshire native limped to second place at the Open Championship, withdrew because of the injury from the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, came back only for the Ryder Cup and returned rusty for the WGC-HSBC Champions just in time to replace Tiger Woods at the top of the Official World Golf Rankings. He also faced a four-way struggle for his right to keep that title and faced questions, particularly from the States, as to whether a non-Major winner could be considered worthy of the top spot.

“Perfect timing!” said Howell of Westwood’s showing at Sheshan.

“It was daunting, it’s a wonderful position to be number one in the world, but there are responsibilities and the expectations that come with that and, as always, Lee dealt with them brilliantly. Obviously winning would have been doing it in style, but he put on a world-class performance as well!”

The other half of the equation is what Francesco Molinari does from here. Apart from claiming the Omega Mission Hills World Cup with his brother Edoardo in 2009, Francesco hadn’t won since his maiden European Tour victory at the 2006 Telecom Italia Open. However, if his HSBC Champions win proves to be typical of how he is going to play in 2011 he will be looked upon in a very different light by the end of the year.

“Molinari is almost beginning the journey, although he’s been a good player for four or five years. I think with Molinari, if he continues to putt with the sort of confidence he had that week [in Shanghai] then you could be looking at another very special player,” Humphreys declares.

“The thing with Molinari is his stature. He’s not a tall guy. He’s got to be playing at his best and at his peak all the time to compete against some of the big boomers that are in the game. Francesco’s got a wonderful game from tee to green and he hasn’t changed that for a number of years. His swing is consistently sound year on year. The biggest killer for most people; they get to a certain point and they think I must change to get better and they actually change to get worse. If he stays that way and his short game stays good… I think the overriding thing about Molinari’s performance is he doesn’t get scared. That’s a fantastic quality to have as a golfer. He talked about it afterwards as a pressure situation, but he never showed it. The fact that he went out against Tiger in the Ryder Cup and was two up after two and Tiger had to shoot nine under to beat him: Tiger would have beaten any other player on either side the way he played on that particular day. It shows strength of character and I think that strength of character is a big club in the bag for Molinari.”

It was incredible that Molinari seemed to stay completely unflustered as the pressure in the tournament mounted. Bogey-free in his final round, he made perhaps one mistake on the Sunday: missing a short par for birdie on the par five 14th hole. Westwood was bogey-free the entire weekend, but at the pivotal moment – Sheshan’s world-renowned driveable par four 16th – it was the Englishman who blinked first. It’s hard to call his three wood off the tee a mistake though. He missed his target by a matter of a yard, got a hard bounce forward and found himself snookered behind the evil pot-bunker that guards the left side of the green. Like Tiger did in exactly the same position the year before, Westwood left the gossamer-fine chip in the long grass above the bunker and the pressure was off.

Still, on eighteen he could have forced a play-off. His five-iron second seemed certain to take the slope down to the hole, but somehow circled the ridge and stayed on the higher level and the duel was over.

“I feel sorry for Westwood because he’d come second in two Majors earlier in the season and here he was coming second again to a guy who was playing, arguably, the best golf of his career. I don’t think he’s ever played as well as that. He may never again, but let’s hope he does,” Laidlaw declares.

“He’s now shown he can do it. What an inspiration it might be to Molinari, wwho knows what he’ll do having hung on and proved himself that he can do it.”

And if Molinari does go on from here?

“We will look back and say that’s when it started. It started because suddenly he realized just what he was capable of. He was always sure he had that capability, but in Shanghai on the course, he did it for real against one of the strongest of opponents: Westwood had played well all season,” said the doyen of British golf writers and broadcasters.

There is one final aspect that the Duel on the Bund does compare and deserves to stand alongside the Duel in the Sun: the level of sportsmanship showed. Refreshingly there was no sense that Molinari felt he had banished, triumphed over, conquered or even that he had defeated Westwood. Westwood himself afterwards said there were “no negatives” in a performance like his and, when his attempt at an eagle putt on 18 rolled past the hole, there was nothing in his behavior at that instant that suggested otherwise.

“Watson and Nicklaus both respected each other so much; they enjoyed battling with each other. It was one of the great adverts for the game. It was in the most sporting manner between two players who between them won eight Open Championships,” Laidlaw recalls. 

“When Watson and Nicklaus were finished, Nicklaus was right there to say “well done, many congratulations”. When Molinari won, Westwood was right there saying “many congratulations”. That’s what it’s all about! The competition! They love the competition! It’s part of the game!”

The Duel on the Bund vs. The Duel in the Sun

First Round
2010 WGC-HSBC Champions
1   Francesco Molinari                      Italy                   65        -7
2   Lee Westwood                                 England                     66        -6
T3 Yuta Ikeda                                    Japan                 67        -5
     Henrik Stenson                             Sweden              67
     Noh Seung-Yul                             South Korea       67

1977 Open Championship
1   John Schroeder                                 United States            66        -4
2   Martin Foster                                    England                     67        -3
T3 Jack Nicklaus                                    United States           68        -2
     Lee Trevino                                       United States            68
     Tom Watson                                    United States           68

Second Round
2010 WGC-HSBC Champions
1   Francesco Molinari                      Italy                   65-70=135       -9
2   Lee Westwood                                 England                     66-70=136       -8
T3 Ernie Els                                       South Africa       72-65=137       -7
     Jaco Van Zyl                                 South Africa       71-66=137      
     Richie Ramsey                             Scotland             69-68=137

1977 Open Championship
1   Roger Maltbie                               United States       71-66=137       -3
T2 Hubert Green                                United States       72-66=138       -2
     Jack Nicklaus                               United States       68-70=138
       Lee Trevino                                 United States       68-70=138
       Tom Watson                                United States    68-70=138

Third Round
2010 WGC-HSBC Champions
1   Francesco Molinari                      Italy          65-70-67=202              -14
2   Lee Westwood                               England    66-70-67=203             -13
3   Luke Donald                                 England     68-70-68=206             -10

1977 Open Championship
T1 Jack Nicklaus                               United States    68-70-65=203  -7
     Tom Watson                                United States      68-70-65=203
3   Ben Crenshaw                              United States     71-69-66=206  -4
Fourth Round
2010 WGC-HSBC Champions
1   Francesco Molinari                     Italy                65-70-67-67=269        -19
2   Lee Westwood                            England            66-70-67-67=270        -18
T3 Richie Ramsey                           Scotland            69-68-71-71=279        -9
     Luke Donald                                England            68-70-68-73=279       
  
1977 Open Championship
1   Tom Watson                               United States    68-70-65-65=268        -12
2   Jack Nicklaus                           United States    68-70-65-66=269        -11
3   Hubert Green     


picture credits: Getty images/Tim Maitland

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Monday, November 08, 2010

WGC-HSBC Champions Puts Exclamation Mark on Europe’s Miraculous Year

The day before his 28th birthday, Francesco Molinari put the finishing touches on four days of incredible golf, becoming the first wire-to-wire winner of the WGC-HSBC Champions and emphatically proving that world golf in 2010 belonged almost exclusively to Europe, Tim Maitland reports.


For the first time Europe Tour members claimed three of the four WGC titles (Ian Poulter won the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship and Ernie Els took the WGC-CA Championship) to add to three Majors (Graeme McDowell/US Open, Louis Oosthuizen/Open Championship and Martin Kaymer/PGA Championship) and the small matter of the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor.


I'm a European Tour Member, I'm proud to be a European Tour golfer, and it's a great moment for European golf and I'm really happy to give my contribution to that,” said Molinari, who also capped an unprecedented year for Italian golf too, by adding his name to that of his brother Edoardo and teenager Matteo Manassero on the season’s list of winners.


Positioned first and second each day and separated only by one shot at the close of each round on the further-toughened Sheshan International Golf Club track, Molinari and new world number-one Lee Westwood put on a stunning display throughout.

 

On the final day both shot five-under-par 67s (a score bettered only by Katsumasa Miyamoto), despite being in the pressure-cooker environment of the leading group. Neither had a bogey in their final round, and Westwood’s cards were unblemished throughout the weekend as the two of them left the rest of a world-class field miles behind; Luke Donald and Richie Ramsey tied for third, ten shots adrift of Molinari’s 19-under total of 269.


I think the difference in score between us and the rest of the field shows you how good [sic] we played, and I'm sure it was a great show for everybody who was watching here on TV, as well,” said the Inter Milan fan, who apart from winning the Omega Mission Hills World Cup for Italy with his brother in 2009, was probably best known for being on the wrong end of a Tiger Woods master-class on the final day at Celtic Manor.


I'm obviously amazed the way I played, and you know, to have the number-one player in the world trailing you by one shot, it's not easy.  I was under pressure all the time, pretty much from the first round. It's great, not only the way I hit the ball, but the way the mind was working.

 

I managed to stay calm, play my game, and holed putts when I had to hole putts. I think the experience of playing with Tiger Woods in The Ryder Cup definitely helped me in the last couple of days. Obviously they [Woods and Westwood] are different players, but when you are playing against the number-one golfer in the world, it is not easy to always stick to the game plan and do your own game,” Molinari said.

 

For the first time in the history of golf, the world number one ranking was up for grabs at an Asian tournament.

 

Westwood, in defeat, won the four-way battle with Woods, Kaymer and Mickelson. Tiger Woods was sixth on 7-under, Kaymer 30th on minus 2 and Phil Mickelson, twice a Shanghai winner, 41st and one-over par for the tournament. Having arrived at the HSBC Champions as the newly-crowned world number one, ending Tiger’s five-year monopoly of the position, Westwood delivered a display worthy of that ranking and further strengthened his grip on it.


No negatives in a performance like that!” Westwood declared. “The rankings come as a consequence of playing well, and I'm playing well and I know I am.


As well as Westwood winning the skirmish for the number one ranking, the Englishman proved that he had taken up another of Tiger’s mantles. The world number one has now been in contention in the final holes on the final day of the HSBC Champions three times. Just as Tiger Woods did in 2005 and 2006, in 2010 the world number one also came second.


All the other battles within the battle went to Europe too. In the first encounter of the game’s great and good since Celtic Manor four members of the winning Ryder Cup team were in the top five – Molinari, Westwood, Donald and Rory McIlroy. Only one American team member – Woods – made it into the top 20 in Shanghai, against eight of the twelve in the European side.


The other winners were the tournament itself and golf in China and Asia. After a successful debut as a WGC event in 2009, 2010 confirmed that the concept of a World Golf Championship event on the other side of the world to golf’s heartlands is a success. Crowds were close to 2009’s record-setting figures with over 31,000 attending the event, and the record-breaking TV coverage increased again, particularly with highlight shows on terrestrial channels in Asia.


To put the rise of the HSBC Champions in perspective, two-time US Open champion Retief Goosen struggled to think of another event anywhere in the world during his career that has risen to prominence the way the Shanghai tournament has since its inception in 2005.


“Good question. Not too many,” said ‘The Goose’. “I’m thinking about the event at Quail Hollow in America; that became very popular within five years: a great golf course, good field. But for an international event this is definitely the number one!”

 

Thanks to Tim Maitland for a tournament wrap-up of the WGC-HSBC Champions Tournament!

 

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