ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — It was no disservice to Louis Oosthuizen here on Sunday when you looked at him in a certain, slightly disbelieving way, and then thought of some of the more flamboyant Open champions.
He had, after all, never presented himself as the new Nicklaus or Ballesteros, and still less the earth-moving Tiger Woods. Indeed, had he been any less pretentious these past few days, he might have been shucking oysters in a local restaurant.
The point, of course, is that there are various ways of measuring champions and, however you do it in this case, there is a bottom line of absolute splendour.
It deals with the quality that will always separate the winners and the losers, wherever they come from and however heavy, or not, their reputations. It is about pure fighting quality and that supreme ability to say: ‘This is my moment, the chance I have always waited for, and no one is going to stop me.’
Paul Casey, the hope of Britain and a man of rather flashier credentials, went through the formalities of a challenge and, on the eighth green, he had reduced the gap to a mere three strokes. A great wave of anticipation swept around the Old Course. Maybe we would, in the end, have something of a battle.
It was a concept that lasted just four more holes, by which time Oosthuizen, the 27-year-old South African was leading by precisely the margin — eight strokes — which he carried into the most important day of his professional life.
Why, though, when you thought about it, would this player, of all players, ever be spooked, or even disconcerted, by the sigh and the moaning of the wind. He grew up, the son of an Afrikans family, on a farm in the Cape country scoured by gales of consistent ferocity and it was clear here soon enough that he felt utterly at home.
Not just with the caprices of the Fifeshire weather and the possibility that at some point someone like Tiger or Phil or the lurking Lee Westwood might erupt and send him back to the reality of a minor career, but also his ability to stand up over four days to the competitive pressure which can drag the life out of you in the course of a hole or two on this least predictable of linksland.
When that kind of possibility reared most dangerously on the ninth hole, when Casey had not only narrowed the gap to three shots but also placed himself in a good position to make a second birdie in four holes, Oosthuizen’s response was arguably the greatest of all those he made to points of menace over four days of unbroken application.
He followed Casey in driving the green at 352 yards, then eagled with a putt of 50-feet. Casey, not for the first time feeling ambushed by a superior force, replied with a birdie.
Gameness
It was the best he could do and showed a certain gameness that might easily have been banished by the first evidence that the man from the Cape had brought with him, the frame of mind which had produced three rounds of stunning consistency — 65, 67 and 69.
Not since Tiger, a strangely irrelevant and, despite the classic red golf shirt, anonymous figure on Sunday, had dominated this tournament 10 and five years ago had we seen here such evidence of a man so in control of every shot, every reflex, every casual reflection.
He was less magesterial, but no less effective, when seen in the early Sunday morning streets of the auld grey town, packing his modest rental car and helping his wife Nel-Mare and young daughter Jana into their seats. The dark shades he wears on the course give him a somewhat spuriously racy image.
He is, unquestionably, the yeoman professional who, until this weekend that will always be fabled in stories of sportsmen who reach out for the supreme moments which change their lives forever, had a record that, understandably enough, left him in awe of such a figure as his compatriot and sponsor Ernie Els.
Scarcely could there have been a less imposing calling card at the old and greatest of golf tournaments. In seven previous majors, he had failed to make the cut six times and, on the one occasion he survived for the weekend action, at the PGA Championship, he finished dead last.
His was the portfolio of a modest contender indeed, but sometimes you are obliged to judge a man not by his past but what he represents now, when the action is on and, maybe, he has found a new dimension, a new belief in the force of his own character.
Prior to Sunday, he said: “I have one belief, that I will not put down at any point in the last round. I will not stop believing that I’m good enough to win this tournament — and that I deserve to do so.”
When he walked home amid cheers last night, the airs had become light, but they were, you had to believe, in absolute agreement. And quite thunderously so.
- James Lawton writes for the Independent in the UK
