What Do You Expect?

Yesterday, 22 year old Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland won the U.S. Open with a record score of 16 under par, capping off the 5th straight major victory for a non-American born player...also a record.  McIlroy, who plays with an interlocking grip by the way, won by 8 shots over Australian Jason Day.  Robert Garrigus and Kevin Chappell were low Americans, finishing 10 shots back and in a tie for 3rd.  Garrigus and Chappell are not exactly household names.

Ever since Phil Mickelson turned 40 and developed Psoriatic Arthritis, and Tiger frittered away his career, the sports media has been searching for golf's next superstar.  Sure, Phil still wins every once in a while, and Tiger may still make it back, but he'll never be the same, so the media has been on the lookout for the next big thing.  Rory McIlroy may be that next big thing, but there's a problem with that, according to some in the sports media...he's not American.  Right now, most of the top 10 golfers in the world are from Europe, not from the good ol' U.S. of A.  In fact, it's not obvious who the next great American player is, and I ask, what do you expect?

For the last 10-15 years in the U.S., we've pampered our best golfers.  Most of the top teachers have created Golf Academies where the best teenage golfers attend high school and focus on golf.  In a lot of circumstances, kids leave their families to attend these academies, or if they are lucky enough to have a parent with them, it's only one parent.  At these academies, the kids receive great golf instruction and get told over and over again how great they are.  They play in tournaments, but even if they don't win, they are told how great they are.  Then these kids are recruited by colleges and told again how great they are by the college coaches.  While it is true that some of the kids don't succeed at college golf, those that do leave still thinking they are super great and that life as a pro is going to be easy.

Then they get on the mini-tours and they realize how good the other guys are, and they don't know how to handle it.  I would submit that they don't know how to handle it because they've spent a lot of time away from their families and have never had to face adversity.  On the other hand, many of the best golfer's in the rest of the world have to scrape their way to the top.  McIlroy had a great family and his dad is a really good golfer.  This definitely helped him, but so did playing golf with his dad and learning to win against the guys at his club.  Take another example...Y.E. Yang from South Korea is the 2009 PGA Champion and finished T-3rd at the U.S. Open.  Yang didn't even pick up a club until he was 19.  Or look at Yang's fellow countryman, K.J. Choi.  Choi learned to play as a teenager and had to drive 3 hours to even get to a course.  Face it, the rest of the world is just tougher than the young golfers are in the United States.

If we want to find the next great American golfer, we need look for the kid who was raised by both his parents, played regular high school golf, and didn't have everything handed to him.  I don't know who that kid is, but I suspect we haven't heard of him yet.  I think we're in for a few years of the rest of the world dominating golf until some young American kid steps up and proves he is ready to consistently compete with the big guys in Europe.  Until then, as American golf fans, we have to put up with what we've created...a generation of kids who don't know how to handle adversity.  Come to think of it...this seems to be true in just about every aspect of American life these days.

And that, my friends, completes my grumpy old man blog.