NEWTOWN SQUARE, PENNSYLVANIA | Here is a story to make you warm to Martin Kaymer, one of a cluster of major champions who were within two strokes of the lead after Thursday’s opening round of the PGA Championship. Martin Kaymer. Remember him?
Here is a little refresher:
Kaymer, the 41-year-old German who won two major championships and the Players Championship. Can you name and date them? Answer: the 2010 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits and the 2014 U.S. Open at Pinehurst by eight strokes and the Players that same year.
Kaymer, who went to LIV having won won nine DP World Tour events and three PGA Tour events, lived for a while in Arizona before moving to Spain.
Kaymer, who holed a key putt for Europe to win the 2012 Ryder Cup, the one known as “The Miracle at Medinah.”
Kaymer, who became world No. 1 for eight weeks in 2011 and would later say he didn’t feel comfortable atop the rankings and was not unhappy when he descended from that position.
Kaymer, one of two Germans among the leading seven at Aronimink after the first round. Stephan Jaeger was the other. The only other time in major championship history two Germans shared the lead after a round was in 2001, when Bernhard Langer and Alex Čejka were tied for the lead after the third round of the Open Championship. “Well Stephan is not really a German anymore,” Kaymer said. “He lives in America. He has a German passport and he speaks perfect German but he’s more American than German now.”
And Kaymer, the story teller. Listen to him. “On Tuesday evening we had the [PGA] champions’ dinner and there was a gentleman sitting next to me from the PGA of America and he asked me if I still played golf … and if I was playing this week? I said ‘yeah, that’s why I am here. I’m not flying from Europe to have a New York strip with you guys. Of course I’m playing.’ He really motivated me.”
Thus motivated, Kaymer took 67 strokes to get around Aronimink on Thursday, 3-under par with only one bogey, on a day when Rory McIlroy’s score was a 74, and Bryson DeChambeau’s a 76.
“It can be a quite intimidating golf course, especially with the wind that we had today. The goal was to hit fairways and greens and a lot of those lag putts.” – Martin Kaymer
It is no surprise that Kaymer liked the course. It is unusual for a player to score well on a a course that doesn’t fit his eye.. “On Monday and Tuesday I had so much fun on the course,” he said. “It’s a very fair test. Great for the PGA Championship.
“I didn’t make many mistakes. It can be a quite intimidating golf course, especially with the wind that we had today. The goal was to hit fairways and greens and a lot of those lag putts. And I did that well today.”
These were words that did not resonate with McIlroy, who had five bogeys in his final six holes and gave a terse response to being asked how he had played. As my colleague Ron Green Jr. gracefully put it yesterday, Rory gave “…a one-word answer that rhymes with spit.”
The last time Kaymer was among the top 10 at the end of a round at a major championship was when he was tied for third after the opening round at the 2020 PGA Championship. The next day didn’t go too well for Kaymer. He missed the cut.
But today, Kaymer’s eye was in. He looked more comfortable than that time six years ago, if less so than Thursday. After a rocky outward half of 40, 5-over par, he settled and the deeper he got into the wiles of a difficult golf course, the harder he fought to win through to the weekend.
Earlier in the week McIlroy had been asked what he thought of Aronimink. The Northern Irishman paused for quite a long time and then damned it with faint praise. “I think in this day and age I’m not sure if it’s going to test all aspects of your bag,” he said “… strategy off the tee is pretty non-existent … but the greens … are the main focus this week and I think getting yourself in the right sections of the greens, making sure you leave yourself below the hole for the most part. That’s the key this week.”
The greens at Aronimink are indeed large but they are not enormous. At an average of 7,000 square feet they are little more than half the size of those at historic Yale Golf Club, designed by C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor and certainly far smaller than the monsters on the Old Course at St Andrews. But as Gil Hanse, the course architect who touched up this Donald Ross course, said at breakfast on Wednesday: “it’s the up-and-overs that are so difficult here.” By “up-and-overs” he meant the putts that had to traverse the undulations in the greens.
Kaymer was all business over his closing holes Friday. He was 4-over par for the day after 17 holes and then dropped another by driving into the rough up the 18th. Even so, he achieved his self-avowed target of being 2-over par after 36 holes. “Yesterday afternoon was difficult and this morning it was cold and the wind was gusty,” he said. “This morning was brutal. There were pin placements that were very intimidating. It was very difficult to play this morning.
“This is a course that requires courage as well as skill but perhaps discipline more than anything. This morning we had only a wedge into the greens and usually you would go for the flags, but if you miss the green you can easily see a bogey or double. Discipline is the number one word.”
A 75 was not the round “… I was looking for, but 2-over is not a bad score.” He felt certain he would make the halfway cut even though more than half the field had still not finished their rounds.
Kaymer has been living in Southern Spain for three years now, at La Reserva on the Sotogrande estate. “I really like it there and so does my wife. I became a member at Valderrama three years ago and I can go and practice there every day in conditions that I never had in Germany. But Europe is still my home.”