It’s December, and it’s hard to tell if we’re at the beginning or the end of everything in golf. The leaves have fallen from the trees and the fairways are dormant, but this climate change keeps delivering random 70-degree days here in the Southeast, keeping the clubs from ever making it to the storage shed.
But golf is bigger than that. And in the biggest ways it’s hard to tell where we stand at the end of 2021.
There was Tiger Woods this week, walking and smiling and speaking of good fortune 10 months after a horrific car accident nearly cost him life and limb. Is he back or is he done? Hard to say.
There was Greg Norman a couple months ago, promising that his ventures with a bottomless pool of Saudi wealth are “only the beginning” of something big on the horizon. Is he threatening the status quo or just saber rattling? Hard to say.
There was PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, detailing a laundry list of revenue deployment that will make the world’s best golfers richer. Will this keep everyone happy and in the fold? Hard to say.
There was the newly monikered DP World Tour, just days after crowning an American the champion of the European Tour, getting scuttled after 36 holes due to weather and a concerning new variant of the coronavirus that isolated South Africa. Is COVID going to ever stop interfering with our lives? Hard to say.
There was Rory McIlroy, a month removed from looking like his old self by winning in Las Vegas then rending his garments in frustration after imploding in Dubai. Is he ready to finally finish his career slam and end an eight-year major drought or not? Hard to say.
There were Brooks Koepka and Bryson Dechambeau mugging for cameras in a “friendly” match Koepka dominated the day after Thanksgiving. Can they really stand each other? Hard to say.
There were Dustin Johnson and Jon Rahm looking like undisputed No. 1s in the Ryder Cup, capping a tumultuous year of either being invincible, invisible (DJ) or benched by COVID. Can they consistently dominate in 2022? Hard to say.
It’s been that kind of year in a game that rarely seems to culminate with the clarity we crave. There’s no Super Bowl or World Series to tie it all up neatly and definitively. It’s not often that a golf season wraps itself in a perfect bow the way the LPGA did with Jin Young Ko and Nelly Korda dueling head-to-head in the final group of the season with player-of-the-year title on the line.
Sure, Patrick Cantlay and Rahm dramatically came to the final green at East Lake with $15 million at stake, but a Ryder Cup and new season started so fast we barely had a chance to argue which one of them really deserved to be the PGA Tour’s player of the year. It really was hard to say – and it’s even harder to say now with Collin Morikawa adding a European title to his second major. They can’t all be Tom Brady. Where is Tiger when you need him?
There was plenty to digest on the golf course this year. Jordan Speith got back in the good graces of the golf gods and found his game again. Rickie Fowler, for the moment, lost his. Hideki Matsuyama made history at the Masters and a new generation of Japanese amateurs are already following his lead. Rahm broke his major maiden and seems destined for many more while Louis Oosthuizen is stuck as a perpetual bridesmaid. Phil Mickelson redefined the parameters of what a senior is capable of in golf while Morikawa keeps showing that experience isn’t everything when it comes to establishing greatness. A young U.S. team delivered a resounding statement about turning the Ryder Cup tide at Whistling Straits while Europe’s veterans reached an end of an era.
(Click on images of Jon Rahm and Collin Morikawa, below, to enlarge.)
Lee Elder got to bask in the sunshine and warm embrace of golf fans one last time on the first tee at Augusta National where he made history in 1975 and watched it in 1997. Now he joins Teddy, Charlie, Pete and Calvin in the pioneers’ wing in heaven.
It really was quite a year that COVID could not derail.
However, and quite frankly, the golf world has never seemed in a bigger state of flux. Rival leagues are trying to horn in on the established tours and elite golfers are being asked to choose sides. Litigation may be looming that could threaten to open the Curt Flood gates of global free agency and pit independent players against commissioners brandishing banishment as a cudgel.
Where this all leads nobody really knows. Norman and the Saudis keep delaying their big pitch as the PGA and DP World tours maintain a gameplan of preemptive parries. The alternative Premier Golf League keeps waiting to talk compromise in a meeting that’s never going to happen.
What will all the major championships have to say about it if and when the dust settles? Is this the end of an orderly top echelon golf as we know it? Hard to say.
It all leaves us wistful for a peaceful December, dreaming of seeing Tiger swing a club again someday at Augusta or St. Andrews while enjoying the holidays and hearth before a traditional new year dawns with the glorious view of Molokai across the Pacific Ocean from Kapalua’s Plantation Course.
With it all still up in the air, Global Golf Post + wraps the season, delivering over the next month some of the best pieces of golf journalism we’ve produced in 2021. When everything else seems crazy, you can revisit Jim Dodson’s poignant tales of reconnecting with meaningful old 7-irons or maintaining a golf marriage. You can travel to Fox Chapel and Mountain Ridge with John Steinbreder. You can relish John Hopkins’ touching tribute to his father or Lewine Mair’s remembrance of Renton Laidlaw. Or you can look back at simpler days when parades and pageants accompanied the Masters and storming the fairways was part of golf’s rich tapestry.
We’ll all try to take a breath and recharge, ready to come back in 2022 and try to make sense of it all. Most of us are still waiting to exhale.