Life after Tiger as emerging talents prove to be no duffers

CADDIE'S ROLE:Golfers were back in the news last week broadening everyone's minds about a new departure in the world game, nobody dominates anymore, writes COLIN BYRNE

GOLFERS INSTEAD of caddies were back in the headlines last weekend on the PGA Tour in America. Not the golfers that you would have expected or probably not the ones you had necessarily heard of, but if you had watched the final denouement to the 93rd PGA Championship you are unlikely to forget them in a hurry.

It would be fair to say that the US Tour is looking for new heroes to hang superstar hats upon, well they found two unlikely pin-ups to bolster their television ratings in the oozing heat of deep summer down south in Atlanta last week.

As the usual, preferred media darlings sunk back to the bowels of the leaderboard by Sunday afternoon the cameras couldn’t avoid the obvious drama of the two ultimate protagonists in Jason Dufner and Keegan Bradley. Even the low key Dane, Anders Hansen managed to get some air time having been totally ignored by the cameras despite not being out of the top 10 since the first round.

All this from a television company who announced on their news channel after the first round the previous week in Akron that Tiger Woods was about to make his comeback after a reasonable opening round. Was that news or a plea for someone to save their ratings?

On Friday we witnessed the abject image of Tiger maybe hitting his nadir as he chopped it down one hole from bunker to bunker, only to end up hitting his greenside trap shot into a hazard. He looked like most of his viewers would have looked trying to negotiate the uncompromising Atlanta Athletic Club’s major set-up: at odds with his game and the course. Sometimes you have to hit the very bottom before you can begin to resurface. The punter could never truly identify with Tiger as a super heroic indomitable world number one golfer. Perhaps he has aligned himself a little closer to the common golfer as he searches for a way out of the abyss.

So, reluctantly, we finally turned our attention to the real contenders: some guy who has hair that looks like it belongs to the peaked hat sitting atop his rounded anti-heroic face and not the scalp it was protecting from the intense Georgian heat. The eventual winner who looked like the country boy who had just been startled by the bright lights of the big city, he may have looked a little misplaced but he let his ample shoulders and clubs do the talking. Not that either of the last men standing after 72 holes of intense competition were not worthy potential PGA Champions. We can often be drawn away from the reality of professional golf at the top in 2011. Increasingly it would appear that almost all the contestants have a good chance of winning. More importantly, they believe they can, even if those showing the event struggle to grasp the new reality of golf. Nobody dominates anymore.

We are all guilty of star gazing and my own hunch would have been the veteran Steve Stricker to lift the Wanamaker trophy for the simple fact that pars were premium over the closing four holes and no better man for grinding out pars under intense pressure. Stricker had dropped too many shots before he got to the back nine and so dismissed himself as a contender. It is difficult to put faith in unknown quantities due, I suppose, to an inbuilt conservative, the ‘divil ye know’ attitude and also the unavoidable positive beat that throbs around established players. The fact is that the majority of competitors who have earned their places in these Major events and who find themselves in the right place at the right time on the weekend are capable of following through.

Not that Jason or Keegan were any duffers before last week. Dufner had performed well already on the PGA Tour and Bradley won his maiden tour victory earlier this year. We all need to get our heads around the reality of this new era of golf and those images of Phil, Tiger and other established winning brands who are not the only ones who can deliver. The more that the old guard are successfully challenged, the more confident the rest of the very talented tournament fields will become. Many of these young aspiring golfers in America have been bred on the college system, which is results oriented, they learn to win from a young age. The state of zero that Jason Dufner seemed to attain on the golf course is a condition that most golf psychologists would dream of for twitchier clients. His whole demeanour reeked of control and confidence. His rather wristy looking pre-shot waggle never changed, I counted eight waggles for irons and seven for the driver. This is a psychologist’s ideal scenario; the exact same routine on every shot, the ultimate for a calm mind. His reaction to a birdie looked very similar to how he appeared after a bogey: the ultimate state of zero.

The convincing winner Keegan Bradley also maintained a rather peculiar but rigid routine and appeared to have the wherewithal to converse with his caddie Steve when there was any pre-shot doubt. Although he was more alert and animated looking than his play-off opponent, he ticked all the boxes for a standard winning routine.

The US Tour should be ecstatic that two new stars have been exposed in last week’s PGA Championship. They may not have the super hero images that marketers lust after but they know how to play golf and entertain with their own idiosyncratic ways. Golfers were back in the news last week broadening everyone’s minds about a new departure in world golf, nobody dominates anymore.