Quietly counting the cost as Van de Velde implodes

The week before the 1999 British Open, seemingly every newspaper in America revisited Ben Hogan's 1953 triumph at Carnoustie writes, George Kimball

In previews of the Open Championship, which begins this morning, Hogan has been replaced as Carnoustie's poster boy by the visage of a forlorn Jean Van de Velde. Over the past seven days, at least two-dozen major American papers ran the same photograph - that of the Frenchman, trousers rolled up to his knees, standing in the Barry Burn, contemplating the awful mess he had gotten us into.

Yes, us.

Van de Velde could not have known it at the time, but he had the Kimball family's grocery money for the next month riding on his Gallic shoulders that afternoon.

The morning before the British Open at Royal Birkdale the year before, I arrived at the press tent to find my Boston Herald colleague Joe Gordon immersed in a study of the morning odds.

"Can you believe this?" Joe exclaimed. "It says Mark O'Meara is 33 to 1."

Not three months earlier O'Meara had won a green jacket in Augusta.

It seemed worth a flyer.

Our British colleague Jim Lawton confirmed the quoted odds were not a misprint. We asked directions to the local bookie shop.

"Oh, you don't even have to leave the press tent," said Lawton. "Statto can get the bet in for you."

He led us across the floor and introduced us to a tall, bespectacled man named Angus Loughran.

"How much do you want to bet?" he asked.

Joe and I each handed over a £20 note and asked for £20 each way on O'Meara. Statto hit one button on his mobile, spoke a sentence or two of bookie gibberish, and hung up.

"Done," he turned to us and smiled.

"Don't we, uh, get a betting slip or something?" I wondered.

"Don't worry about it," said Loughran. "Just come find me if you win." Four days later O'Meara staggered to the wire and found himself in a four-hole play-off with somebody named Brian Watts. Joe and I had four stories to write when it was over, but there seemed to be an even more pressing issue. We put our heads together.

"One of us has to go out and watch the golf," we decided, "and the other needs to stay here and keep an eye on Statto." We needn't have worried. O'Meara won, and, true to his word, Angus found us, and peeled off a large roll of pound notes worth well in excess of $1,000.

I hadn't known it at the time, but Loughran is reputed to be among the foremost betting experts in Britain, and serves in that capacity for the BBC. He also turned out to be the son of the noted conductor James Loughran.

Fast forward to the following year. At Carnoustie, Joe and I perused the newspapers but found nothing offering the sort of value for money O'Meara had at Birkdale. When it came time to make a bet on the 1999 Open, we passed.

On Saturday afternoon I ran into Statto in the media centre. What turned out to have been the most difficult British Open set-up ever devised had already routed most of the favourites, and the unknown Van de Velde was stubbornly clinging to the lead midway through the penultimate round.

When Loughran asked whether I'd made a bet, I admitted that I hadn't, but was at that moment seized by an impulse.

"Just for the hell of it," I said, "see what the price on the Frenchman is now." After one click of the mobile and two sentences of mumbo-jumbo, Statto replied "Six to one."

"I'll take 50 of that," I said.

I certainly wasn't counting on winning, but with Van de Velde three shots ahead with a round and a half to play, it struck me as an irresistible outlay. Besides, I reasoned, after my windfall at Birkdale, I was actually playing with Statto's money.

I never even tried to calculate my winnings until the Frenchman stood on the 18th tee Sunday afternoon, still three shots clear of the field. At that point once again I looked around the press room to make sure of Statto's whereabouts.

A few years later, in a made-for-TV reminiscence, Van de Velde returned to Carnoustie and played the 18th using only a putter. He made six.

Here's what many people don't remember about the afternoon in question: Van de Velde concluded his play of that hole with what might have been the most pressure-packed putt in Open history - an eight-footer for a seven that put him into a play-off with Justin Leonard and the eventual winner, Paul Lawrie.

So the Frenchman still had a chance to win the Open even after he futzed up the final hole of regulation.

Years later, Joe Gordon still recalls my performance that afternoon as "the most remarkable display of self-control I've ever witnessed".

I didn't tear my hair. I didn't burst into tears. I didn't curse at Van de Velde, during a single stroke of his seven-stroke implosion on the closing hole, or during his wretched meltdown in the ensuing playoff.

I didn't even try to strangle him when I interviewed him a few minutes later and he shrugged and said, "There are worse things in life."

When Phil Mickelson similarly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at Winged Foot last year he was able to put it into perspective by proclaiming, "I am such an idiot!" But at Carnoustie the best Jean Van de Velde could do was, "There are worse things in life?"

Oh yeah? Name one.