George Kimball/America At Large: Since the British Open was first played at Royal St George's 109 years ago, the locals had been waiting for a man from Kent to win, and when one finally did, he turned out to be from Kent, Ohio.
Ben Curtis played his college golf at Kent State University, but he wasn't born until 1977, fully seven years after that institution of higher learning came to worldwide attention when the Ohio National Guardsmen turned their guns on student protesters and killed four of them.
Prior to last Sunday's stunning developments at Royal St George's, the nearest Curtis had come to full-scale media interrogation had come last February, when Ben Curtis was busted for pot.
We should hasten to explain that until late last weekend Ben Curtis the golfer wasn't even the United States' most prominent Ben Curtis. Ben Curtis also happens to be the name of the actor who portrays "Steven," the "Dell guy" in an irksome series of television commercials inundating American living rooms, and when Ben the Actor was arrested for criminal possession of marijuana earlier this year after making an ill-advised decision to purchase a bag of high-grade grass from a street dealer on New York's Lower East Side, Ben the Golfer found himself answering a lot of annoying questions.
American headline writers could not restrain themselves from gleefully capitalizing on the TV computer pitchman's most quotable line: "Hey, dude, you're getting a CELL!" Along about the time he got to five-under par in the final round and it became apparent Curtis might not disappear back from whence he had come, British journalists began flocking to their American colleagues in the press tent in search of background information on the upstart leader.
"Are you kidding?" Boston Herald golf correspondent Joe Gordon replied to one. "I've only written two words about him all week, and those were 'Ben' and 'Curtis'." Curtis may well have been the most unlikely winner in the 132 year-history of the championship. His only previous win as a professional had been pretty small potatoes indeed, at the Myrtle Beach stop on the Hooters Tour last year, and the most significant titles of his golfing life had been back-to-back wins in the Ohio Amateur.
Half an hour spent with the new champion in the media centre did little to illuminate the picture. He'd grown up in Ohio, on a public golf course in Ostrander, outside Columbus, which his grandfather owned and operated.
He'd qualified for the 2003 Open on 10 day's notice, when his best-ever PGA Tour finish, a 13th-place tie at the Western Open, got him in under the "top eight finishers not otherwise exempt" clause, and prior to arriving in Sandwich for his practice rounds, Curtis said the sum of his links golf experience consisted of two rounds in Germany during the 2000 Amateur World Team competition.
If the 26-year-old seemed unfazed by his lofty place among the leaders going into the final day, you could probably chalk that up to innocence.
"I've been playing a lot better the last three weeks and this kind of golf suits me the best. It's not going to take 10, 15 or 20 under par to win. If you stay around par, you're going to be right in the hunt," he said late on Saturday, and you just wanted to pat him on the head.
"Even if you are like two or three back going into the back nine, you never know what can happen," he said. "If I shoot like I did today, like four-under, you never know. You get a couple of putts to go in and anything can happen. There are a lot of heavy guys out there and I'll just do the best I can."
At one point on the back nine young Curtis became dizzy atop the leaderboard and carded four bogeys in a six-hole stretch, but in the end his game held up where those of Thomas Bjorn, Vijay Singh, Davis Love, and Tiger Woods did not, and even while being grilled under the hot lights and microphones an hour later, Curtis seemed blissfully undaunted: No, he hadn't been surprised. He'd always had confidence he would win a tournament sooner or later. He described the experience as "a dream come true," but it was stunningly apparent it seemed of small consequence to him.
And when he finally took his leave of the press tent, R & A officials had to chase him down to remind him to take his newly-acquired hardware along with him. Having just won the most coveted trophy in golf, Ben Curtis tried to walk out of the press tent without the Claret Jug.
Whether Curtis goes on to take his place in the pantheon of great champions or proves to be a flash-in-the-pan, of the order of Bill Rogers, another postwar St George's Open winner, it would appear improbable he will ever win another in Sandwich. Although R & A officials heatedly denied that a decision had already been taken to drop St George's from the Open rotation, it seems more likely than not the Sandwich club may join its immediately abutting neighbours, Prince's and Royal Cinque Ports, on the historical roster of courses which have previously hosted Opens but no longer do.
Ben Curtis may miss it, but it's a safe bet most of the professionals will not. While he wasn't exactly rancorous about it, Tiger Woods reminded people all week long that St George's could be a penally unfair track, one which could reward a perfect drive (though God knows Tiger didn't hit many of those last week) with a flukish kick into almost unplayably tangled rough.
Jack Nicklaus may have won three Opens, but he never won at Sandwich, and when he last played in a championship there, Nicklaus found himself fending off accusations he had described Royal St George's as "the worst golf course" on the British Open rotation.
"I never said that," explained Nicklaus. "What I did say was that as a rule you could rank the British Open venues from north to south. Sandwich just happens to be the furthest south."
