Golf without TIGER

The U.S. Open gets underway today at Congressional Country Club. Dae-Hyun Kim, the two-hundred-and-twenty-fifth best golfer on the planet according to Official World Golf Ranking, had the honor on the first tee. In total, there are four players in the field named Kim, the most crucially important, if you’re Tim Finchem, the commissioner of the P.G.A. Tour, being Anthony Kim, the Korean-American Ryder Cup standout who wears cowboy-sized belt buckles and speaks with a faint but recognizable Texahoma twang.

Along with a handful of other young players (Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler, Hunter Mahan, Camilo Villegas, and Dustin Johnson), Kim represents what was once considered the bright future of the sport—that crop of talent planted during golf’s most recent boom years, the late nineties. But with Tiger Woods (pictured above with Finchem, in happier times) struggling through his second season of competitive irrelevance (and out with injuries this week), and Phil Mickelson now forty, the youngsters are being prodded by the golf media, and begged by Finchem, to act like grownups. That means winning a major, preferably this one.

The last time Congressional hosted the U.S. Open was 1997. Things were different. Tiger had just won his first major, the Masters, by twelve shots; Anthony Kim was in middle school; Congressional’s eighteenth hole was a squirrely par-three that was more afterthought than conclusion; and the champion, Ernie Els, received a mere $465,000. This time around, there’s no Tiger, and the winner will collect a check for $1.35 million on the green of a par-four finishing hole that is the final punctuation mark to a radically redesigned Congressional back nine. The drastic change in both cash and course length (this year’s total yardage will exceed the 1997 layout by about four hundred and fifty yards) is Tiger’s legacy. With his international superstardom, tournament purses doubled and then doubled again, and club manufacturers began pouring millions into R. & D. Everybody on tour now swings a driver with a clubhead roughly the size of whole grapefruit, and last year players one through ninety-five on the money list made at least a million dollars between the ropes.

But it’s the other Tiger effect that has Finchem scrambling. Since the scandal broke in 2009, Tiger has been absent in the winner’s circle, yet the overwhelming majority of media coverage devoted to golf (which has been shrinking in recent years) is still also devoted to him. Through a variety of promotional campaigns, including pairing hopeful superstars together for the first two rounds of a tournament, Finchem has tried to advertise his young guns, and to disentangle, gently, the Tour from Tiger. So far, though, the two have proved inseparable. What’s needed, the commissioner knows, is something that looks a lot like what got him and his Tour here in the first place: a young, hyped player holding the hardware above his head come Sunday.

Photograph by Keith Allison, Flickr CC.