Martin Kaymer Blows It In The Desert
Heading into the final round of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship raise your hand if you thought it wasn’t going to be four hours of the Martin Kaymer show? I doubt there would have been a lot of hands up. I too thought I’d be waking up to see Kaymer put the finishing touches on what had been three perfect days in the desert. Instead his six shot lead was gone and no trophy is on its way to Germany.
Yes anything can happen on any day and no lead is ever safe but when a player like Kaymer loses a lead like this, it’s surprising. This isn’t just the average tour player blowing a big final round lead; we’re talking about a major champion here. Kaymer’s got some big time game; the US Open and PGA Championship trophies in his closet show that. He’s also won this event multiple times. Put all that together and he’s one of the last people you’d expect to let a six shot lead slip through his hands.
What makes this even more confusing is that Kaymer came out of the gates with all guns blazing today. He birdied three of the first four holes pushing his lead to ten. Things unraveled after that. Starting with a bogey on the sixth and then a double bogey to close out his front nine. It didn’t get much better on the back, where he tallied eight pars and a triple bogey seven on the thirteenth hole. A seven? I thought for a second I was looking at one of my scorecards. Instead this was the scorecard of the defending US Open champion, whose desert locomotive was completely falling off the tracks.
There also may be something in the water on the European Tour these days. This was the second straight week a major champion blew a big final round lead. In South Africa last week their native son and former Masters champ Charl Schwartzel coughed up a five shot advantage and then eventually lost in a playoff. So now we have two straight weeks of major champions blowing leads. No wonder why Tiger Woods is playing in the US in two weeks rather than Dubai. He doesn’t want to get caught up in this mess, and he already has enough problems. In a related story his back probably still hurts.
Now back to the desert, Kaymer would go on to shoot a three over par 75, two shots back of winner Gary Stal. By the way there are probably more people who thought Kaymer would blow a six-stroke lead than knew who Stal was before today. The unknown Frenchman shot a 7 under 65 to hold off a surging Rory McIlroy and a fading Kaymer. That being said I may as well have won this tournament because all the talk is about the stars.
Going into this week guys like Rory, Kaymer, Rickie Fowler, Henrik Stenson and Justin Rose dominated the headlines. Stars of the golf world making their 2015 debuts and fans hope that they could see them battling down the stretch. That in fact did happen, it’s just that Stal crashed the party. Rory did his best to try and steal the trophy with a six under 66. He finished one shot back of Stal and Kaymer was two back. Stal got the trophy but not the headlines. When a two time major champ blows a six shot lead and the best player in the world finishes second, they steal the show.
As Yogi Berra famously once said “It’s not over until the fat lady sing” and she never sang today for Kaymer. She never sang for Greg Norman at the 96 Masters, Jean van de Velde at the 1999 Open Championship and Phil Mickeslon never heard her on his iPod at Winged Foot. It’s really not over until the ball rolls into the cup on that final hole. In golf especially a big lead can get away from a player so quickly. Think about other sports. The Yankees historic collapse against the Red Sox took place over a few days. In golf it’s not a few days, you don’t have the time to pause, regroup and stop the bleeding. One bad swing and you could be spiraling out of control and you don’t know how to stop it.
When it comes to Kaymer’s collapse we still have to keep things in perspective. It’s only January, it wasn’t a major and for guys like him they are judged by what they do four times a year rather than this weekend. This is something that never goes away though. If he ever finds himself on top of a leaderbaord again the conversation will always go back to the time when he couldn’t get it done. Rather than the times he did no matter how unfair that may be.