David Frost can live up to his name and beat the debilitating heat at next week’s US PGA in Oklahoma
GOLF: Jon Swift
THIS has, by anyone’s yardstick, been a bumper year for southern African golf. Ernie Els the US Open champion, Simon Hobday, winner of the veteran’s equivalent and Nick Price a popular winner of the British Open.
It is a record that could grow even larger on the world stage next weekend at the US PGA at Southern Hills in Oklahoma. And the man who could do it this time is David Frost. There are any number of reasons why Frost is ready to break through for his first major victory but the most compelling one is the tight, flat and uncompromising Southern Hills layout itself.
First, anyone bold enough to tackle the par-70 monster in August has as a prerequisite to have the stamina of a Durban- based triathlete in December. The heat is unbending in its intensity and humid in the extreme. The course is thus constantly watered, often to almost ridiculous extremes. When Ray Floyd won the PGA there in 1982, the hoses were turned on the greens between one set of players putting out and the next arriving.
But, that said — doubtless ruling out many of the European contingent in the process — it is designer Perry Maxwell’s architecture which really makes Southern Hills the challenge it is.
Floyd based his 1982 victory on a staggering opening round of 63. His winning 272 was eight under and six shots better than next best major winner, Hubert Green, managed in the US Open of 1977.
Green’s victory though contained an unexpected extra ingredient of personal bravery. Already into his final round, Green was told by Sandy Tatum, the president of the USPGA, that an anonymous telephone call had come through with the chilling message that three men were on their way to assassinate the player.
Just why Green was the target remains a mystery. But Tatum and his committee were unwilling to take the chance that the call was a hoax and had the unpleasant task of telling Green as he left the 14th tee.
Green, now flanked by armed guards, continued as if nothing had happened. And as he walked up the tree-lined 18th — one of only two discernible inclines on the course — he had Lou Graham breathing down his neck. He managed to keep his composure long enough to sink a putt of around a metre at the final hole to hold Graham out by a shot.
Death threats aside, par is not easy to beat in a major at Southern Hills. Dave Stockton, now setting the seniors circuit alight, also managed to beat regulation by a stroke with 279 for his four rounds in the 1970 PGA. But, like Floyd, this was thanks to a superb 66 in the third round which lifted him out of the baying pack after a 70-70 start and, despite a three-over final round, gave him victory by two shots from Arnold Palmer and Bob Murphy.
These statistics would perhaps belie it, but Southern Hills is more a course that is likely to bow to intense concentration and error-free accuracy over four days than a single glittering round over one.
It is off the tee at the course on the flat prairies of America’s farming heartland that inevitably takes its toll on the more adventurous players. Miss the fairway, and you have the beginnings of more problems than Bill Clinton. This is largely due to the intense heat in Tulsa. Frost, whose temperament matches his given name, is both a native of Africa and a resident of Florida. Simply put, he is used to the heat both mental and physical.
Because of the normal climatic conditions, the course is seeded throughout with Bermuda grass, a strain which handles on-going heatwaves with seeming scorn. This makes for a superb layout to the eye but stray off the charted fairways, where the rough will be grown in for the PGA and allowed to rise to ankle height, and there be dragons.
So severe is the tangle of Bermuda off the fairways that the great Ben Hogan had to withdraw from the 1958 US Open after turning his wrist over so badly on a shot out of the rough that he could not continue.
There is another characteristic to Southern Hills which does not exactly endear itself to the playing professionals. The bunkers, though not even vaguely approaching the depth of the potholes so much a feature of traps surrounding the greens in many of the older venues, are among the most difficult in the world.
The reason for this is the native sand from the nearby Arkansas River, known for some inherently American reason as “Number 6 Wash”. The oddly titled grains have the fine consistency of talcum powder, making a shot out of sand very much a hit and hope affair and, like every other incipient hazard on this demanding layout, only steered clear of through the accuracy of shotmaking.
You can never discount the brilliance of Els or the dogged refusal to give in — and the magnificent recoveries this attitude engenders — of Price.
But one feels that consistency is the key. The type of almost metronomic play produced by Loren Roberts in giving our Ernie such a run for his money in the US Open.
Add real, proven class as a golfer to this ability for consistency and you don’t have to look much further than Frost.