We’ve been here before. When Seve Ballesteros won the first of what would become five Major titles, the 1979 Open Championship at Royal Lytham, it brought to an end a nine-year drought for European golfers in the game’s four most important tournaments.
Even more importantly, the Spaniard’s memorable triumph set off something big. Over the next 14 years four other European players — Sandy Lyle, Bernhard Langer, Nick Faldo and Ian Woosnam — would, along with Ballesteros, taste victory in 14 more Majors.
Inspired by the dashing Spaniard, the rest quickly realised they were good enough to beat the best. It would turn out to be a golden era for the European game. Now, of course, Europe and its best golfers stand at a similar crossroads.
Will Padraig Harrington’s memorable win in the 136th Open Championship at Carnoustie — the first Major win by a European golfer in this century — mirror Ballesteros’s triumph of 28 years ago and have the same stimulating effect on both him and his contemporaries?
”While I would love to think so, the world of golf today is very different from that of 1979,” says Ken Schofield, the former executive director of the European Tour and the man who presided over the era dominated by Europe’s ”Big Five”.
”For one thing, we have Tiger Woods today. Winning any of the four Major championships is that much harder because you have to beat the man who may just be the greatest golfer who ever lived.”
Schofield’s point is well made. Every one of the Ballesteros-led fivesome was, at one time or another, ranked number one in the world.
In other words, each had the morale and confidence-boosting knowledge that he was better, statistically at least, than those he was trying to beat every week.
”We knew we were better than the Americans,” says Faldo. ”And we all knew that we could beat Seve, at least some of the time. So if he was good enough to win Majors, so were we.”
Today, of course, no such boast is forthcoming or likely to be any time soon.
Woods is so far ahead of what passes for his competition that the world-ranking points of the men in second and third places, Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk, do not add up to his own total. Thus, a long shadow is cast over even the best of the rest. He is going to be number one for quite some time.
Then again, golf being the game that it is and the Majors coming along only four times a year, there is always the possibility that even a player of Woods’s undoubted ability is going to be firing on something less than all cylinders in a given week.
That was certainly the case at Carnoustie, where the world number one was performing at a level some way from his best. And when that is the case, he is eminently beatable, as no fewer than 11 men showed last week.
Timing, as they say, is everything. Still, no matter the current state of the Woods swing and psyche, there is little doubt that the emergence of Harrington as Europe’s first Major winner in eight long years has to be viewed as a major boost for golf as a whole on this side of the Atlantic.
While regular — and increasingly easy — victories over the Americans in the biennial Ryder Cup matches are one thing, an individual win by one of the Europeans is something else again.
”I’m pleased on three levels,” continues Schofield. ”First of all for Padraig [Harrington] himself. He is such a hard worker and the example he has set to both his direct contemporaries and everyone else on the European Tour has been exemplary. And, now that Padraig has won the Open, the generation of players that he is part of — guys like Thomas Bjorn, Lee Westwood and Darren Clarke — will not be remembered primarily for failure at Major championship level.
”Then there is the next generation, of which Sergio [Garcia] is the leader. They will surely be thinking to themselves that the time to step up is now. I’m thinking of men like Luke Donald, Paul Casey and Nick Dougherty. If I were one of them, I’d be licking my lips, knowing that I was good enough to contend in any of the Majors. Sergio has showed them it really is possible.”
And now those possibilities must be turned into realities if history is to repeat itself. And if it is, interesting times are ahead.