Monty: It Should be That Difficult

By Derek Lawrenson

Editor's Note: The following is a special feature courtesy LINKS Magazine
 
Colin Montgomerie first thought he had won the U.S. Open in 1992, when Jack Nicklaus came up to him after the Scot had completed his final round at Pebble Beach and said, “Congratulations on becoming our national champion.”
Montgomerie thought he had won it again at Oakmont in 1994. He led the putting statistics—and every other time he has done that in his career he has always gone home with a trophy.
 

The third time came at Congressional in 1997, when he played so well that he turned in the low score in two of the four rounds. As he says: “Has anyone else ever done that, and not won?”
 
And then there was last year, when he holed his “Hail Mary” putt on the 71st hole, a snaking 60-foot triple-breaker, and split the middle of the fairway with his final drive at Winged Foot. When you hole a “one in a thousand” putt—his Larry Mize at the 1987 Masters or Bob Tway at the 1986 PGA moment—how can you not think it’s your time?
 
“Here’s one fact that tells you everything,” Montgomerie says with a rueful grin. “There have only been a handful of times in my entire career when I thought I’d won a tournament and it didn’t happen.
 
“Four of them have come at the U.S. Open.”
 
Montgomerie knows firsthand that the Open is the most difficult tournament to win. “There’s no let-up at the U.S. Open,” he says. “Every hole is a potential bogey. Look at Oakmont: Even the par 5s are bogeys if you’re not careful. So you come off every year feeling mentally whacked.”
 
A lot of great players have never won the Open. The list includes Nick Faldo, Greg Norman, Seve Ballesteros and at the very top, Sam Snead.
 
But at least those guys won other majors. Montgomerie, 43, is the only player to finish second five times in the majors—three in the Open—and never win. The Open close calls hurt most because it’s the tournament that plays to all his strengths. Despite the disappointment of having Nicklaus verbally hand him the trophy in 1992 before first Jeff Sluman then Tom Kite snatched it from him, Montgomerie was quite happy with his third-place finish in his Open debut.
 
“I wasn’t unhappy finishing third,” he says. “Totally the opposite. I had fallen in love with the U.S. Open. I thought it was right up my alley.”
 
And why not? Montgomerie is straight off the tee, putts well and is remarkably consistent. He’s Hale Irwin with an accent and better eyesight; yet Irwin has won three Opens and Montgomerie is 0 for 14.
 
That’s because no event exposes weaknesses like the Open, and Montgomerie’s lack of conditioning, fragile concentration and rabbit ears factored in all his subsequent second-place finishes.
 
In 1994, after playing four rounds in stifling heat and tying Ernie Els and Loren Roberts, Montgomerie showed up for the playoff wearing a dark outfit. “That was mistake number one,” he says. “I had run out of clean shirts apart from one with a black tartan pattern. I was sponsored by Pringle, and felt a duty to wear one of their shirts. How would it look if I won the title and wasn’t wearing one? Of course, I should have walked into the pro shop and bought a white Oakmont shirt.