Reflections of the BMW Championship: Monday, September 14, 2009 - The Aftermath
Just a week ago, I embarked upon a rare journey into the heart of Chicago Golf. Now, less than 24 hours after Tiger Woods’ dominant -19 victory at the BMW Championship and 48 hours since his record breaking 62 on a course that promised to be bigger, burlier and tougher than the Dubsdread I grew up on, I can’t help but feel sorry for the Jemseks and Chicago golfers everywhere.
Chicago always has been and always will be a working-class, blue collar town; no matter how flashy and out-spoken the elitist minority may become. The people who grace this city’s fairways do so almost exclusively on the weekends and fork over their hard-earned dough every time they get the itch to tee it up. When you speak to these weekend warriors, the stories they tell you rarely begin or end at places like Medinah, Olympia Fields, Bob O’Link or Butler National. More often than not however, their stories do take place at Cog.
It is as much our dream to host a U.S. Open as it is the Jemsek’s and I fear that Tiger’s masterpiece on Saturday has crushed our spirits. It’s not our fault. You have to be wired a certain way and a student of history to be a sports fan in a town that is home to the 1908 World Series champion Cubs, 1969 Stanley Cup champion Blackhawks and 1985 Super Bowl Bears. Bringing a U.S. Open to Chicago and hosting it on a public course like Cog Hill would rank right up there as a crowning achievement in sport, but right now it is not to be and we slink away from this weekend with the same painful aphorism tattooed to our minds; wait till next year.
But to my golfing brothers and sisters and displaced Chicagoans all over the country and all over the world, I say don’t give up. Renovated courses, as with brand new ones, need time to mature before its full potential can be realized. Even Tiger Woods is aware of this fact and remarked during the tournament that the greens were “probably a year or two from settling” and rolling the way Rees Jones intends. Zach Johnson echoed similar sentiments when he was asked if Cog could be tougher and host a national championship saying that the rough could be higher, the fairways tighter and the pins placed in more difficult spots.
Yes, the dream is dead…for now, but I believe that good things still linger off on the horizon and soon the day will come that our national championship is played at Dubsdread -the people’s course.
The End