US Open: Justin Rose’s landmark triumph was built on greatness

Englishman breaks his Major duck with a performance that is sure to live long in the memory
Reuters
Kevin Garside18 June 2013

If the measure of a champion is not only the scale of his win but the manner in which it is delivered then Justin Rose can be doubly proud of his victory at the US Open, his maiden major championship and the first by an Englishman for 17 years.

The glance to the heavens, accompanied by a kiss, was a tribute to his father, Ken, the figure behind his early grounding in the game, who died a decade ago of leukaemia. It was, Rose said, his father about whom he was thinking as he closed out the championship over the hardest holes in golf.

"It wasn't lost on me that today was Father's Day,” he said. “A lot of us come from great men and we have that responsibility to show our children what a great man can be. My goal was to carry myself in a way that I could be proud. I couldn't help but look up to the heavens and think my dad had something to do with it.”

The scenes at the final hole will live with Rose for the rest of his days. Though Nick Faldo was the last from England to win a major at the Masters in 1996 we must go all the way back to 1970 to find a name from the mother country engraved on the US Open trophy, that of Tony Jacklin.

If Rose never wins another major the memory of what he achieved will sustain him. This is no ordinary course, no routine event. The US Open makes the greatest demand of a golfer and had to be won. When the pressure was at its height Rose was the man who dared to win, seeing off not any rank and file tour player but American hall-of-famer Phil Mickelson down the stretch, as they say in these parts.

Rose’s tee shots at the forbidding 17th and 18th holes were gun-barrel straight, the latter landing a metre from the Hogan plaque. Symbolism was dripping off his club when he lashed his approach to the back of the green, emulating the Hogan 1-iron in 1950, framed for all time in the iconic photograph taken by Hy Peskin. Having only narrowly missed the pin Rose left his third shot, hit through the fringe with a 3-wood, on the rim of the cup for a tap-in par.

Mickelson still had a birdie to force a play-off but without a driver in the bag was always going to struggle to advance his ball far enough up the hill off the tee. He was short with his approach and needed to chip in to take Rose to extra time. Not even Lefty on his 43rd birthday could conjure that kind of magic.

And so Rose had done it at last, 15 years after blazing into this sporting life at Royal Birkdale, a 17-year-old boy chipping in for fourth place at The Open. He turned pro immediately, racking up those 21 missed cuts that for so long defined him. He can forget about them now.

“When I was missing 21 cuts in a row, I was just trying to not fade away, really. I just didn't want to be known as a one hit wonder, a flash in the pan,” he said. “I believed in myself inherently, deep down I always knew that I had a talent to play the game. I thought that if I put talent and hard work together, surely it will work out in the end.

“The other thing that I was able to do during that period was not beat myself further and further into the ground. If I missed a cut by five one week and by two the next week, I would kind of tell myself that I was getting better.

“But also there have been times in my career when I found it hard to close out tournaments, and I think a lot of that goes back to that sort of scar tissue of early in my career. I feel like since I started winning in 2010, I had a two win season over here on the PGA TOUR, that was when I first felt like I was over the start to my pro career and I could move on and believe in myself and be confident and trust myself under pressure.”

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