J Rose
Boston-based commentary with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer

On Sunday, Padraig Harrington won his second consecutive British Open Championship at Royal Birkdale in Southport, England, becoming the first European golfer to pull off the back-to-back feat in over 100 years.

And the question I have is: who cares?

According to the reaction of most Americans I know and read, the answer is, not many people on this side of the pond, outside of diehard duffers and Golf Channel employees.

The ratings for this year’s “Open Championship”, as the insufferably proper Brits like to refer to the oldest major, should be decent, despite the absence of Tiger Woods, thanks in large part to the feel good story of Greg ‘The Choker’ Norman making a run for the Claret Jug after a decade of doing nothing. But the interest in the Open over here remains just a hair higher than that of MLS soccer and the WNBA.

Why is that? It’s a major, one of only four on the PGA calendar, meaning the best players in the world are going to show up. It’s the oldest major, bringing a boatload of tradition and history from the land where the game was invented. And it presents a welcome change of pace from the sunny, pristine courses that dot the schedule over here in the States.

So why is the Open Championship treated like a redheaded stepchild Stateside?

Let me provide a few answers.

1.) It’s in England.
That fact presents two problems. One is the time difference. Great Britain is five hours ahead of the US, meaning the all important final pairings are over by 1:30-2:00 in the afternoon here, which is right around the time most people get home from church, or in blogger’s cases, wake up.

The other problem is the weather in England is usually, how do I put it, shitty. Ask tennis fans what it’s like to watch matches during driving rainstorms and constant cloudiness, and then multiply it by 100 because unlike at Wimbledon, the blokes at the R&A believe in playing through such nuisances like 35 mph winds and freezing rain.

2.)The style of play is also foreign to us
Europeans play the game on links courses, which roughly translated means the courses are full of rolling hills, knee high grasses and bunkers that could hide a small army. Players are inclined to hit low shots that roll hundreds of feet towards the hole, rather than hit a high arcing shot that’s apt to get caught in the jetstream and lost in the fescue. People who have never been fortunate enough to travel to the birthplace of golf can’t relate to this style of play, therefore are more apt to ignore it as they caress their precious Big Berthas.

3.)Foreigners and/or nobodies tend to win
Take away Tiger’s three titles in the past eight years and the winners of the Open are like a who’s that? of championship golf. Harrington, who has only won two tourneys in the States, both in 1995, has now won consecutive Claret Jugs, and other luminaries such as Ben Curtis, Todd Hamilton, David Duval and John Daly have drank from the funny looking trophy (for Daly it was a shot glass), making it the PGA equivalent of an MTV Movie Award. It’s not really about who’s good, but who’s hot.

Take all these factors and mix in a lack of Tiger and suddenly you’ve got an event that’s only slightly more relevant than the ESPYs to Americans.

Which is sad. Because there’s nothing like waking up early on a Sunday morning in mid-July and watching professional golfers curse, slog and bellyache their way through a golf course, just like us amateaurs do.

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