Jean van de Velde wrote himself into The Open folklore in 1999 after a collapse of epic proportions. We relive the drama in the July issue of Compleat Golfer.
France is a country without much of a golfing tradition. Its greatest player, Arnaud Massy, conceded victory to Harry Vardon on the 35th hole of a playoff at the 1911 British Open, saying, ‘I can’t play zis damn game.’ He was just being modest, of course – Massy had won the 1907 Open – but since then the French have placed golf somewhere between sunbathing and just plain bathing on their list of vital activities.
The Trophee Lancome, France’s biggest golf tournament, is staged near the Palace of Versailles, and its main purpose seems to be to allow French society to dress up and roam the tented village holding champagne flutes.
So it was startling last week when a dashing Frenchman named Jean van de Velde threw away The Open Championship at Carnoustie, Scotland, in the most extravagant display of je ne sais squat in the history of championship golf. Standing on the tee of the final hole, Van de Velde had a three-stroke lead. Twenty excruciating minutes later he was bent over a six-foot putt, needing to hole it to get into a playoff with 1997 Open champion Justin Leonard and Scotsman Paul Lawrie.
To get from point A to point B the Frenchman had hit the wrong club off the tee, chosen an even worse club from the rough for his second shot, bruised a grandstand, wound up barefoot in a burn and pitched into a greenside bunker. Nothing anyone said could capture the horror of the Frenchman’s misadventure. ‘
Obviously Jean had the tournament in his pocket,’ said Lawrie, who made history himself by shooting 67 and coming from a record 10 shots behind in the final round to win. ‘He chips it down the 18th fairway, hits it on the green, makes five, he’s the Open champion.’ Leonard, who had played in the twosome in front of Van de Velde and warmed up the audience for the Frenchman by hitting a 3-wood into the burn, said, ‘As bad as I feel, he feels worse.’
Van de Velde couldn’t quite get his mind around the calamity. ‘It wasn’t something mad that I tried to do,’ he said at his postmortem press conference. ‘It just came out to be a nightmare.’
Which was appropriate, because that’s what the 128th Open Championship was from start to finish: a golfer’s nightmare. Carnoustie, which was last the site of The Open in 1975, is a nasty antique that was brought down from the attic after 24 years. The holes were longer than they were when Watson won there; the rough was deeper; and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the organisation that runs the British Open, made the fairways as narrow as an eel’s appendix scar. The fairways were also ultra-firm, allowing balls that landed safely to go looking for trouble, most often in some gravel-bottomed moat or wall-faced bunker. ‘I don’t think there’s an individual in the R&A who could break 100 on this course,’ said Phil Mickelson, who shot 79, 76 and missed the cut.
Every year there are claims that the course at some Major championship is too severe, but how often does the first-round leader fail to survive the 36-hole cut? At Carnoustie that happened to Australia’s Rodney Pampling, who shot 71, the only par round on Thursday, before bowing out with a more believable 86 on Friday. How often does America’s leading money-winner finish 22 over par? That happened to David Duval, who carded 24 bogeys and four double-bogeys on his way to a 62nd-place finish.
It was fitting that a Scot won, because this Open seemed less about defending par than about restoring the British Empire. Carnoustie sank the Spanish Armada! (Seve Ballesteros, rookie sensation Sergio Garcia and Masters champion Jose Maria Olazabal shot a collective 69 over par for two rounds.) Carnoustie disciplined the Colonies! (Defending champion Mark O’Meara shot a first-round 83, the highest round by a defending champion in 123 years.) Carnoustie humiliated the French! (Poor Van de Velde.)
Some blamed the wind, but the wind was normal for Tayside, a persistent 15 to 25mph with an occasional toupee-lifting gust. In such conditions the ideal shot is usually described as one played ‘under the wind’.
‘Christ, they don’t know what a low ball is,’ muttered Carnoustie’s feisty greenkeeper, John Philip, as he watched the world’s best players struggle with links-style golf. ‘We used to call them daisy cutters. This is the old style, the natural style.’ Philip was pleased with the scores, which ranged far upwards from the playoff trio’s six-over-par 290 – the highest winning total at any Major since Jack Nicklaus’ 290 at the 1972 US Open at Pebble Beach.
By the third round the golfers had changed their focus from the impossible course conditions to the possible payoff: £350 000 and one year’s possession of the fabled Claret Jug. Craig Parry, the diminutive Australian, shot the lowest score of the week, a 67, and moved into a second-place tie with Leonard.
But Saturday was most notable for the non-collapse of the second-round leader, Van de Velde, who never let his lead slip to less than two. Van de Velde is a handsome 33-year-old with thick brown hair, a single win on his European tour résumé and an excess of Gallic charm. He speaks English with an Yves Montand purr – the only thing becomes zee only sing – and he seduced the British galleries with an occasional wink and grin. But it was the golf course that sighed and reached for a smoke when he was done on Saturday. Among his memorable strokes: an 80-foot putt for birdie at the 14th, a bunker escape to within a foot to save par at the 17th and a 45-footer that rolled squarely into the hole for another birdie on 18.
The Frenchman, like Lawrie, got to Carnoustie through local qualifying, and he came in as the 152nd-ranked player in the world. Had Van de Velde won, only John Daly would have been a lower-ranked Major title winner. ‘Better players than me have had a commanding lead and lost,’ Van de Velde conceded on Saturday, almost embarrassed by his five-shot margin.
Tiger Woods, who tied for seventh at Carnoustie for his fifth top-10 finish in his last seven Majors, had predicted that even a 10-shot lead wouldn’t be safe on such a savage course. Van de Velde proved him right on Sunday, squandering his lead by the 8th hole, where Parry caught him in suddenly becalmed weather. But Van de Velde regained the lead when Parry made seven from deep rough on the 12th. When Van de Velde birdied the 14th, the lead was back to three.
Golf historians will argue over what happened to Van de Velde on the 18th tee. Some will blame his caddie, who failed to dissuade him from using the driver. Others will blame Napoleon, who set a bad precedent at Waterloo. Whatever the reason, Van de Velde spent five strokes on his way to the greenside bunker, drawing groans and howls of disbelief from the thousands of fans watching from the grandstands and from the balconies of the Carnoustie Golf Hotel.
‘His golfing brain deserted him,’ said the BBC’s Peter Alliss.
But amazingly, Van de Velde’s heart did not. He hit an explosion shot to six feet and then avoided total humiliation by making the putt, causing the stands to erupt. His non-victory dance – Van de Velde pumped his arm, waved his visor, and hurled his ball into the stands – was peculiarly poignant and deserves to be reshown for years as an example of spirit in dispiriting times.
The playoff, staged in a steady rain on holes 15 through 18, was tedious and not too artistic, but Lawrie’s bogey-bogey-birdie-birdie slog was far better than either Van de Velde or Leonard could do.
Van de Velde was brave and funny in defeat. ‘Hey, you silly man,’ he claimed his golf ball had told him from the burn. ‘Not for you, not today.’ But he looked forlorn as he walked back to the hotel under his umbrella while his wife, Brigitte, murmured consolations and hugged his waist.
1999 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP LEADERBOARD
1 Paul Lawrie (Sco) 73 74 76 67 290
Justin Leonard (US) 73 74 71 72 290
Jean van de Velde (Fra) 75 68 70 77 290
4 Angel Cabrera (Arg) 75 69 77 70 291
Craig Parry (Aus) 76 75 67 73 291
6 Greg Norman (Aus) 76 70 75 72 293
7 David Frost (SA) 80 69 71 74 294
Tiger Woods (US) 74 72 74 74 294
Davis Love III (US) 74 74 77 69 294
10 Hal Sutton (US) 73 78 72 72 295
Scott Dunlap (US) 72 77 76 70 295
Jim Furyk (US) 78 71 76 70 295
Retief Goosen (SA) 76 75 73 71 295
Jesper Parnevik (Swe) 74 71 78 72 295
Another in our series of stories from the archives worth repeating. This one, reflecting on the 1999 Open, first appeared in Sports Illustrated
