ST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- The Old Course lost a lot of street cred Saturday. So did the ghost of Old Tom Morris, the Royal & Ancient elders, and every local who ever told those sun-kissed hackers from Boca Raton to Palm Springs that the game was meant to be played in conditions that would send a polar bear scrambling for cover.
On a day when the skies were largely blue and the weather was inviting enough for visitors to wander about the cathedral ruins on the coast and turn the St. Andrews town center into Times Square on New Year's Eve (well, not quite), the people running The Open at St. Andrews actually closed business for 10 hours and 28 minutes because some nasty gusts weren't playing nice with the pros' nuclear-powered golf balls.
Nae wind, nae rain, nae nothing. Forget Old Tom Morris -- Old Tom Watson would have gladly volunteered to play a full round with that familiar gap-toothed smile on his face. Heck, if the late, great Ernie Banks was still around to suggest, "Let's play two," he would've been surely talking about rounds, not holes.
But when those R&A elders pulled the plug on the second round early Saturday morning and ultimately scheduled a Monday finish for the second time in Open history, they did at least guarantee this much: The contender with the strongest mental makeup over the next two days will win the Claret Jug.
In that context, Dustin Johnson has never been mistaken for Ben Hogan. He has a 1-shot lead at 10-under because he's bigger, stronger and longer than everyone else, and because the Old Course has always been a dear friend to the long ballers of their day, from Jack Nicklaus to John Daly to Tiger Woods.
Johnson is a grip-it-and-rip-it type who leaves the science of the game to lesser athletic specimens. But to be fair, after Friday's rain-delayed second round resumed at 7 a.m. Saturday and after a 40-mph gust twice blew his chip shot down a slope on the par-5 14th green as he tried to mark the ball, Johnson showed some serious mental toughness. He played the final four holes in 1 under, and said all the right things to boot.
"I'm not the only one that happened to," Johnson said, "so it's nothing to worry about now. It's over with."
And when it was over with, the world's best golfers -- at least the unfortunate ones who couldn't complete their second rounds Friday -- were a hopelessly dazed and confused lot. Just like at the U.S. Open in 2009, when Bethpage Black was reduced to a thinly disguised Brazilian rainforest, players and fans were having difficulty distinguishing one day from the next.
Including Friday's delay, the tournament was shut down for close to 14 hours. Saturday morning, Peter Dawson, chief executive of the R&A, had a team out on the far end of the course to determine whether the cradle of golf would honor its Scottish code and play on at almost any cost.
"We had to take a few steps structurally to make sure we didn't get blown away," Dawson said. The R&A picked the Old Course's most vulnerable appendage, the 11th green, and ran tests that showed their golf balls holding firm against the wind. They ordered the competitors to take their positions, and as soon as the horn blew, all heck broke loose.
Brooks Koepka, once an All-American at Florida State, said his ball on the 11th green immediately rolled two or three inches from its place 6 feet left of the cup. He kept trying to return his ball to its rightful place, and the wind kept blowing it off the spot. "I've never seen a ball wiggle that much," said Koepka, who thought this not-so-funny piece of comedy would soon leave him with a 40-foot putt. He told the nearest official that he didn't want to play anymore, and Dawson put his top man on the case. Soon enough, there was a standoff and the potential for Scotland's answer to the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel at 10 paces. "It's going to sound stupid," Koepka said, "but it felt like a tropical storm growing up in Florida."
Stupid? The 2010 winner here, Louis Oosthuizen, would beg to differ. During the Koepka follies at 11, Oosthuizen watched his ball on the 13th green move from 3 feet to 1 feet to 8 feet as if kicked by some unseen gremlin. Though his ski cap/balaclava gear had him looking like a burglar, Oosthuizen was the one who got robbed. (He did sink the par putt regardless.)
Woods didn't have much to joke about Saturday, but that absurd scene made him laugh. The third member of their group, Jason Day, saw Oosthuizen laughing, too, but decided the man was only doing that because he didn't want to cry.
"So I walked over [to an official] and then we all started complaining, as we do, as players," Day said. "We complain." Meanwhile, Jordan Spieth was making a spectacle of himself on the 14th. As the Masters and U.S. Open champ watched Johnson's ball tumble down a slope and off the green, he raced toward his own ball to mark it before it could meet a similar fate.
"It was pretty funny," Johnson said. "I was laughing at him. I wasn't laughing at myself." Spieth missed a short birdie putt, and then yanked his putter over his shoulder in anger. On account of the gusts, it was a left-center putt that he played outside the cup to the right. Spieth was so focused on the weather's impact on his putt that he forgot to do what any golfer trying to win the third leg of a Grand Slam needs to do: stay aggressive.
He came up short, and said his fit of anger was directed at himself. But he did tell an official, "We should never have started," after the horn blew a second time to call a halt to this one-sided fight.
Thirty-two minutes in, Dawson realized he had a bigger problem with his greens than his USGA counterpart Mike Davis had at Chambers Bay. Asked if the R&A could wipe out the morning play that saw 52 holes completed and only three birdies, Dawson said, "I wish we could. Rules of golf do allow you to wipe out a full round, but sadly not part of a round."
Sadly, the R&A needs to keep the Old Course greens faster than the German Autobahn to protect it from complete annihilation on calm, sunshiny days. This was no consolation to the artist formerly known as Woods, whose own Grand Slam bid received no such reprieve at Muirfield in 2002, when the R&A threw him out there in the middle of a monsoon and watched him drown with an 81.
That's when Scottish golf was really Scottish golf. Thirteen years later, hey, times (and tee times) have definitely changed. When he woke up early Saturday morning to the sound of howling winds, Patrick Reed locked eyes with a couple of friends staying in his rented home. "Do you actually play in these heavy winds?" one of the buddies asked.
"Well, it's the British Open," Reed responded. "Probably." Or probably not. Golf balls were oscillating on the greens and tees and dying slow deaths in the air, so the game was called for 10 hours and change, and the players were left to kill a ton of time. Johnson caught a half-hour nap and hit the gym. Paul Lawrie, a Scot, got a Periscope lesson from Ian Poulter. Spieth went back to his house to catch up on the sleep he didn't get the previous night.
It was an endless, maddening day for those who rose at 4:30 a.m. for the 7 a.m. start. The good news? The indignities and inconveniences stretched from here to Monday evening will test the willpower of every golfer in the hunt, just as it should be even in an Open delayed -- stunningly enough -- by typical Scottish weather.
If nothing else, this guarantees a winner of extreme mental strength and one worthy of the Claret Jug, whether that's Johnson or Spieth or someone else.