Duval 'a blessed man' despite his 83
"What's happened to me in the last six to eight months is far greater than anything I've ever done for the last 10 years around here."
The 2001 British Open champion says there are now much more important things to him than golf. Which is a good job considering his opening round score at Shinnecock Hills yesterday.
Duval may have lost his game but he has found happiness in his life at last, a result of meeting his "best friend" and wife, Susie, and her three children. Against a backdrop of a declining game and back and shoulder problems, he moved from Florida to Denver, Colorado, and dropped out of the professional golfing circus completely.
So completely in fact that it was only last Saturday night that he decided to come to New York and play in "one of the greatest championships in golf".
Which is why he found himself five hours earlier receiving a reception to savour in the early morning mist on the first tee. The applause and chorus of "welcome back David" were one of his three highlights of the round, he said later, and it no doubt inspired the second, a tee shot crunched down the fairway with a three-wood to set up a dream start with a birdie.
"That was the most important shot of his life," said Bob Duval, David's father and a professional golfer himself on the US seniors Champions Tour. "I told him months ago, that with everything that was going on, 'there's going to come a time when you're going to have to hit that first one'.
"He did and I'm proud of him."
Pars followed at the second and third to set up what looked like the feel-good story of the golfing year. Unfortunately, the tone of the round turned from romance to a situation with all the charm and macabre interest of a car-crash.
At the fourth tee, Duval found his ball in a knee-high clump of rough and elected to take a drop, which gave him a lie on the flattened grass of a spectator walkway. He then found the green, but three-putted for a double bogey to move from one under to one over.
The fifth hole was similar: tee shot into rough, escape shot looping along the side of the fairway followed by another penalty drop and three shots later there was another double bogey.
Bogey at six sent him to four over before pars on the short seventh and par-four eighth, met with more rapturous applause from the grandstands, steadied the ship a little.
It started to list again at the ninth however, and the sequence of tee shot-rough-recovery-two putts sent Duval to the turn in 40, five over.
So it continued, with bogeys at 10 and 11 followed by an all too rare birdie at the par-four seventh, much to everyone's delight.
It produced an all too rare smile from the man who famously hides his emotions with the help of dark sunglasses and a poker face. But the relief did not last long as Duval's tee shot at 13, taken without using a tee, re-introduced his ball to the long stuff and the scorers with black rather than red numbers.
Bogeys at 14, 15, 16 and 17 saw the plus figures mount up, but Duval will have been buoyed by his final reception of the day, as he climbed the slope up to the 18th green.
It was his third highlight of the day, he said, and although double bogeying his final hole was most decidedly not, he added: "In general, I'm pleased with what happened today.
"I felt like I conducted myself well, which as you know is very important to me, and I felt like I hit some really nice shots and putted really good. All in all, I would call it an enormous victory for me today."
Not that his re-appearance this week means an immediate return to the tour.
"I've got to take my time and play when I feel like I'm ready and play when I want to. I think that's the biggest key for me this year. There's no reason to bombard myself or my wife or kids with lots of golf tournaments. I didn't take all that time off to do that. I did it to try to feel like I was ready to play and to be excited to play.
"The next time I feel like I'm ready to play is when I'll show up."
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