US Open Diary: Rory McIlroy opens up on his fainting spells
The world No. 1 was asked if he ever had an experience “anywhere near” what happened to the Australian at the end of the second round on Friday, when Day suffered a return of a condition diagnosed as benign positional vertigo, falling to the ground as a result of the dizziness.
McIlroy replied: “Yeah, I fainted a couple of times. I don’t suffer from vertigo, I suffer from low blood pressure. So if I go from a sitting position to standing up I get a little bit light-headed at times. It’s never happened on the golf course, thankfully. I was just glad to hear Jason was okay.”
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Spectators at major golf tournaments are well used to advertising in the sky over the venues they attend. If it’s not a Goodyear Blimp chugging above them, it is usually a small plane flying across the vista trailing a banner.
Yet The Diary can safely say this week at Chambers Bay was the first time in major championship history that a flying ad contained the sales pitch: “Mary Mart @ Tacoma sells legal marijuana”.
This has been a very different week for the US Open, mostly because of the unusual nature of the course its national championship is being played on and the fact that it is located for the first time in 115 years in the Pacific Northwest.
Yet bringing it to Washington State has had an unexpected by-product, the legal sale of cannabis for recreational use. Washington and Colorado are the only two American states that have introduced legislation to decriminalise marijuana for non-medicinal use and a year into the project, retailers in the nearby city of Tacoma, south of Seattle, are reporting a spike in sales and interest during the US Open, with tour buses rolling up in their car parks both to buy and to satisfy their curiosity.
“There’s definitely an increase in business,” Tacome marijuana retailer Bryan Jastrzembski told his city’s Sunday News Tribune newspaper, while opposite there sat a a quarter-page colour advertisement for Tacoma-based Clearchoice Cannabis depicting a golf-gloved hand against a generic image of a golf course holding a lump of cannabis under the wording “Go For The Green”.
Makes a change from the usual golfing nerdiness surrounding types of grass.
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What Gary Player would make of all that herbal agronomy, one can only imagine, considering the 79-year-old multi-major winner’s ability to reach extreme levels of apoplexy just talking about the course at Chambers Bay.
Player, 50 years removed from his US Open victory in 1965 at Bellerive, the fourth of nine major successes and the one that secured his career grand slam, has been on site at the championship this week, grumbling about the Robert Trent Jones Jr links-style design and its unsuitability as a USGA host venue.
On Saturday, the South African was given a wider platform on America’s Golf Channel, on which he described the ongoing major as “the most unpleasant tournament I’ve seen in my life”.
“I mean,” Player continued, “the man who designed this golf course had to have one leg shorter than the other,” presumably referring to the sloping fairways that feature on many holes of this public course.
“You don’t bring it to golf courses like this. This is devastating.”
Well, it’s not really devastating in the scheme of things but Player was not finished, undermining his criticism further with another ridiculous assertion, this time that this week’s tournament was “an absolute tragedy”. A tragedy it certainly is not.
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Such are the intricacies of a golfer’s amateur status and also the labrynthine nature of US collegiate sport that when Nick Hardy missed a par putt on the final hole of his second round, the 19-year-old was unable to cash in on the outpourings of gratitude that came his way from 15 grateful golfers.
Hardy had unwittingly pushed the halfway cut mark out by a stroke, bringing 15 more players into the weekend’s play and earning them each at least $17,336 (€15,250) in extra prize money.
Hardy as an amateur will have to forfeit his prize money but as a University of Illinois golfer he was even unable to accept gifts from grateful co-competitors he bumped into the final two rounds.
Webb Simpson’s caddie had offered the teenager a €100 reward as a thank you but was politely rebuffed and Hardy said of the pros: “They were goofing off, just saying ‘I’ll buy you dinner’. I’m like, ‘No, that’s against NCAA rules!”
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