Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Columnist Dean Juipe: Winner has Vegas succe$$

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4084.

The question was not whether someone who had the ability to win the U.S. Open could win the Las Vegas Invitational, but whether a three-time Las Vegas Invitational champion had the ability to win the U.S. Open.

Jim Furyk provided the dramatic answer Sunday, taming Olympia Fields Country Club in suburban Chicago for a fourth successive day en route to his long awaited first major championship victory.

It was a career day for a man who has taken more bows in Las Vegas than many a cut-rate magician or meandering lounge performer.

Of course Furyk has also won more money on the golf course than any other professional player in the history of Las Vegas, so the bows are but a reflexive action.

Not that Furyk was our own little secret. But of his seven previous victories on the PGA Tour, all but four of them were finalized on the glossy sheen of the TPC at Summerlin.

He won here in 1995, 1998 and 1999, helping to cement the view that the playground at Summerlin is most easily tamed by someone who is marginally long, someone who is able to keep the ball in play and someone who can craft a shot into slick yet accessible greens.

Olympia Fields, despite being 76 years older than the 12-year-old TPC at Summerlin, is dissimilar only in that it's relatively flat. Its rough was not as thick and as unmanageable as most Open courses, and its pin placements were not as fortressed as the sometimes cantankerous United States Golf Association typically demands.

Furyk was able to hopscotch around the layout, much like the target golf approach that befits the TPC at Summerlin.

That he was able to win so handily -- his final-round 72 allowed him a three-shot cushion over runner-up Stephen Leaney -- was a sign that Furyk was on his game at a most opportune time, much as he has been throughout the first half of 2003 and whenever the stakes are the greatest. The Open victory was his 11th top-10 finish of the season and his 13th top-10 finish in a major tournament in a career that dates from 1994.

That was the year he first came to our attention as not only a player with potential but one with a most unorthodox swing. I recall being mystified at how to describe it -- was it inside out or outside in? -- in reporting on Furyk as he finished in a tie for fifth place in Las Vegas that year.

The following year he arrived here still without a victory on the tour and the opportunity presented itself to talk with him at length in the locker room at the Las Vegas Country Club prior to the tournament's opening round. I had been asked to provide a Sunday feature on any player in the field and chose Furyk, who graciously complied and made the piece worthwhile.

It became priceless, in my mind at least, when he won the tournament on the very day the article appeared.

As the years went on, sitting in on a Furyk interview in Las Vegas became fairly commonplace as he routinely found himself in a position to win. To his credit he neither suffered from a bloated self-esteem nor flinched when the pressure was on, as each of his three victories here was by a single stroke.

And yet even with his dominance in Las Vegas and his other successes, Furyk had become part of a puzzling trend in terms of the local tournament. While the Las Vegas Invitational in its various caricatures and identities once played to the form of major-championship winners, it has since become a workingman's heyday. Good but not great players such as Bill Glasson, Billy Andrade, Bob Estes and, last year, Phil Tataurangi have won here in the years since 1997 when Furyk did not.

All but forgotten was the fact that there was a time when the champion in Las Vegas had a chance of being a heralded star, as was the case when Fuzzy Zoeller, Curtis Strange, Greg Norman, Paul Azinger, Bob Tway, Davis Love III and Tiger Woods -- each of whom already owned or would go on to own at least one major title -- was surrounded by showgirls as he hoisted the oversized check at the tournament's closing ceremony.

Furyk's U.S. Open victory allows Las Vegas to at least indirectly gloat once again, the city having been the site of the desert masterpieces that were the Rembrandts of the early portion of his career.

But now he has added a wonderful trophy, one that is not entirely unexpected in that he missed only one cut in eight previous Opens and twice finished tied for fifth. In a final round that had its rocky moments -- bogeys at Nos. 10 and 12 unmasked the tension -- a man with a homemade swing, who putts cross handed, who had his father walking among his Father's Day gallery and who will forever be associated with the table-topped TPC at Summerlin became a star.

Each of us who saw him play so well here is entitled to say we saw it comin'.

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