have and probably always will. The U.S. Open presents some of the most difficult conditions tour players ever face, and Irwin won three of those, including the 1974 edition at Winged Foot, where the winning score was 7 over par.
So perhaps all this bodes well for Irwin’s chances this week.
Irwin is far and away the most successful Senior/Champions Tour player in history -- with 45 career wins -- but he’s never before played a Champions Tour event in Colorado. Considering at 63 he’s now roughly a decade past his best years on the circuit, winning at this point would be quite a feat. Indeed, if he captures any Champions title from here on out, he’d become the oldest winner in the history of the 50-and-over tour.
Irwin hasn’t won since January 2007, and he has no top-10 finishes in 2008. But with this former football player, insinuating he’s down for the count just adds to the challenge for one of the most tenacious competitors on tour. Just witness the 1990 U.S. Open he won to end a five-year victory drought on the PGA Tour.
“I can still play,” he said Tuesday. “I haven’t played well this year, but there are reasons for that.”
Among those are Irwin’s mother, Mame, dying in March of this year in Boulder; Irwin’s wife, Sally, passing out and hitting her head at the MasterCard Championship in January (she‘s fine now); and Irwin’s mother-in-law becoming temporarily ill earlier this year.
All that, combined with some mediocre golf by Irwin’s standards have added up to some un-Irwin-like results in 2008. After never ranking lower than 22nd on the Champions Tour money list for a year, Irwin stands 60th so far in 2008. For only the second time in his Champions career he missed a cut (in the Senior PGA). And he had never shot in the 80s in a Champions event before his second-round 80 in the Senior PGA.
The good news for Irwin, though, is that he’s coming off his best result of the year, a 12th-place showing at the 3M Championship two weeks ago.
Despite the fall-off in his performance this year, Irwin doesn’t sound like a guy who’s close to calling it quits, competitively-speaking.
“I’ve still got expenses,” he said Tuesday.
Last month in a phone interview, Irwin said, “I don‘t intend to give up anytime soon, but things change and evolve. I‘m not playing at the level I want to. But the incentive is there for me. I don‘t intend to cut back significantly.”
As for how he might fare this week, Irwin has always been at his best in U.S. Golf Association events. Besides winning three U.S. Opens, he claimed U.S. Senior Open titles in 1998 and 2000. All told, he’s finished in the top five seven times in the U.S. Senior Open. The bad news is that six of those seven came prior to 2001, and he missed the cut in the event for the first time last year.
Will Irwin have any advantage this week in the old home state? He doesn’t think so. He said he’s played “surprisingly few rounds” at the Broadmoor, and none that he could remember for a period since his 1965-67 CU days until three weeks ago.
“I’m just like the other guys,” he said Tuesday. “I couldn’t even remember some of the holes.”
But fellow competitors have seen enough of Irwin‘s abilities not to count him out.
“He’s one of the greatest competitors of all time,” defending U.S. Senior Open champion Brad Bryant said recently. “He’s a great golfer and a fierce competitor. … If there‘s a course left that Hale would do well on, this is it.”
