That’s when Karrie Webb made it official. She knocked in a long putt on the 10th hole to top a tap-in birdie by Se Ri Pak and the 56th U.S. Women’s Open was another page in the history of Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club.
It may have been an Open championship, but Webb made it appear closed. That solid answer ended any speculation that she might falter under the heat of majors pressure.
Frankly, it was over on Friday morning when Webb put that course-record 65 on the table. The rest of the field could have gone June bug hunting. Karrie Webb does not give away U.S. Open championships. She seizes the moment, hangs on until her opponents start quivering, then strikes the killing blow with the swiftness of an angry rattler.
Se Ri Pak never knew what hit her. There isn’t a tougher competitor on the LPGA Tour than the gritty South Korean, but she was fooling herself if she dared dream on Saturday night that she might win her second Open title.
Pak’s chances were slim and none when she teed off at 2 p.m. Sunday. And when Webb recovered from an early bogey with a birdie on No. 7, ol’ Slim had done picked up and rode out of town.
You might say — as one media room wag did — Pak could have packed it in. It wasn’t that she wasn’t making birdies. In fact, she made more birdies than Webb on Sunday. But she also made more bogeys. Pak’s problem was in making pars. She had holed four birdies through the 13th hole, and when she checked the leaderboard it still showed Webb’s lead at five. Four birdies offset by four bogeys. No pain, but certainly no gain.
It is no knock against the other would-be Open contenders, but they simply weren’t playing the same game as Webb this week. She came here smarting somewhat from all the publicity that her chief rival on the LPGA Tour, Annika Sorenstam, had been generating. Sorenstam had done it all this season. She had shot the first 59 in LPGA history. She had won five times already. She had won more than $1 million by the end of May. And she had become the quickest to reach the $7 million mark in career money on the Tour.
This was Sorenstam’s year. She came to Pine Needles expecting to continue on her roll. She played a practice round on Tuesday and felt great about her game. She played another round on Wednesday and couldn’t wait to start keeping score for real on Thursday.
But Thursday was a sad reminder that golf is never owned by anyone. It’s only a rental game, and Sorenstam’s lease had just run out.
The woman who had dominated the Open here in 1996 was just another player this time. Her best effort came in the opening round when she was posted a level-par 70. Little did she realize that this would be the highlight of the week for her.
When Sorenstam finally holed out for her 72 on Sunday, her total for the week was 287, a stupefying 15 shots more than the record 272 score she shot in 1996.
Red is good in a golf tournament, the universal color for under par. When Pak made bogey on No. 11, so did Webb. But that left her at minus-6, the lone red numeral on the board.
Pak would bounce back, but it was too little, too late. This was Karrie Webb’s Open. As another famous Webb used to say on the TV show Dragnet, “Just the facts, Ma’am.”
Now that all the facts are in, it can be said that Pine Needles and the Sandhills area do a great job of hosting a U.S. Open. Donald Ross built perfect courses for U.S. Opens, and the USGA does a fantastic job of staging an Open.
But nobody plays one any better than the lady from down under, Karrie Webb.
