As Open proved, there's no hiding in golf

Updated: June 25, 2006, 5:26 PM ET

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By Pat Forde
ESPN.com
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The mayhem on No. 18 at Winged Foot on Sunday showed us, yet again, why golf is the most compelling spectator sport in the world:

AP Photo/Charles KrupaPhil Mickelson's emotions were on display all over the 18th hole Sunday.

It strips its athletes to their psychological skivvies right before our voyeuristic eyes.

No other sport leaves its combatants as mentally exposed at moments of peak pressure. We see their strengths and frailties etched upon their faces, carved into their body language, expressed through their swings. There is no running and no hiding.

When a golfer's arms turn to cement and his mind races toward panic, there are no teammates to pass to, no timeouts to call, no refs to blame. The game is the ultimate merciless meritocracy.

In most other sports, athletes can rely on quick-twitch instinct to take over at some point. A quarterback has a couple of seconds to make a decision, a batter less than that. Dwyane Wade, the Sunday crunch-time antithesis of Phil Mickelson and Colin Montgomerie, made his plays on the fly.

Not so in golf, where the pace plays tricks on the mind and nobody sets any screens. It's just the golfers out there, and us watching, and a horribly long time between physical acts for them to think and ponder and calculate.

And, in the cases of Mickelson and Montgomerie, to choke.

"Choke" has become a dirty word, too harsh for sensitive ears, but it shouldn't be if people are honest with themselves. Normal folks choke during everyday life. I've choked while writing columns on deadline. So you'd better believe athletes do it, too.

More so in major championship golf, perhaps, than anywhere else.

The demands of the game make it so, given the perverse amount of time available to feel the weight of the situation. Some seemingly unworthy players have blocked out the burden just long enough to create a career moment: Rich Beem and Shaun Micheel, hitting brilliant shots to win majors. The guys who have routinely blocked it out -- Nicklaus, Tiger -- seem all the more amazing.

Their sporting toughness sometimes has bordered on the superhuman. Meanwhile, the rest of Golfworld is littered with the carcasses of the human.

A golf choke can happen in the short stroke of a putter, like Scott Hoch's at the 1989 Masters. It can happen over two ugly hours, a slow-motion building collapse, like with Greg Norman at the 1996 Masters. Or it can happen in the minutes it takes to get from tee to green, like for Jean Van de Velde at the 1999 British Open.

Or like Mickelson and Monty on Sunday. They choked. No other verb need apply.

The old slogan said M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand. On Sunday, M&M melted on the 18th hole. And on national television.

With the U.S. Open in the balance, Monty and Mickelson revealed themselves -- again -- as flawed action heroes. We were reminded that they don't look too pretty in their emotional underwear.

First, Monty dumped his approach -- from perfect fairway position -- miserably short of the green and into filthy rough. The collapse was on in full from there, resulting in a disastrous double-bogey that ruined a plucky final round from a guy most suspected didn't have the stomach for such a fight.

After hours of contradictory evidence, the suspicions were proved right at the end. Montgomerie has suffered so outwardly -- and often humorously -- that this seemed a cruel bit of piling on.

But golf isn't known for its tender mercies, which is part of its brutally fascinating allure.

Then it was Mickelson's turn. And his yack was worse, spawned less by lack of nerve than by lack of coherent thought.

Lefty's response to acute pressure seems to be rash boldness. He had sublimated that urge to do something reckless in recent years, with results (three major championships, where forever there had been none) that should have reinforced that newfound prudence. But Sunday at Winged Foot, with less-qualified contenders collapsing all around him, Mickelson couldn't resist joining them by reverting to the old brain-lock days.

He made a bizarre early decision to gouge a 4-wood out of gnarly rough, a brilliant idea that produced a one-foot flub and an eventual bogey. He got away with serially errant drives on a course that rewards accuracy. But at finishing time, Mickelson couldn't resist the suicidal impulse to fish that driver out of the bag -- then he couldn't resist trying to hit a hero shot out of trouble when a simple punch-out to the fairway might have saved the day.

In Jim "Bones" Mackay, Mickelson might have the most involved caddie in golf. But short of placing him in a sleeper hold, no caddie and no swing coach and no fawning gallery could save Phil from himself Sunday.

With the crater from the implosion still steaming, Mickelson owned up to the monumental gag job.

"I am such an idiot," Lefty said.

That's the great and gruesome thing about golf. We see you in your skivvies, so there's no use denying the truth.

Pat Forde is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPN4D@aol.com.