Arnie’s Assassins: Golf Channel’s Open for the Ages Hosed More Than One Links Legend

Golf Channel’s virtual “Open for the Ages” ran from Thursday to Sunday of last week, airing live commentary over doctored footage of historical golf stars playing The Old Course at St. Andrews. The field included the last 50 years of British Open champions, competing on even terms in the top form of their prime years. It’s a tad fishy that the fictional event’s Sunday showdown pitted Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods at the top of the leaderboard, but Big Jack’s win is certainly a plausible outcome of any tournament under any circumstances.

So far, so good.

More interesting is the content at bottom of the Open for the Ages scoreboard. Arnold Palmer, winner of 2 straight British Opens in 1961 and 1962, finishing dead-last. Gary Player, lifter of 9 major championship trophies between 1959 and 1978, finishing T-2nd-to-last. Included among the players who finished well ahead of Palmer and Player (and Lee Trevino for that matter) are John Daly, Louis Oosthuizen, and Zach Johnson. Peter Thomson, who won the Open Championship 5 times and understood the Old Course like Picasso understood blue, finished tied with Player at -3, 13 strokes behind Jack’s winning 272 and 12 behind Tiger at -15.

You would expect to see a few great golfers fall short in a by-the-numbers simulation. As Robert Trent Jones once pointed out, a well-kept secret of the links is that Bobby Jones (no relation) carded competitive rounds in the 80s. Tiger and Jack’s back-9 duel for the Forever Claret Jug would point to NBC Sports, which kept its methodology fairly close to the vest, hedging slightly on any scientific method for the sake of TV drama, especially after swashbuckling British Open legends like Tom Watson and Seve Ballesteros were portrayed lurking on the last 18. Some of the scoring must have been necessitated by the finite quality of archival footage – if there’s no video of Nick Faldo stuck in a fairway bunker on #12, you can’t include Nick’s shot-to-follow in the doctored clips.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have “Dungeons & Dragons” style overlords manipulating the results of sports simulations and poly-generation experiments. If a computer tells you that Michael Moorer would have knocked-out Mohammed Ali in the 1st round, whatever info and instructions went into the machine were tainted and must be corrected by the “hand of God” in the virtual event’s reported results. For example, NBC’s golf advisors like John Feinstein and Johnny Miller would agree there is no chance of a healthy Tiger Woods in his prime scoring poorly at a wide-open, relatively-short Old Course layout over 4 rounds. Woods, after all, shot a brain-melting 53 under par over 16+ rounds at the 4 major championships in 2000. If a souped-up PlayStation or CPU simulation spat-out a 4-round score of “Tiger Woods: 296” the Golf Channel team would be correct to ask for a do-over.

That being the case, why wasn’t anything done about Arnold Palmer’s scores in Open for the Ages? Or Gary Player’s for that matter? If anyone thought a dead-last or 2nd-to-last finish was a realistic scenario for either champion, does that person have any business being around an expensive TV golf project?

Arnold Palmer was a late-bloomer whose prime lasted 5-7 seasons on tour. In that time, he won 4 U.S. Masters championships, a U.S. Open, and 2 British Opens in a row. Arnie’s worst finish in a major between 1959 and 1962 was T-17th in a loaded PGA Championship field. What’s more, competing at the Old Course would benefit a power player like Palmer at his peak, given the number of drive-able Par 4s and reachable Par 5s. When John Daly won his 2nd of 2 majors at the Old Course in 1995, he was often found pitching out of dangerous green-side rough…but pitching for an eagle all the same.

Arnie’s real life scoring history at St. Andrews reveals rounds in the 60s even on days when his putting had the yips. It is simply unfathomable that Arnold Palmer of 1961 would lay a high-profile stink bomb and be the event’s caboose rolling up the Valley of Sin.

Palmer’s final-round virtual “scorecard” is even more of a joke. Trailing the leaders by a wide margin, Arnold Palmer – the 1960s version – supposedly scored 2 birdies, 1 bogey, and 15 pars, with the final 10 pars all in a row. Anyone who has read the 1st chapter of Go For Broke! knows that plodding along with pars when losing on the weekend is about the furthest thing imaginable from Arnie’s actual golf game.

Here’s a realistic “simulation” (off the cuff, using one’s computer for blogging purposes only) of what Palmer’s last “Open for the Ages” round should have looked like:

Hole #10 – Drives Par-4 green 350+ yards downwind. Lag from the collar. Birdie.

Hole #11 – Tries a foolishly daring shot over Strath Bunker. Misses landing zone by 2 feet, buried lie in sand. Bogey.

Hole #12 – Drives Par-4 green, makes spectacular putt for eagle.

Hole #13 – Massive drive into a gorse bush.

Arnie would follow that with brave gambling shots on the Road Hole despite his goals fading out-of-reach by then. It makes common sense that Arnie, not wanting to go down as a quitter of an “All-Time” event, would have preferred to make a few bogeys rather than 10 straight parred holes and a dull Sunday scorecard. Gary Player’s banal results are almost as much of a mystery, with monotonous pars dotting the card of a golfer so confident, he threatened to beat his age at Augusta when Tiger was an up-and-comer there.

Golf Channel chose to make Open for the Ages a birdie-fest, with  light winds and scores well under par. Matching golfers across decades offers flexibility in scoring parameters even in a virtual tourney, because players can par or bogey holes off-screen if necessary, and can be made to play with old/new average shot distances on a course with supposed “2023” length from tee to green. Jack and Tiger have played 2 very different styles of golf at St. Andrews, but Nicklaus wasn’t opposed to hitting a wedge into a Par-5…he just didn’t get to try it as often as Tiger did. Jack would never consistently beat Tiger from the same tees based on the pair’s raw driving statistics, but in their 20s, each enjoyed fantastic driving power relative to other PGA players.

NBC could have simply pretended that Jack and Arnie got to use modern gear in the fictional tournament. You don’t show the clubheads close-up on a typical golf broadcast, and even if some of the footage did, there’s always Adobe. The 45-year-old “ceremonial” version of Arnold Palmer drove average distances off the tee, and might have legitimately finished last in an Open for the Ages simulation. But 1961’s Arnie, with the nuclear golf gear of the 2020s, on an easy St. Andrews setup? Not a chance. One wonders how Nicklaus’ AI file created a top-2 scorecard unless Big Jack could hit it the same length as Y2K Tiger Woods, and also why only certain old-time power hitters were allowed to score well.

Maybe Golf Channel factored the entire records of Claret Jug champions into its Open for the Ages. That would account for Arnie, Player, and Trevino struggling to keep-up on the leaderboard. Palmer played far into his old age as a fan favorite without a solid chance to win, while Player kept trying to make cuts at Augusta National and elsewhere throughout his 60s. But that hypothesis just leads to another contradiction, as Watson himself posted decades of poor scores in majors and looked great in OFTA. The same is true for Nicklaus, even though Big Jack was pretty solid and consistent as a rookie, and again as an elder.

It’s not like Open for the Ages was a surprise summer hit with TV sports viewers. Whether the event was an incompetent stab at a historical golf simulation, created by idiots, or a rigged farce with Golf Channel’s weird biases and oversights factored in, it will all fade out of memory soon enough. Outside of a few online forums and drunken clubhouses, NBC’s slap at the legacies of at least 3 great British Open winners will be forgotten too.

But the event will stand as a reminder what not to do with a virtual tournament. It’s less an issue of protecting legends’ reputations as a having an eye for what made those reputations to begin with. If each golfer’s whole tournament record and physical decay get factored into an historical contest, fine. Let’s talk about Tiger’s years upon years of being too injured to even swing a 7-iron. Then discuss Tiger beating Arnie by a billion strokes on Golf Channel.

It’s disappointing to know that the Royal & Ancient Club was involved in the fiasco, too.

So, if a Virtual Men’s Olympic Basketball tourney includes Team Canada upsetting Lebron James, Stephen Curry, and Team USA in a close contest, then more power to the Habs. But if James misses 20 free-throws in a row, or if Tuukka Rask allows 6 goals on 7 shots-against for Team Finland? That’s when the computer should get the MacReady treatment…and the simulators should try to “Carpenter” out a more plausible outcome.

 

Palmer spent his last few years arguing for more fairness for hobby players in the Rules of Golf. It feels righteous to stick up for Big Arnie’s golf game about 6 days after Open for the Ages premiered and about 60 years since his closing 65 at Cherry Hills. Nobody could ever simulate Arnold Palmer’s swing, and apparently, no Fantasy guru (or sports-television producer) can be bothered to showcase Arnie’s finest golf either.