BY: Sam Gemini
MADISON – The Summer Olympics featured golf for the second straight year as players from all around the world gathered to represent their nations at Kasumigaseki Country Club. The golf course – which made up for in beauty what it lacked in difficulty – yielded great scores all weekend. Patrick Reed, Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele, and Collin Morikawa were poised to represent the United States; Rory McIlroy (representing Ireland) and Hideki Matsuyama (Japan) also headlined the field.
Kasumigaseki was a well-groomed but quite vanilla layout: The green complexes were tame and the greens themselves were flat and predictable. On the upside, the course had a very clean, defined look; beautiful Japanese pines and deep, white-sand bunkers framed every hole; the tenth and eighteenth greens were decorated with charming, glassy ponds. All of this gave the golf course a very pure, natural feel while still being perfectly manicured.
For the Americans, the beginning of the tournament was unimpressive; that is, until Xander Schauffele catapulted himself into the lead with a sparkling sixty-three on Friday. From that point on, the twenty-seven-year-old American remained at the top of the leaderboard; his lead grew to as many as three at multiple instances in the final round before he was shockingly caught by Slovakian Rory Sabbatini, who posted an astonishing sixty-one in the final round. The pressure was now all on Xander, who remained tied with Sabbatini until he birdied the easy seventeenth with a smooth up-and-down out of the greenside bunker.
Meanwhile, a massive dogfight for bronze was heating up, and by the end of the round seven players were tied for third. Resolving this necessitated a bloated seven-way playoff with all players representing different nations: Morikawa played in the initial group of four, with McIlroy and Matsuyama competing in the threesome that followed. Two players were eliminated with bogeys on the first playoff hole, and two more holes were required to eliminate another three players. This left Morikawa and C.T. Pan of Taipei to play the eighteenth hole one more time. The American made bogey from a disastrous lie in a greenside bunker; Pan drained a seven-footer for par to secure the bronze for Taipei.
While it took far less time to decide the winner of the gold medal, there was no decrease in drama. After his birdie on the seventeenth, Schauffele faced the difficult par-four finisher with a one-stroke lead. Due to a badly-sliced tee-shot, Xander had to pitch his ball back into the fairway, leaving a high-stakes ninety-yard wedge shot for his third. He proceeded to confidently stick this wedge shot four feet from the hole and pour in the dagger putt for par and gold. Schauffele has been knocking on the door at major tournaments for a few years now, and it was cool to see him earn this great win and take the gold medal home to the United States.
