Grant Winter
JOHANNESBURG: South African golfers have won extensively all over the world for decades, but Tim Clark’s victory in the PGA Tour’s Canadian Open on Sunday must go down as one of the finest of these successes.
When the feisty Clark, now 38, played on the International Team in the Presidents Cup, both Greg Norman and Nick Price described the man who learnt his golf at Umkomaas on the KZN south coast as world golf’s “Bull Terrier” because of his legendary fighting qualities.
And to hunt down a luminary such as former US Open champion Jim Furyk at Royal Montreal, by making up four shots on the great American on the final nine, holes was simply sensational.
Clark, a little man (he’s just 5ft 7in tall) with a huge heart, has a habit of winning national opens. He has won the SA Open twice, the Australian Open, the Scottish Open and now the Canadian Open.
But this victory – apart from his 2010 Players Championship win – was perhaps the finest of his national open successes, as he stormed home in 30 strokes in the rain on a back nine which included five birdies and an astonishing eight one-putt holes in a row to leave Furyk gobsmacked.
Lacking in length compared to some of the gorillas on tour, Clark makes up for this by being deadly straight off the tee – and he was No 1 in driving accuracy in Montreal as he closed with a 5-under-par 65 for a 17-under 263 aggregate, one shot better than Furyk.
The win earned Clark a cheque of $1.026million and boosted his career earnings on the PGA Tour to close to a hefty $22million. He has finished second no less than 12 times on the American tour, and has had runner-up finishes every year since 2005 –including the 2006 Masters when Phil Mickelson beat him by a stroke. But because nobody remembers the man who comes second, he was last year described as the “forgotten man of South African golf”, with the likes of major champions Ernie Els, Charl Schwartzel, Louis Oosthuiizen and Retief Goosen and others enjoying the limelight.
Now with this victory he has hopefully turned the corner for South African golfers in 2014, which has essentially been a quiet year for them. Besides the money, his other reward from Sunday is gaining a place in the year’s fourth major – next week’s US PGA Championship.
“Any national Open to me is special, and it’s an honour for me to be the Canadian Open champion,” said Clark.
“The front nine (on Sunday) I was a little out of sorts, but making the turn I was only three back. At that point there’s nothing to lose and suddenly I got hot with the putter.”
Known as one of the genuine “nice guys” on tour, Clark in 2005 donated his winning cheque from the Nelson Mandela Invitational to Chevronne Adams, a girl at the Carel du Toit Centre for the Hearing impaired, who used the money to pay for her cochlear implant.
Clark’s just a humble man who happens to have a huge talent for golf. But he’s also a terrier on the course and this win won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
Seeing Clark playing so well perhaps inspired Els and Goosen at Royal Montreal on Sunday, because these two forty-somethings both finished with a flurry of birdies to tie for 12th.