And here I was thinking that Rich Beem was my kind of guy. It wasn’t too long ago that he was selling car stereos in Seattle. Sort of out of the blue, he decided to move to El Paso and take up professional golf again. But he wasn’t one of these 6-foot-2-inch, broad-shouldered young studs with exquisitely engineered swings that you see on tour these days. He’s short, a bit paunchy, and has an ugly, slashing swing. He looked like millions of us hacks, only he himself wasn’t a hack, as everyone discovered in 2002 when he withstood a final-round charge from Tiger Woods to win a PGA Championship.
Without that improbable win, Beem would be just another of the generic white guys in Dockers on the tour. In his six previous United States Open appearances, he hadn’t made a weekend cut. With thoroughly average stats (he ranks 56th in driving distance, 145th in putting), he almost lost his tour card last year.
But because Beem now lives in Austin, I wanted to catch up with him last week in San Diego at Torrey Pines Golf Course, host of the 108th U.S. Open. During the first two rounds, he played a group behind the dream pairing of the three best players in the world – Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Adam Scott. Since they would be coming one right after another, I could easily catch my Austin homeboy and the game’s stars during the first two rounds of play. But after talking to Beem Thursday afternoon, I decided to scratch that plan.
It’s not like Beem was unusually dicky. For a professional golfer he was, rather, just averagely dicky – peevish, dismissive, disdainful. I had asked him some lame questions, and he would have no part of it. “It’s fine; it’s not a problem,” he said of playing in the wake of the Woods and Mickelson hullabaloo, sounding thoroughly irritated that I wasn’t more interested in the particulars of his 3-over-par first round.
Over the years of covering golf tournaments, I’ve come to appreciate why reporters throng to Tiger and Phil. They’re not only the best players in the world; they’re also the best at that other part of the job – creating rapport with fans. Even when they’re testy, they’re still there, still present. Whether that comes naturally or they have to work at it, I don’t care. I’m looking for athletes to enthrall me, and the great ones get this. They deliver, as Woods did last weekend, giving fans a spectacular show on a bum knee to force an 18-hole Monday playoff with Rocco Mediate, which, naturally, he won – in a sudden-death extra hole.
For all I know, Beem did some nifty things himself (making the cut, he finished at the bottom of the barrel, 21 strokes back of Woods and Mediate). But if he did, I’m betting that I wouldn’t have felt involved in those triumphs, however big or small.
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This article appears in June 20 • 2008.