Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. There’s no shame in losing when the winner played as well as Cameron Smith did.
In today’s SI:AM:
⛳ Cam’s remarkable final round
⚾ Verducci on what Juan Soto represents for the Nats
🏉 The future of U.S. rugby
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Rory ran into a buzzsaw
By all accounts, everyone at St. Andrews—and across the U.K.—was rooting for Rory McIlroy to win this 150th edition of the British Open. On any other day, it probably would have been McIlroy who lifted the Claret Jug, but yesterday Cameron Smith had other plans.
Smith fired a final-round 64 to capture his first major championship, finishing the tournament at 20 under par. It was an impressive rebound for Smith, who, after shooting 67 on Thursday and 64 on Friday, held a two-stroke lead over the rest of the field entering play Saturday. But his third-round 73 left him at 12-under for the tournament, four strokes back of McIlroy and Viktor Hovland, who were tied at 16-under to start Sunday.
No problem. All Smith did was come out and play the round of his life. His bogey-free 64 was tied for the lowest round of the tournament. (Cameron Young and Sam Burns also shot 64s.) He opened the back nine with a string of five straight birdies, then birdied the 18th to edge Young by one stroke after Young made an eagle. The key hole for Smith, though, was the 17th.
Smith’s disappointing second shot came perilously close to going into a greenside bunker, and the pin location made a chip shot all but impossible. So Smith decided to putt it around the edge of the bunker, which he executed to perfection, allowing him to save par.
Bob Harig wrote that the putt on 17 “essentially won him the tournament”:
Yes, he had to make birdie at the 18th to edge Young by a stroke, but a bogey there would have changed everything. It would have allowed McIlroy a chance, and he might have then faced a four-hole playoff with Young.
The putter was the key for Smith all day long. He needed just 29 putts on Sunday, compared to 35 on Saturday. For McIlroy, though, it was the putter that did him in, as Michael Rosenberg wrote:
“The putter just went a little cold today,” McIlroy said, and that’s exactly the right way to describe it. Not bad. Cold. His pace on the greens was exquisite. But he hit eight putts from between 10 and 20 feet and didn’t hole any of them. He did not have a single one-putt birdie.
When a golfer blows a four-stroke lead in the final round of a major, it’s easy to look back on the tournament and say he “lost” it. But Rory didn’t “lose” the 2022 Open. Starting the final day ahead by four strokes and posting a 2-under 70 is usually good enough to win a major. But yesterday at St. Andrews, Cameron Smith was just too good.
The best of Sports Illustrated
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Martin Pengelly’s Daily Cover about the state of American rugby would have looked a lot different before the men’s national team’s upset loss to Chile this weekend.
Nick Selbe breaks down a star-studded first round of the MLB draft. … Tom Verducci weighs in on the dilemma facing the Nationals and Juan Soto. … Before Matt Carpenter hit yet another home run this weekend, Stephanie Apstein wrote about his unlikely revival with the Yankees. … Rohan Nadkarni broke down the larger implications of Deandre Ayton’s return to the Suns. … The first line of Jonathan Wilson’s story about Barcelona’s signing of Robert Lewandowski had me hooked: “None of this makes much sense.”
Around the sports world
Eagles rookie Devon Allen was disqualified from his hurdles race at the World Championships for a false start by 0.0001 seconds. … Chris Sale, who only recently returned from the injured list, left yesterday’s game after being hit on the pinky with a line drive. … Florida quarterback Anthony Richardson says he’s dropping his “AR-15” nickname. … Chile qualified for the Rugby World Cup for the first time after beating the United States, which still has one more chance to qualify. … Fox Sports apologized for airing a graphic that put the Yankees’ and Red Sox’ logos inside the 9/11 memorial’s reflecting pools.
The top five…
… things I saw yesterday:
5. This bone-headed play by the Cubs.
4. Joel Embiid having the time of his life at a Jewish wedding.
3. Juan Soto’s vicious home run swing.
2. Red Sox rookie Jeter Downs’s first career homer. (At Yankee Stadium, naturally.)
1. Cameron Smith’s promise to find out how many beers fit in the Claret Jug. (He wasn’t kidding.)
SIQ
Babe Ruth became baseball’s all-time home run leader on this day in 1921, a title he would hold for 53 years. How many homers did the previous all-time leader have?
Friday’s SIQ: Who won the first (non-FIFA-sponsored) Women’s World Cup in 1970?
Answer: Denmark. The Danes beat host Italy, 2–0, in the final.
The tournament featured seven teams: Mexico, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, England and West Germany. (Czechoslovakia was supposed to compete but had to withdraw due to visa issues.) The small number of nations participating can be attributed to the fact women’s soccer was illegal or only recently legalized in many countries. (SB Nation has a good explainer about the fight to allow women to play soccer.) West Germany banned women from participating until 1970, and England’s Football Association handcuffed the women’s game by refusing to allow women to play on FA-sanctioned fields.
Even still, the tournament was a popular event. The final between Italy and Denmark drew 40,000 fans in Torino. The second World Cup, held in Mexico in 1971, was even more popular. An estimated 110,000 packed the Estadio Azteca to see Denmark defeat Mexico in the final.
The success of the two World Cup tournaments led to a series of competitions called the “Mundialito” (Spanish for “little World Cup”), held in Italy four times between 1984 and ’88, plus a smaller version in Japan in ’81. The Mundialito, like the ’70 and ’71 World Cups, was not a FIFA-sanctioned event, but it did prove that women’s soccer could be commercially successful. FIFA finally sponsored its first women’s event, the Women’s Invitation Tournament, in ’88. The first FIFA Women’s World Cup was held in ’91.
From the Vault: July 18, 2011
Chuck Solomon/Sports Illustrated
Joe Posnanski’s story about Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit is pretty close to perfect, balancing the retelling of the facts of Jeter’s home run off of David Price on July 9, 2011, with a meditation on why 3,000 (regular-season) hits is such a big deal:
Of course, Derek Jeter did not really get his 3,000th big league hit last Saturday under a clear blue sky at Yankee Stadium. No. He actually got his 3,184th hit … then 3,185 … then 3,186 … then 3,187 … then 3,188. That would be if you count his postseason hits. But we don’t count those. Why not? Well, why don’t we celebrate a player for, say, reaching base 4,000 times? (Jeter passed 4,000 times on base last year.) Why don’t we celebrate 500 doubles or 2,000 RBIs or 4,000 innings pitched? Why don’t we celebrate the Directors Guild Awards instead of the Oscars?
We choose the things we want to celebrate in sports and in life. We choose 3,000 regular-season hits as something to treasure. That was why Yankee Stadium on Saturday felt charged with excitement and nervousness and the buzz of anticipation. You don’t need an irreproachable reason for a celebration. You need only a consensus.
Jeter couldn’t have asked for a better way to pick up his 3,000th hit, either. Sapped of the already limited power he had earlier in his career, the milestone hit was one of just six homers he hit in 2011. But isn’t that how Jeter’s career went? He always managed to make the biggest moments even bigger.
The Jeter cover was one of two covers SI published that week. The other featured Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz, who might seem like an unlikely candidate to land on the cover—until you read Gary Smith’s excellent story about his journey to the majors.
Check out more of SI’s archives and historic images at vault.si.com.
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