Darren Clarke Will Be Unforgotten

Published: 04th August 2011
Views: N/A
Ask About This Article Print Republish This Article
Darren Clarke will of course be remembered first and foremost for winning The Open at the 20th attempt - or 22nd if you include the two occasions in 1990 and 2008 when he tried to qualify and failed.
But nobody is likely to forget what he did with his TaylorMade Burner SuperFast TP 2.0 Driver in the Ryder Cup five years ago.
It was perhaps the greatest ever performance in the history of the Cup and contained perhaps its greatest ever birdie.
Six weeks before Europe and America gathered at The K Club near Dublin, the Northern Irishman's wife Heather lost her long fight with breast cancer.
Few can imagine what it was like to receive the ovation he did on the first tee on the first morning, yet he struck a 300-yard drive by TaylorMade Burner SuperFast TP 2.0 Driver into the perfect spot, hit his approach to 12 feet and sank the birdie putt.
"The crowd that Friday morning will be something I'll cherish forever," he said as Europe's celebrations started with him inevitably at the heart of them, a pint of Guinness in hand.
"It's done a lot for me. It's done a lot for people to show me how much they care about me and how they cared about Heather. That means everything."
And as for his part in the victory he added: "I can play sometimes. Not all the time - just now and again."
Clarke came through the Tour qualifying school at the first attempt, but he finished only 112th on the money list in his rookie season and only narrowly avoided losing his card.
Clarke became a member of the next four teams as well and in 2000 beat Tiger Woods by TaylorMade Burner SuperFast TP 2.0 Driver in the final of the Accenture Match Play to become Europe's first winner of a World Golf Championships event.
That earned him a million dollars and he did it again three years later in the WGC-NEC Invitational in Akron, but the majors continued to elude him.
He was also third at Royal Lytham in 2001, then two years after that led The Masters by three with an opening 66 before falling back to 28th - his next best round was a 74 - and in the 2004 US PGA (TaylorMade Burner SuperFast TP 2.0 Driver) set the initial pace again with a 65 only to come 13th after another horrid shank.
Although the first Ryder Cup on Irish soil was such a success for him, he went nearly five years without a tournament victory and one writer put in print that he had "embarked on an inexorable descent into golfing irrelevance".
But then he won again in China, then in Holland - it was not enough for 2008 Ryder Cup captain Faldo, who gave his wild-cards to Ian Poulter and Paul Casey instead - and then again in Majorca this May.


This article is free for republishing
Source: http://yukilee2.articlealley.com/darren-clarke-will-be-unforgotten-2326888.html

Report this article Ask About This Article Print Republish This Article


Loading...
More to Explore
 

Ask a Professional Online Now
27 Experts are Online. Ask a Question, Get an Answer ASAP.
Type your question here...
Optional:
Select...