O'Meara: Royal Birkdale will always be special to me

As the last Royal Birkdale Open champion, MARK O’MEARA will defend the title he won in 1998 when the Open Championship returns to the Southport links for the first time in a decade next July. Daily Post golf writer Trevor Peake caught up with the popular American for an exclusive interview in Morocco, when he crossed the Atlantic to play in the Hassan II Trophy

HAVING turned 50 last January, Mark O’Meara has played most of his golf on the senior Champions Tour in America this year.

But he loves to play links golf and, as a past champion, the Open will always be a part of his schedule.

“I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a great challenge,” said O’Meara.

“Birkdale obviously has a very special place in my heart of all the Open Championship venues.

“The Open is played on firm courses and with the winds playing a part, which dictates how the players are going to play. It’s a sort of golf I really love to play.

“It’s well known that I’m very fond of golf in Ireland and I also find all the Open courses a great test of golf.

“I’m proud that I made the cut at Carnoustie this year and played relatively decent to finish runner-up at Muirfield in the British Senior Open. But to go back to a place where I won my favourite major will be very special.

“And it will be the first time I have been back since 1998.

“In my previous Birkdale Open in 1991 I was paired in the last round with Ian Baker-Finch. Finchy played as good a round of golf on the front side as I’ve ever seen anybody play and went on to win the Open Championship.

“I finished third and then when I came back in 1998, having become the Masters champion earlier that year, winning in the play-off at Birkdale against Brian Watts was just great.”

O’Meara and Watts, a little known American who played mainly in Japan, tied on level-par 280 after four rounds of the 127th Open Championship 10 years ago, just a stroke ahead of O’Meara’s great friend, one Tiger Woods, who then had yet to win the oldest major championship.

In April that year O’Meara, by then aged 41, had won his first major, the 1998 US Masters at Augusta, and he mastered the tricky conditions on the final day at Birkdale with a two-under-par 68, to catch Watts, who closed with a level-par 70.

Leading the Open on the Saturday night, Watts later said: “I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Southport that night and nobody recognised me. Nobody knew who I was and I was leading the tournament.”

O’Meara birdied the first of the four play-off holes to take a lead he would never lose to clinch the championship.

He finished at one under par with Watts at one over, and his second major in his 17-year professional career had arrived within months of his first.

“My strongest memory of the week 10 years ago is probably from the Saturday on the sixth hole,” said O’Meara. “That was the biggest turn around.”

“I hit my driver off the tee, then a driver off the fairway and hit it way right and it looked like I might have a lost ball.

“We started to search for it and after a few minutes I was about to walk back, when my caddie, who at the time was Jerry Higginbotham, heard that a guy had picked it up.

“We finally got him to confess that he had it in his pocket and I was able to play it from where he had picked it up, instead of declaring it lost and having to go back and play another ball.”

At the time O’Meara said: “There was a lot of miscommunication.

“The USGA was on the radio. The R&A was on the radio. It was like Watergate, nobody would make the call.

“I made bogey but it could have been a double or a triple bogey, so that was a big turning point, that sixth hole there on the Saturday”

After winning the play-off O’Meara was asked if winning two majors gave him a place in history.

“No,” he answered. “I think I’m a very nice player, a good player, but I don’t classify myself as great. Jack Nicklaus, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan. Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, those are great golfers.”

Playing on the senior tour in the States, O’Meara restricts his appearances to about 20 tournaments a year worldwide, spending much of his time back home in Windermere in Florida with his wife Alicia and their two children Michelle, 20, and 18-year- old Shaun.

He says: “I have my replica of the claret jug at home, right next to the Masters trophy and the US Amateur Trophy, three of my proudest achievements in the game of golf.

“But to know that I’m a former Open champion is very, very special.”

O’Meara’s fond memories of Birkdale stretch even further back than when he finished third in 1991.

“I also won the Lawrence Batley tournament there in 1989, so some very positive things have happened to me on that links course,” he added.

“To come back to what I think is the greatest championship in the world 10 years after winning it will be really something for me.”

O’Meara was seven strokes behind joint leaders Woods and another fellow American John Houston after opening with a 72 in 1998.

Watts added a 69 to his opening 68 on the second day to take a one-stroke lead over Woods (73) and Zimbabwe’s Nick Price (66-72) at the halfway stage, with O’Meara in a group on 140, three off the pace.

With winds gusting at 40mph on the third day, Watts posted a 73 to lead O’Meara, who shot 72, by two strokes going into the final round with Woods blowing up to a 77, Price and 1997 Open champion Jason Leonard shooting 82s and Phil Mickelson an 85.

Woods hit back with a 66 on the final day but couldn’t quite catch O’Meara and Watts and the US Ryder Cup player beat his unknown countryman to lift the Claret Jug in the early evening on July 19, 1998.

Will such high drama be in prospect on a July evening next year?