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 U.S. Open Notebook Montgomerie can't escape heckling fans at Olympic
Posted: Sunday June 21, 1998 11:24 PM
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The verbal abuse of Scotland's Colin Montgomerie by fans got worse Sunday during the fourth round of the U.S. Open, leading Montgomerie into an exchange with a fan midway through the round. Montgomerie, the target of hecklers last year at the Open at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, thought he'd escape such ribbing this week at The Olympic Club and made a point of saying he thought fans on the West Coast were not as abusive as their East Coast counterparts. But Montgomerie, a member of the European Ryder Cup team that beat the United States last year, has been taking a beating from fans all week. After Montgomerie hit his tee shot on the sixth hole Sunday, one fan yelled, "Get in the bunker." The fan was identified and led away by security guards. As Montgomerie walked from the eighth green to the ninth tee, another fan yelled, "Go home, Monty." "Who said that?" Montgomerie demanded. "I did," a fan replied. "Why?" Montgomerie asked. "Because of the Ryder Cup," the fan responded. "There's nothing wrong with the Ryder Cup except that you lost," Montgomerie snapped.
Nicki's adviceSteve Stricker was missing his usual caddie for the U.S. Open, but that didn't stop him from getting some advice from her that helped Stricker move onto the leaderboard for the fourth round.Stricker, who began Sunday's round tied for sixth, has had his wife, Nicki, carry his bag in four previous Opens. But she's expecting to give birth to the couple's first child in late August, so caddying was out of the question. That didn't stop Nicki from giving her husband a few tips, and one of them paid off in the third round. "My wife gave me a little lesson on the green. She told me to slow it down a little bit, so I tried to have that major thought while I was on the greens," Stricker said. "I started to putt a little bit better."
Sand on the fairwaysSome of the green fairways at The Olympic Club were pockmarked with patches of tan by Sunday's fourth round, the result of divots being filled in with sand.When golfers took divots out of the grass, crews filled many of them in with sand overnight. Some golfers said unpredictable conditions resulted. "The 18th fairway is a mine field. You have sand in the divots and if your ball lands in one, you don't know if you have a chip or a bunker shot. I don't think it's right," Jack Nicklaus said. "It's unfair," Tiger Woods added. "It's one thing not to be in the middle of the fairway. It's another thing to end up in a bunker in the middle of the fairway. There is a lot of sand in a lot of the divots and the ball tends to sit down in it." Divots: As the leaders teed off for the final round, 15 reporters were glued to a TV set inside the press tent, watching the U.S.-Iran World Cup soccer match. ... Lee Janzen had trouble driving this weekend -- off the course. He made a wrong turn in San Francisco, and ended up going across the Bay Bridge toward Oakland. Then he got caught in traffic on the way back across the bridge, and lost a hubcap, too.
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