COLORADO SPRINGS — As storm clouds began to poke their heads over Cheyenne Mountain, Mark Hensby slumped into his seat at a podium up the range from the Broadmoor Golf Club, the unlikely early face of Thursday’s U.S. Senior Open.
His own face, though, twisted with torment.
Two hours before, as blue skies smiled on early strokes in the Springs, Hensby’s putter was golden. His demeanor, as he strolled up and down early fairways, was sunny. This was a course whose greens have tested some of the best men in this profession, but this was a man who’d faced much tougher tests in life, who’d once spent his nights sleeping in his car at a golf course in Chicago three decades ago. Through nine holes, Hensby buried a stunning seven birdies.
And then he wiggled into his stance on the 18th hole, tapped a massive putt a hair too off-kilter, and walked off the green rubbing the back of his hat in clear dismay.
“It’s just frustrating,” Hensby said a few minutes later. “I played like (expletive) the back nine. What else can you say?”
An early 6-under, far clearing the rest of the field, shrank to a 3-under with a couple of shanked bogeys. Hensby finished with a 67, good enough to tie for the day’s lead with Irish mainstay Padraig Harrington in a group of former Masters winners and U.S. Open champions. But Hensby walked away lamenting a few strokes he’d left on the grass, a standout first day reduced to merely a great one.
“I’m hot or cold, and that kind of sucks,” Hensby said. “Certain shots I keep hitting during rounds — it just pisses me off, so to speak. So yeah, the back nine was just kind of a bit of that.”
Forces greater than Hensby’s own unpredictability, though, were at play on grassy slopes born from the natural curve of Cheyenne. A field of 156 luminaries at the Senior Open got their first taste of a different planet Thursday, one where Earth’s gravity doesn’t quite apply, putts stopping strangely short or rolling strangely long in a cruel demonstration of Newton’s First Law. On a shot on the 9th hole, Australian golfer Stuart Appleby softly tapped a putt that trickled just past the cup — and then continued to drift a few feet beyond to kiss the rough.
Appleby waved his arm out at his ball, outstretched, as if to question its movement.
“That’s one of the unique challenges of this course with the slope — the whole thing is on a big slant,” said Stewart Cink, who tied for third Thursday at a two-under 68. “The greens, when they have moisture in them, it’s hard to predict what it does when it lands.”
That unpredictability played out most prominently on the back nine, as a variety of entrants struggled to solve both physics and several challenging holes down the stretch. Harrington noted there were a pair of par-5 holes on the front end of the course and none — with little room for conservative play — on the back half.
“There’s a huge difference between the two nines, to be honest,” Harrington said Thursday.
The three-time major champion proved a mighty challenger to Hensby’s mark Thursday. The 53-year-old Irishman is still built like a boxer, and his driver boomed and his putter whispered for 14 holes. He was squarely in position to seize the day at four under. But on the 15th, the back-nine struck.
A drive veered hard left, over the green, over the rough, deep into the forest at The Broadmoor. Harrington, his caddy, and fellow golfers Cink and Justin Leonard trampled through thickets beyond the green like a trio of senior-aged Goonies, Harrington peering helplessly into reeds and bushes before re-teeing and accepting a penalty stroke for a lost ball.
“You never feel good after you’ve lost a ball,” Harrington recounted, “so your head’s a little scrambled.”
A subsequent bogey sank his score to that eventual 67, as Harrington still received a smattering of claps from lingering fans near the 18th hole. He was pushed by group-mate Cink, who solved the final stretch as good as any other in the field, dropping in birdies on the 15th and 16th.
Being four-under as opposed to three ultimately makes little difference on Day 1 of a four-day Senior Open, as Harrington noted. But Hensby and Harrington, despite struggles on the back-end, did enough to push themselves to the front of the pack in a fascinating group chess match at The Broadmoor.
“A lot of this,” Harrington said, “is jockeying just to be in position on Sunday.”
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