In Matt Fitzpatrick’s Sunday Glory, a player with a definitive short game and who is already tenth in the world ranking, the first circle of international golf also noticed the guy who carried the bag, Billy Foster. After more than 150 majors on his battered back, having cleaned the irons and read the yards for a good handful of the best players in history, including Seve and Tiger, occasionally helping to victory in 45 titles around the planet, Foster finally got to savor a big Sunday. At last he found himself on the bright side of history, now so fashionable.
Until Sunday, if Foster, a carpenter’s apprenticehe would have had to rescue a moment from memory, he would undoubtedly choose the last day of the European Masters of Crans Sur Sierre when he was a witness -and the only testimony that has transpired- of the most incredible blow that Seve starred in front of the pool wall of the club, the one that is identified as the best that the Spaniard gave in his career.
Now, for emotions, for transcendence, He will preempt the afternoon at the Brookline Country Club, where the last of his bosses, the youngest he has worked for or, at least, the oldest he got – he will be 60 years old soon due to Fitzpatrick’s 27 – lifted the US Open.
Probably because of his career alongside Ballesteros, the boss whom he imitates with absolute respect and arouses everyone’s laughter, and also because he has participated in 14 Ryders (all except 2012 since 1987), Foster always had a special complicity with the rest of the players. With a sad face, she put humor in all the celebrations. He did not hesitate to dive into the lake on the 17th hole at Valderrama in 1997, after Langer underpinned the victory against the United States by debutant Tiger Woods. Billy had already broken up with Seve and was already hanging out with Darren Clarke, another of the great players he helped in his career. Neither in that victory nor in any other had he wanted to continue with the tradition of many colleagues of keeping the flag rag from the last hole. On Sunday I changed my mind. And he went down on his knees before the great cup that Fitzpatrick was raising. After all, he had brushed against it with Thomas Bjorn at the 2003 British Open – the Dane committed a double bogey on the 16th hole when he was leading – and with Westwood, on different occasions, since Westwood, the best player without A great one, he has achieved three second places and six third places in his experience with Billy.
“It has been a relief,” he told the Golf Channel microphones. While he recalled that in his beginnings, as an assistant to the South African Hugo Baiocchi, when he had to come to Spain in 1981, he slept in slums “where if the rats had entered during the night, they would have taken a look and left because it was too dirty” . Victory at Brookline, by golf standards, would have earned him more than $300,000, 10 percent of the $3.15 pocketed by the Sheffield golfer, the biggest in golf history. the big ones.
“At first he told me that he was going to work with me for only 25 months, but I think that in these four years he must have really had a week or two off. He is very professional and has taught me that you have to play with patience, that the birdies will come,” the new US Open winner gave Foster.
