HBO film knows how to score with 'Back Nine at Cherry Hills'
HBO warms up for the U.S. Open next week with a new golf documentary. This is a familiar TV trick. CBS even did a special on the overhead golf shot earlier this year to piggyback with mania over the Masters.
If you think I'm kidding, you didn't see it with your own eyes.
Yet "Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open," which debuts at 9 p.m. Wednesday on the premium-cable channel, isn't your run-of-the-mill sports special, not even as an installment of HBO's irregular "Sports of the 20th Century" series. This is an exceptional documentary with the feel of a Gary Smith piece in Sports Illustrated, and aware readers know just what high praise that is.
This is a golf documentary with a reason for being beyond the mere fact that it's U.S. Open week.
Golf fans will recall that Denver's Cherry Hills was the site of one of Arnold Palmer's patented charges over the 36-hole final day, back in the era before the USGA got wise to how it was better to alienate a few religious zealots in order to put golf on TV on Sundays. But usually forgotten in the hot 10-man scramble to win over the final round is how the aging Ben Hogan and the young Jack Nicklaus were also in the hunt.
"Back Nine" focuses on those three and casts the 1960 Open as a pivotal event in golf history.
It takes a little license in that. This is not "three generations" of golf greats, as it claims. A generation is 20 years, and you'd have to be a math wiz on the order of Robert deVicenzo to separate those three by the requisite 40 years. Yet there's no denying they spanned three different eras, and the documentary throws in a little timely Father's Day element by emphasizing their vastly different relationships with their fathers as well.
Hogan was a hardscrabble product of the Depression in Texas and the intensely driven son of a suicide. Palmer grew up in Latrobe, Pa., the son of a country-club groundskeeper, and developed ways of compensating for being denied the privileges of membership. "He lived to show off," says James Dodson. Nicklaus, by contrast, was a member of the country club, the son of a well-to-do Columbus, Ohio, pharmacist he considered "my best friend."
Hogan had disdain for Palmer's undisciplined swing and his flair for drama. "He was never friendly to me," Palmer recalls. Hogan preferred Nicklaus' more channeled power game. Of course, he was right in suggesting Nicklaus would have the more extended career, but for a blissful decade in the late '50s and on into the '60s Arnie and his Army of followers were a force.
Having firmly established its three main characters, "Back Nine" simply sets them loose on the last day of play, with Hogan and Nicklaus fortuitously paired together and Palmer seemingly an also-ran before he put himself in contention with a decent third round and opened the fourth with three straight birdies, going out in 30.
At that point, I'm going to let the viewer loose on his or her own to watch the drama unfold. Yes, Palmer wins, but watch and rediscover how close Hogan came to reclaiming his majesty, and how Nicklaus made his bones even while faltering at the end.
So often sports TV specials seize on one event and invest it with overarching themes and high drama so that the actual sport collapses under all the ponderous strain. Yet "Back Nine" seizes on a moment in golf history that really represented the changing of the guard and - in a mere hour - casts the characters in relief and makes the drama seem authentic and fresh. It's a splendid way to warm up for next week's titanic tilt at Torrey Pines between Comeback Tiger and Lefty Phil and whatever young player emerges yet to write his own name in golf history.
In the air
Remotely interesting: "EliteXC Saturday Night Fights" delivered an average of almost 5 million viewers to CBS last weekend, peaking at 6.5 million in the last hour. But am I the only one who thinks CBS star Kimbo Slice got propped up by the ref and saved by a quick TKO in the third round after narrowly surviving the second?
Cubs TV play-by-play man Len Kasper showed off his Sabremetric chops with a chatfest on the Baseball Prospectus web site this week. … The Cubs come from a 9-1 deficit to win last Friday, and WLS Channel 7 sports anchor Mark Giangreco leads his 10 p.m. report with Brian Uhrlacher deigning to attend the Bears' practice? No wonder this is a Bears town.
End of the dial: Tom Shaer is the master of ceremonies for the University of Chicago Medical Center's annual Survivor's Day celebration at the Westin Hotel downtown on Sunday.
Bears kicker Robbie Gould makes the rounds at ESPN in Bristol, Conn., today, including an appearance on "First Take" at 9 a.m. and a chat on espn.com at 12:15 p.m.