Mike Celizic

Turnberry is where the land goes to meet mortality, where the howling wind and biting rain and crashing seas rip and claw and tear and devour the last rag ends of tortured rock and dirt and grit and the wretched vegetation that clings to it with blind desperation.

It is not about surviving at such a place, because the elements will always win. It is about hanging on, enduring, fighting for every inch of ground, for every extra minute of life before it is all washed away.

There could be no more appropriate place for Tom Watson to come in the sixth decade of a golfing life so well lived and not yet quite over. He arrived in Scotland as the land itself, at the ragged end of his powers, tanned and bleached and spotted and torn, one hip no longer the one he began life with, his neck creased and checkered.

But if you looked past all of that and focused a couple of inches beneath the brim of his cap, the years disappeared. There, Watson’s crystalline gaze still burned with the clear blue flame of fires that remained unquenched.

Watson didn’t come to Turnberry at 59 years of age to recapture his youth or strike a blow for geezers or merely to roll it around for a couple of rounds for nostalgia’s sake. He came because he thought this ancient scrap of rock and turf was suited to him and his game. He came because he thought that the "old fogey" could actually win another major.

And so while others obsessed with Tiger and Sergio and Padraig and the other usual suspects, Watson confidently stuck a tee in the tough turf and put on a show that no one will ever forget.

He knows he should have won. We all do.

“It would have been a helluva story, wouldn’t it?” he asked afterward, those wonderful eyes sparkling in a face from which the years seemed to have fallen away.

There would be no happy-to-be-here insincerity from Watson. He’s from Missouri, and he’s never strayed from the values he grew up with in the heartland, the chief of which is honesty. Ask him a question, he doesn’t mince words.

“Yes, it’s a great disappointment. It tears at your gut as it always has torn at my gut,” he confessed.

Good for him. He came to win, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. And after what he did, no one’s laughing at his temerity. All we can do is shake our heads in dumb admiration and rethink our definition of what is possible.

Slideshow   The 138th British Open Championship Final day of play in Turnberry, Scotland. more photos

I don’t think there are degrees of disappointment at times like this. It’s not like it would be better if Watson had lost the playoff by a stroke instead of half a dozen. And it didn’t really matter that the critical mistake wasn’t really the putt he couldn’t force himself to hit to win the tournament on the 72nd hole of regulation, but the approach two shots earlier. Losing is losing.

Still, he stood in the middle of what should have been the final fairway, an 8-iron in his hand, destiny in his swing and one dram of excess adrenaline coursing through his heart. The 8-iron was too perfect — right at the flag and just a foot or two too long. It rolled off the back, and that was it.

Watson said after that if he had it to do all over again, he would have hit a 9-iron, two-putted from 50 feet, and gone home hugging his sixth claret jug and an accomplishment so extraordinary that there is nothing to which to compare it. Oh, for a mulligan.

Until that final approach, we were trying to figure out how we would categorize the win he seemed certain to get. But there was no category for 59-year-old guy wins the British Open. We would have had to tear apart the room that houses sports’ all-time greatest moments and built a new shrine above everything else just for Watson’s victory. It would have been, like the Phoenix he tried so hard to imitate, sui generis — one of a kind.

That he fell so agonizingly short is already beside the point. What really matters is that a gnarly and self-described fogey came to a place just as tough and unyielding as he, a place where he stood defiantly in the face of life’s most primal elements. It was not about defeating them, but about challenging them, about hanging on to the very end, about never giving in.

In the end, Tom Watson was washed away, but he sure did give it one helluva battle. In the process, at the place where land and sea and nature and elements wage their constant war, Tom Watson has reminded us all why we should keep battling on.

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